International Journal of Geographical Information Science

Gazetteers are more than basic place name directories containing names and locations for named geographic places. Most of them contain additional information, including a categorization of gazetteer entries using a typing scheme. This paper focuses on the nature of these categorization schemes. We argue that gazetteers can benefit from an ontological approach to typing schemes, providing a formalization that will better support gazetteer applications, maintenance, interoperability, and semi‐automatic feature annotation. We discuss the process of developing such an ontology as a modification of an existing feature type thesaurus; the difficulties in mapping from thesauri to ontologies are described in detail. To demonstrate the benefits of a categorization based on ontologies, a new gazetteer Web (and programming) interface is introduced and the impact on gazetteer interoperability is discussed.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Linda Hill for giving us a detailed insight into the development and conceptualization of the ADL FTT and for fruitful comments concerning the proposed conceptual design. Discussions with Naicong Li and Catharina Riedemann have shaped our ideas on how to implement the presented feature type ontology. The ideas for a shared gazetteer infrastructure and a new kind of Web interface were outcomes of the NCGIA Gazetteer Research and Practice Workshop held in December 2006 in Santa Barbara, USA. Partial funding for this work came from the SimCat project granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG).