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In this paper, we introduce a web GIS platform created expressly for exploring and researching a set of 63,467 historical maps and illustrations extracted from 4,000 titles of Chinese local gazetteers. We layer these images with a published, geo-referenced collection of Land Survey Maps of China (1903–1948), which includes the earliest large-scale maps of major cities and regions in China that are produced with modern cartographic techniques. By bringing together historical illustrations depicting spatial configurations of localities and the earliest modern cartographic maps, researchers of Chinese history can study the different spatial epistemologies represented in both collections. We report our workflow for creating this web GIS platform, starting from identifying and extracting visual materials from local gazetteers, tagging them with keywords and categories to facilitate content search, to georeferencing them based on their source locations. We also experimented with neural networks to train a tagger with positive results. Finally, we display them in the web GIS platform with two modes, Images in Map (IIM) and Maps in Map (MIM), and with content- and location-based filtering. These features together enable researchers easy and quick exploration and comparison of these two large sets of geospatial and visual materials of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses digital annotation. Topics include use of digital annotation in ways that would, like manuscript production in monasteries, establish a mode of behavior in a scholarly practice; Semantic annotation enables humans to identify places in individual Web documents and align those with global place authorities, known as gazetteers; and through this process, we can create or curate Web documents but heterogeneous materials from texts to images can be brought together in dialogue.

As business intelligence is for companies, territorial intelligence is for local authorities. However, it is not the simple exportation of business intelligence concepts and tools, but overall a new discipline characterized by the amalgamation of collective human intelligence and computer intelligence. As a result, geographic knowledge bases, rules and inference engines are not only based on logic but also on topology, geometry and linguistics, and must take multiple actors' points of view into account. The scope of this paper will be to present the concepts necessary to construct such systems, i.e. to pass from intelligence to geographic knowledge engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the very first digital library developments was the transition of bibliographies to digital formats and the rise of online services which allowed new kinds of searching for topics. Here we examine three other reference genres: (1) Gazetteers, which, when coupled with maps and bibliographies, allow new ways to search by place; (2) Chronologies, which when digitized and combined with time lines and named time periods, transform search by time; and (3) Biographical directories, which, with improved design, could link persons with their contexts in new and more effective ways. The paper will present work developed in a project entitled: Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Republican era and the PRC, both regimes labeled religious practices outside official institutionalized religions as "superstition" (mixin). In the early PRC, the CCP labeled superstitious activities with mass participation as "mass superstitious incidents." This article examines a mass superstitious incident in Chongqing in 1953 in which more than fifty thousand people participated. In this case, local residents, especially local merchants, advertised an old woman as a Living Guanyin Bodhisattva with supernatural disease-curing powers to expand their economic interests. The incident was also a result of poor healthcare infrastructure management. Key organizers in the incident were severely punished, in part because they were scapegoats for the problems of the new national policy of State Monopoly for Grain Purchase. The incident also had a strong contagion effect that led to various similar "superstitious incidents" in the vicinity that were eventually suppressed under the name "huidaomen." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local place names are frequently used by residents living in a geographic region. Such place names may not be recorded in existing gazetteers, due to their vernacular nature, relative insignificance to a gazetteer covering a large area (e.g. the entire world), recent establishment (e.g. the name of a newly-opened shopping center) or other reasons. While not always recorded, local place names play important roles in many applications, from supporting public participation in urban planning to locating victims in disaster response. In this paper, we propose a computational framework for harvesting local place names from geotagged housing advertisements. We make use of those advertisements posted on local-oriented websites, such as Craigslist, where local place names are often mentioned. The proposed framework consists of two stages: natural language processing (NLP) and geospatial clustering. The NLP stage examines the textual content of housing advertisements and extracts place name candidates. The geospatial stage focuses on the coordinates associated with the extracted place name candidates and performs multiscale geospatial clustering to filter out the non-place names. We evaluate our framework by comparing its performance with those of six baselines. We also compare our result with four existing gazetteers to demonstrate the not-yet-recorded local place names discovered by our framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical place databases can be an invaluable tool for capturing the rich meaning of past places. However, this richness presents obstacles to success: the daunting need to simultaneously represent complex information such as temporal change, uncertainty, relationships, and thorough sourcing has been an obstacle to historical GIS in the past. The Qualified Assertion Model developed in this paper can represent a variety of historical complexities using a single, simple, flexible data model based on a) documenting assertions of the past world rather than claiming to know the exact truth, and b) qualifying the scope, provenance, quality, and syntactics of those