A Proposal for Space Exploration at The National Archives
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A Proposal for Space Exploration at The National Archives
Amy Warner Paul Clough
The National Archives University of Sheffield
Kew Gardens, London Sheffield (UK) S1 4DP
Amy.Warner@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk p.d.clough@sheffield.ac.uk
Abstract
This information can be exploited and used to
The National Archives (TNA) is the UK provide spatial awareness to information systems
government's official archive. They store (see, e.g. (Buckland et al., 2007; Purves et al.,
and maintain records spanning over a 2007)). Zong et al. (2005) discuss how the ability
thousand years; more recently in digital to perform query by location can be an important
form. Much of the information held by and useful addition to a digital library and Buck-
TNA makes reference to place; and fre- land et al. (2007:376) concur with this in saying
quently user’s queries to TNA’s online “libraries have a broad need to support geo-
catalogue involve searches for location. graphic search”
To enhance access to this unique collec- In this paper we consider how geo-referencing
tion, we are planning to utilise existing information from The National Archives1 (TNA),
technologies from Geographical Informa- the UK government's official archive, could pro-
tion Retrieval (GIR). In this paper we de- vide a means of synthesising access across dif-
scribe TNA, initial analysis of the geo- ferent archives and provide novel ways of
graphical nature of data held by TNA, searching and browsing historical and culturally
geo-referencing as a starting point for GIR significant material. Section 2 discusses past
and our proposed plan of research. work in exploiting location for enhancing access
to libraries and archives; Section 3 introduces
1 Introduction TNA, the data and motivations for the proposed
project; Section 4 describes areas involved in
Geo-referencing - relating information to geo- geo-referencing information; Section 5 outlines
graphic location - is an important consideration our planned project work and Section 6 con-
for information access systems (Hill, 2006; cludes the paper.
Chapman & Wieczorek, 2006). This is due to the
ubiquity of location (particularly place names) 2 Related Work
within much of the information we encounter on
a regular basis. For example, many Web docu- Geography provides an important facet for in-
ments contain geographical identifiers including formation seeking in many contexts, including
place names (or toponyms), addresses (and ad- historical, cultural and library archives. Several
dress fragments), postal codes, and hyperlinks studies have examined the nature of search que-
(Ding et al., 2000; McCurley, 2001; Himmel- ries in the cultural heritage field, both for general
stein, 2005). In addition, Petras (2004) showed information (Cunningham et al, 2004) and for
that over half of a set of five million library cata- images (Pask, 2005; Choi & Rasmussen, 2003;
logue records of the University of California Collins, 1998; Chen, 2001). These all had similar
contained one or more place-related subject findings: namely that people, places, time peri-
headings or codes. However, not only do docu- ods, and subjects were popular topics of search
ments contain geo-references, but users of search in this domain. This is also true of library users
systems also query based upon location. For ex- (Buckland et al., 2007; Zong et al., 2005) and
ample, a study by Zhang et al. (2006) found that utilizing place (and time) for information access
12.7% of queries submitted to a Web search en- has been investigated in a range of past projects.
gine contained a place name; Sanderson & Han Probably one of the most widely cited research
(2007) also showed that queries for city names projects that made use of geo-referencing was
were repeated more frequently than for other
names (e.g. country and state). 1
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) project lection, is investigated. This includes the devel-
(Frew et al., 1998; Goodchild, 2004) aimed “to opment of a prototype system to demonstrate
develop a user-friendly digital library system that advanced search and browse functionalities, in-
provides a comprehensive range of services to cluding faceted browsing, timelines and maps,
collections of maps, images and spatially- based on semantic enrichment of data from Tate
referenced information.” Online.
Moritz (1999) describes the geo-referencing of Finally, the Vision of Britain5 website brings
narrative descriptions of specimens in natural together census data, election results, historical
history museums written by collectors in the maps, gazetteers and travel writing between 1901
field. Reid et al. (2004) discuss some of the pro- and 2001 into a single point of access. This is
jects funned by EDINA, a National Data Centre part of the Great Britain Historical Geographical
in Edinburgh, including Go-Geo! and Geo-X- Information System (GBHGIS) project managed
Walk. These projects facilitate the discovery of by the University of Portsmouth (Gregory &
geo-referenced information from distributed col- Southall, 2003).
lections in the UK.
