The DIGMAP geo-temporal web gazetteer service

This paper presents the DIGMAP geo-temporal Web gazetteer service, a system providing access to names of places, historical periods, and associated geo-temporal information. Within the DIGMAP project, this gazetteer serves as the unified repository of geographic and temporal information, assisting in the recognition and disambiguation of geo-temporal expressions over text, as well as in resource searching and indexing. We describe the data integration methodology, the handling of temporal information and some of the applications that use the gazetteer. Initial evaluation results show that the proposed system can adequately support several tasks related to geo-temporal information extraction and retrieval

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore, the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages

Geospatial information infrastructures to address spatial needs in health: Collaboration, challenges and opportunities

Most health-related issues such as public health outbreaks and epidemiological threats are better understood from a spatial–temporal perspective and, clearly demand related geospatial datasets and services so that decision makers may jointly make informed decisions and coordinate response plans. Although current health applications support a kind of geospatial features, these are still disconnected from the wide range of geospatial services and datasets that geospatial information infrastructures may bring into health. In this paper we are questioning the hypothesis whether geospatial information infrastructures, in terms of standards-based geospatial services, technologies, and data models as operational assets already in place, can be exploited by health applications for which the geospatial dimension is of great importance. This may be certainly addressed by defining better collaboration strategies to uncover and promote geospatial assets to the health community. We discuss the value of collaboration, as well as the opportunities that geographic information infrastructures offer to address geospatial challenges in health applications

Linking archival data to location A case study at the UK National Archives

Purpose The National Archives (TNA) is the UK Government's official archive. It stores and maintains records spanning over a 1,000 years in both physical and digital form. Much of the information held by TNA includes references to place and frequently user queries to TNA's online catalogue involve searches for location. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how TNA have extracted the geographic references in their historic data to improve access to the archives. Design/methodology/approach To be able to quickly enhance the existing archival data with geographic information, existing technologies from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) have been utilised and adapted to historical archives. Findings Enhancing the archival records with geographic information has enabled TNA to quickly develop a number of case studies highlighting how geographic information can improve access to large‐scale archival collections. The use of existing methods from the GIR domain and technologies, such as OpenLayers, enabled one to quickly implement this process in a way that is easily transferable to other institutions. Practical implications The methods and technologies described in this paper can be adapted, by other archives, to similarly enhance access to their historic data. Also the data‐sharing methods described can be used to enable the integration of knowledge held at different archival institutions. Originality/value Place is one of the core dimensions for TNA's archival data. Many of the records which are held make reference to place data (wills, legislation, court cases), and approximately one fifth of users' searches involve place names. However, there are still a number of open questions regarding the adaptation of existing GIR methods to the history domain. This paper presents an overview over available GIR methods and the challenges in applying them to historical data

Interactive visual exploration of a large spatio-temporal dataset: Reflections on a geovisualization mashup

Exploratory visual analysis is useful for the preliminary investigation of large structured, multifaceted spatio-temporal datasets. This process requires the selection and aggregation of records by time, space and attribute, the ability to transform data and the flexibility to apply appropriate visual encodings and interactions. We propose an approach inspired by geographical 'mashups' in which freely-available functionality and data are loosely but flexibly combined using de facto exchange standards. Our case study combines MySQL, PHP and the LandSerf GIS to allow Google Earth to be used for visual synthesis and interaction with encodings described in KML. This approach is applied to the exploration of a log of 1.42 million requests made of a mobile directory service. Novel combinations of interaction and visual encoding are developed including spatial 'tag clouds', 'tag maps', 'data dials' and multi-scale density surfaces. Four aspects of the approach are informally evaluated: the visual encodings employed, their success in the visual exploration of the clataset, the specific tools used and the 'rnashup' approach. Preliminary findings will be beneficial to others considering using mashups for visualization. The specific techniques developed may be more widely applied to offer insights into the structure of multifarious spatio-temporal data of the type explored here

APREGOAR: Development of a geospatial database applied to local news in Lisbon

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Geographic Information Systems and ScienceHá informações valiosas em formato de texto não estruturado sobre a localização, calendarização e a essências dos eventos disponíveis no conteúdo de notícias digitais. Vários trabalhos em curso já tentam extrair detalhes de eventos de fontes de notícias digitais, mas muitas vezes não com a nuance necssária para representar com precisão onde as coisas realmente acontecem. Alternativamente, os jornalistas poderiam associar manualmente atributos a eventos descritos nos seus artigos enquanto publicam, melhorando a exatidão e a confiança nestes atributos espaciais e temporais. Estes atributos poderiam então estar imediatamente disponíveis para avaliar a cobertura temática, temporal e espacial do conteúdo de uma agência, bem como melhorar a experiência do utilizador na exploração do conteúdo, fornecendo dimensões adicionais que podem ser filtradas. Embora a tecnologia de atribuição de dimensões geoespaciais e temporais para o emprego de aplicaçãoes voltadas para o consumidor não seja novidade, tem ainda de ser aplicada à escala das notícias. Além disso, a maioria dos sistemas existentes suporta apenas uma definição pontual da localização dos artigos, que pode não representar bem o(s) local(is) real(ais) dos eventos descritos. Este trabalho define uma aplicação web de código aberto e uma base de dados espacial subjacente que suporta i) a associação de múltiplos polígonos a representar o local onde cada evento ocorre, os prazos associados aos eventos, em linha com os atributos temáticos tradicionais associados aos artigos de notícias; ii) a contextualização de cada artigo através da adição de mapas de eventos em linha para esclarecer aos leitores onde os eventos do artigo ocorrem; e iii) a exploração dos corpora adicionados através de filtros temáticos, espaciais e temporais que exibem os resultados em mapas de cobertura interactivos e listas de artigos e eventos. O projeto foi aplicado na área da grande Lisboa de Portugal. Para além da funcionalidade acima referida, este projeto constroi gazetteers progressivos que podem ser reutilizados como associações de lugares, ou para uma meta-análise mais aprofundada do lugar, tal como é percebido coloquialmente. Demonstra a facilidade com que estas dimensões adicionais podem ser incorporadas com grade confiança na precisão da definição, geridas, e alavancadas para melhorar a gestão de conteúdo das agências noticiosas, a compreensão dos leitores, a exploração dos investigadores, ou extraídas para combinação com outros conjuntos dos dados para fornecer conhecimentos adicionais.There is valuable information in unstructured text format about the location, timing, and nature of events available in digital news content. Several ongoing efforts already attempt to extract event details from digital news sources, but often not with the nuance needed to accurately represent the where things actually happen. Alternatively, journalists could manually associate attributes to events described in their articles while publishing, improving accuracy and confidence in these spatial and temporal attributes. These attributes could then be immediately available for evaluating thematic, temporal, and spatial coverage of an agency’s content, as well as improve the user experience of content exploration by providing additional dimensions that can be filtered. Though the technology of assigning geospatial and temporal dimensions for the employ of consumer-facing applications is not novel, it has yet to be applied at scale to the news. Additionally, most existing systems only support a single point definition of article locations, which may not well represent the actual place(s) of events described within. This work defines an open source web application and underlying spatial database that supports i) the association of multiple polygons representing where each event occurs, time frames associated with the events, inline with the traditional thematic attributes associated with news articles; ii) the contextualization of each article via the addition of inline event maps to clarify to readers where the events of the article occur; and iii) the exploration of the added corpora via thematic, spatial, and temporal filters that display results in interactive coverage maps and lists of articles and events. The project was applied to the greater Lisbon area of Portugal. In addition to the above functionality, this project builds progressive gazetteers that can be reused as place associations, or for further meta analysis of place as it is colloquially understood. It demonstrates the ease of which these additional dimensions may be incorporated with a high confidence in definition accuracy, managed, and leveraged to improve news agency content management, reader understanding, researcher exploration, or extracted for combination with other datasets to provide additional insights

Geospatial Semantics

Geospatial semantics is a broad field that involves a variety of research areas. The term semantics refers to the meaning of things, and is in contrast with the term syntactics. Accordingly, studies on geospatial semantics usually focus on understanding the meaning of geographic entities as well as their counterparts in the cognitive and digital world, such as cognitive geographic concepts and digital gazetteers. Geospatial semantics can also facilitate the design of geographic information systems (GIS) by enhancing the interoperability of distributed systems and developing more intelligent interfaces for user interactions. During the past years, a lot of research has been conducted, approaching geospatial semantics from different perspectives, using a variety of methods, and targeting different problems. Meanwhile, the arrival of big geo data, especially the large amount of unstructured text data on the Web, and the fast development of natural language processing methods enable new research directions in geospatial semantics. This chapter, therefore, provides a systematic review on the existing geospatial semantic research. Six major research areas are identified and discussed, including semantic interoperability, digital gazetteers, geographic information retrieval, geospatial Semantic Web, place semantics, and cognitive geographic concepts.Comment: Yingjie Hu (2017). Geospatial Semantics. In Bo Huang, Thomas J. Cova, and Ming-Hsiang Tsou et al. (Eds): Comprehensive Geographic Information Systems, Elsevier. Oxford, U

On the Cyberinfrastructure for GIS-Enabled Historiography

From a historian's perspective, the use of GIScience and technology in the study of history holds the promise of an integration of historical and geographic modes of analysis. The national geographic information systems (GIS) that provide extensive coverage of changes in administrative structures over time provide important support for GIS-enabled historiography. Other parts of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to support collaborative research in a digital environment are now beginning to emerge, but a world-historical gazetteer, an essential tool for linking historical data to mapped places, has yet to be developed. 就史学者的角度而言, 在历史研究中运用地理信息科学与技术, 具有整合历史与地理分析模式的前景。全国地理信息系统 (GIS) 广泛地包覆了行政结构随着时间的变迁, 为由地理信息系统促成的历史地理学提供了重要的支援。信息基础建设中, 支援在数码环境中合作研究的其他必要部分目前正逐渐浮现, 但全球性的历史地名词典——一个将历史数据连结至已绘製于地图上之地方的必要工具——仍然尚未建立。 Desde la perspectiva del historiador, el uso de SIGciencia y tecnología en el estudio de la historia es algo prometedor para la integración de los modos de análisis históricos y geográficos. Los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG) nacionales que dan amplia cobertura a los cambios que ocurren a través del tiempo en las estructuras administrativas, proveen apoyo importante a la historiografía en la que los SIG han sido protagónicos. Otras partes de la ciber-infraestructura que se requiere para la investigación colaborativa en un entorno digital están ahora empezando a aparecer, aunque un diccionario histórico-geográfico mundial—herramienta esencial para enlazar los datos históricos con los lugares cartografiados—todavía está por realizarse.East Asian Languages and Civilization