assertions. This model was successfully implemented in a production-strength historical gazetteer of religious congregations, demonstrating its effectiveness and some challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The GB1900 project used crowd-sourcing to transcribe all text from the second edition County Series six inch to one mile maps of Great Britain, published between 1888 and 1914, a total of c. 2.55m. geo-located text strings. These locate almost every farm and about half of all street names. The paper describes the final datasets, and how they were created. It then presents a detailed comparison with five other freely-available gazetteers of Britain: Geonames, the US government's NGA gazetteer, the Ordnance Survey's 50k and Open Names datasets, and the English Place Name Survey's DEEP project. Comparisons are presented at national level and, more qualitatively, for an area of eastern England. The results demonstrate both GB1900's greater volume of geo-located entries and its ability to locate places and features identified in other historical sources beyond administrative hierarchies: this is the most detailed historical gazetteer, certainly for Britain and possibly for anywhere. The final online system is described, including its integration of place name histories from DEEP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial humanities projects rely on information found in gazetteers to supply the infrastructure for projects. However, a majority of spatial gazetteers provide place names and geographical coordinates but lack contextualizing information that give meaning to a place, making them insufficient resources for humanities inquiry. In this article, I explore contemporary approaches to data collection and models for cultural gazetteers set forth by early modern chorographical traditions to lay the foundation for building community-driven, open cultural gazetteers. Concurrently, the role of the public in providing Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) by harnessing user-friendly tools is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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With the spatial turn in the humanities, the representation of space through places as distinct entities becomes more significant. This has redefined the potential importance of place name registers, whether analogue or digital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different languages imply different visions of space, so that terminologies are different in geographic ontologies. In addition to their geometric shapes, geographic features have names, sometimes different in diverse languages. In addition, the role of gazetteers, as dictionaries of place names (toponyms), is to maintain relations between place names and location. The scope of geographic information retrieval is to search for geographic information not against a database, but against the whole Internet: but the Internet stores information in different languages, and it is of paramount importance not to remain stuck to a unique language. In this paper, our first step is to clarify the links between geographic objects as computer representations of geographic features, ontologies and gazetteers designed in various languages. Then, we propose some inference rules for matching not only types, but also relations in geographic ontologies with the assistance of gazetteers.

Abstract Freshwater biodiversity is currently facing critical threats worldwide. As top predators, otters are indicator species of ecosystem health, and flagship species for conservation in freshwater ecosystems. Three otter species – Lutra lutra , Aonyx cinereus , and Lutrogale perspicillata – exist in China. They were once widely distributed but have experienced dramatic decline in the late 20th century, being listed as Class II protected animals in China. We searched in gazetteers, publications, online news, museum specimens, and camera trapping databases, and conducted questionnaire surveys to obtain otter records to reconstruct the historical (1550–1950), recent (1950–2000), and current (post-2000) distribution maps of otters in China. Unlike many other mammal species, otters' range did not contract during 1550–1950. Otters' recent and current distributions were comparable or even surpassed their historical ranges. However, applying rigorous verification criteria, only 57 sites in China were confirmed with otter occurrence since 2000. The potential distribution of L. lutra was mainly on the Tibetan Plateau and in northeast China, whereas only small and sparse patches remained in southeast China, where otters were frequently recorded in historical gazetteers. Although being endangered, otters have been neglected in China, with few research projects and no project funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China. Consequently, even wildlife experts have poor knowledge of otters. Surveys and specific research are urgently needed for otters in China. Public education is also advocated to raise awareness of otter conservation. Without sound information generated from research and urgent conservation actions, otter species will remain severely threatened in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-known that the educated elite of China, Vietnam, and other neighboring polities participated in a shared community of inquiry, but how did it work in practice? This article examines Phạm Thận Duật's 1856 Hưng Hóa Gazetteer in order to discover the process by which knowledge was contested and produced within this broader culture of knowledge. Writing within the gazetteer genre, Phạm Thận Duật engaged with foundational classical Chinese texts, recent Vietnamese works, and the Qing-era kaozheng movement of evidentiary scholarship. That he took himself to be participating in a literary culture that transcended Vietnam is clear from an analysis of his textual citations, as is his confidence in rejecting, reconfiguring, or adding to a transregional culture of knowledge. Phạm Thận Duật and others like him were autonomous contributors to a community of inquiry that transgressed political boundaries. For Vietnamese scholars, this community was rooted in classical texts but centered in Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese address segmentation is a serious challenge in geographic information system geocoding. Most previous studies have relied on predefined gazetteers without considering the information contained by a raw address corpus. In this paper, a hybrid method employing both rule-based and statistical methods is proposed for Chinese address segmentation without a predefined gazetteer. This approach utilizes statistical methods to extract address information from a raw address corpus and a rule-based method to segment Chinese addresses. Two typical statistical methods and their combinations with rule-based methods are compared with the hybrid method in an experiment involving approximately 460,000 address items in Shenzhen City, China. