Um gazetteer ontológico para recuperação de informação geográfica

Abstract

The volume of spatial information on the Web grows continuously, both as maps and as references to places in documents and pages. Considering user needs for spatial information, it is often necessary to determine the places to which the text in a page refers. This work introduces a proposal for a new generation of gazetteers (place names dictionaries) that includes elements such as spatial relationships, concepts and related terms, essentially forming an ontology of places. This ontological gazetteer, or OntoGazetteer, provides semantic support for solving various common problems in geographic information retrieval. The validation of the proposed structure for the OntoGazetteer was achieved through case studies that covered two categories of geographic information retrieval problems: (1) detection and inference of the geographic context in texts, and (2) disambiguation of place names. These studies showed good results, which recommend the use of the OntoGazetteer in further geographic information retrieval problems.