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves anF-score of over 0.8, which is better than those of existing methods, thus validating the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Geospatial humanities projects rely on information found in gazetteers to supply the infrastructure for projects. However, a majority of spatial gazetteers provide place names and geographical coordinates but lack contextualizing information that give meaning to a place, making them insufficient resources for humanities inquiry. In this article, I explore contemporary approaches to data collection and models for cultural gazetteers set forth by early modern chorographical traditions to lay the foundation for building community-driven, open cultural gazetteers. Concurrently, the role of the public in providing Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) by harnessing user-friendly tools is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the centuries of Britain’s colonial expansion, English was transplanted to the four corners of the globe, and became an extensive and prolific borrower of general lexical items and toponyms from indigenous languages. The Englishes of Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji are three typical examples. Indigenous loanwords and toponyms comprise one of the most distinctive features of these Englishes, and are regularly used to express national identity. Although these nations share a common colonial language, they differ markedly in their indigenous cultures and languages, the way they were occupied, and the colonizers’ attitudes towards indigenous peoples. These factors significantly influenced relationships between the two groups, and resulted in distinct patterns and degrees of indigenous borrowings into the three regional varieties of English. This gazetteer-based study provides evidence of these patterns and degrees of borrowing through an analysis of the number and distribution of indigenous toponyms in the three jurisdictions. It also considers the various linguistic, sociocultural, attitudinal, and historical factors that shaped place naming. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the problem of locating and categorizing atomic entities in a given text. In this work, we used DBpedia Linked datasets and combined existing open source tools to generate from a parallel corpus a bilingual lexicon of Named Entities (NE). To annotate NE in the monolingual English corpus, we used linked data entities by mapping them to Gate Gazetteers. In order to translate entities identified by the gate tool from the English corpus, we used moses, a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system. The construction of the Arabic-English NE lexicon is based on the results of moses translation. Our method is fully automatic and aims to help Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as, Machine Translation (MT) information retrieval, text mining and question answering. Our lexicon contains 48753 pairs of Arabic-English NE, it is freely available for use by other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how toponym databases (gazetteers) can be used to examine the ethnophysiography hypothesis, which states that people from different language groups/cultures have different ways of conceptualizing landscape. Toponyms of two classes of eminences, mountain and hill, in Malaysia and Indonesia where the dominant languages are highly cognate were extracted from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) GEOnet Names Server (GNS) and analyzed using a heuristics-based geomorphometry approach. The result revealed that gunung and bukit, the main terms in Malay or Indonesian languages similar to mountain and hill in English, are used differently in the two countries: Bukit and gunung are used interchangeably for eminence features in Indonesia regardless of size (area extent), but the use of gunung is more strict for Malaysia to refer to larger eminence features. Furthermore, in Indonesia, the NGA GNS can readily be used to identify generic terms in local languages and dialects; we show that in some cases, size of eminence is distinguished with different generic terms and that spatial proximity might affect which term is used. The result suggests that NGA GNS is a promising set of data to explore ethnophysiography research questions, and can be a valuable exploratory tool for guiding detailed ethnophysiography work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gazetteers are instrumental in recognizing place names in documents such as Web pages, news, and social media messages. However, creating and maintaining gazetteers is still a complex task. Even though some online gazetteers provide rich sets of geographic names in planetary scale (e.g. GeoNames), other sources must be used to recognize references to urban locations, such as street names, neighborhood names or landmarks. We propose integrating Linked Data sources to create a gazetteer that combines a broad coverage of places with urban detail, including content on geographic and semantic relationships involving places, their multiple names and related non-geographic entities. Our final goal is to expand the possibilities for recognizing, disambiguating and filtering references to places in texts for geographic information retrieval (GIR) and related applications. The resulting ontological gazetteer, named LoG (Linked OntoGazetteer), is accessible through Web services by applications and research initiatives on GIR, text processing, named entity recognition and others. The gazetteer currently contains over 13 million places, 140 million attributes and relationships, and 4.5 million non-geographic entities. Data sources include GeoNames, Freebase, DBPedia and LinkedGeoData, which is based on OpenStreetMap data. An analysis on how these datasets overlap and complement one another is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]