Buckland & Lancaster (2004) describe com- 3 The National Archives (TNA)
bining place, time and topic in the Electronic
3.1 The Role of TNA
Cultural Atlas Initiative 2 , designed to foster a
research community interested in geo-temporally The National Archives (TNA) is the UK gov-
encoded data and create a catalogue of geo- ernment's official archive. The documents that it
referenced online resources. As a part of this ini- holds reflects almost 1,000 years of history, with
tiative, Buckland et al. (2007) overview the Go- records ranging from parchment and paper
ing Places in the Catalog project, an initiative to scrolls through to digital files and archived web-
offer seamless searching of educational and sites6. The National Archives also provides ad-
scholarly numeric and textual resources. This vice and guidance to others throughout the public
includes extracting geo-spatial information from and private sectors about caring for archives, and
library catalog records to enhance the user’s records the location of archival collections
search experience. throughout the UK. It publishes all UK legisla-
Johnson (2004; 2005) describes the indexing tion and advises upon and encourages the re-use
and delivery of historical maps online from the of public sector information.
National Library of Australia using the Time- The National Archives brings together the
Map3 tool (a mapping Java applet which gener- Public Record Office (founded in 1838), Histori-
ates complete interactive maps with a few simple cal Manuscripts Commission (founded 1869), the
lines of html code). With a similar goal, Martins Office for Public Sector Information, and Her
et al. (2007) describe the EU co-funded DIG- Majesty's Stationery Office (founded 1786).
MAP project aimed at making collections of
digitised historical maps spatially aware, through 3.2 Data held by TNA
the use of text mining techniques and Geo- The National Archives’ history, and its central
graphic Information Retrieval (GIR). This pro- role in information management, means that the
ject deals specifically with some of the issues data that it holds is extensive, varied and rich.
involved in using digitised versions of historical This information falls into 4 groups:
documents (e.g. old font styles, incorrectly
OCR’d words etc.). 1. Original documents, in both paper and
Mostern & Johnson (2008) describe the con- electronic format (found in Electronic
struction of a historical event gazetteer (these are Records Online – ERO) and digitised
records of historical events that describe the exis- copies of original documents made
tence of named places) and the use of spatio- available online (through Documents
temporal visualisation to view events and rela- Online).
tionships from the Heurist 4 collaborative data- 2. Catalogues which describe the content
base. Clough et al. (2008) describe a study in of The National Archives collections and
which semantic access to cultural heritage infor- record the location of archival records
mation from Tate Online, a large online art col-
2 5
http://www.ecai.org/ http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk
3 6
http://www.timemap.net http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/whowhathow.htm?
4
http://heuristscholar.org/heurist/ source= ddmenu_about1held throughout the UK. These range would enable the creation of a distinct set
from the general, in particular TNA’s of place data.
Catalogue of its collections and the Na- • Disambiguation between different places
tional Register of Archives, to the spe- with the same name.
cific, with the E179 Taxation database.
3. Published information, in particular the Exploiting place information in The National
London Gazette, official newspaper of Archives databases could unlock their potential,
record and the Statute Law Database. allowing the information to be interrogated in a
This data is currently maintained and way which is not possible with 15 discreet data
7
hosted separately . sources, currently existing in isolation. Comple-
4. A wide variety of other datasets, in- mentary information in different databases could
cluding the ARCHON Directory of ar- be highlighted, enhancing the richness of the
chive contact details, and Your Archives, data. For example, researchers interested in the
a wiki which allows users to contribute history of Godalming parish could consult:
content about archival records.
• Tithe records on The Catalogue:
In addition to these groups, data can also be http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ca
talogue/displaycataloguedetails.asp?
divided into structured and unstructured; the CATID=4085656&CATLN=6&Highlight=
latter providing a greater challenge for computa- ,GODALMING,PARISH&FullDetails=False
tional text analysis. Geographic information can • Details on a seventeenth century Vicar of
be found throughout TNA’s databases, varying Godalming, who failed to pay his tax,
from the postal addresses of every archive in the found on the E179 database
UK (found in the ARCHON directory); a com- http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e1
79/details.asp?piece_id=1030&doc_id=3
prehensive directory of medieval places, with 8513&doc_ref=E179/14/216A
related OS grid references and alternative names • The records of Godalming parish, held at
(drawn from the E179 tax database); and a list of Surrey History Centre, recorded on the
parishes which relate to the National Farm Sur- National Register of Archives:
vey carried out during World War Two (found in http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nr
a/searches/subjectView.asp?ID=O12730
the Catalogue, reference MAF 32).
• The location of records relating to the
3.3 Motivations for Space Exploration manor of Godalming, found on the Ma-
norial Documents Register:
Allowing users to search TNA data by place is a http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/md
high priority because of the popularity of place r/searches/detail.asp?SubjectID=17071
names as search queries. A recent survey of a 6&CountyID=398&FirstDate=&LastDate=&P
arishName=&MDKeyword=
sample of search queries carried out in January
and July 2009 found that about 25% of search User’s resource discovery experience could
queries related to a place (substantially higher potentially be enriched further by links to related
than figures reported in previous studies for gen- external resources, for example:
eral-purpose Web search).
Enabling TNA’s data to be navigated and ex-
• The page on Godalming on the Explor-
plored by place could provide an effective means
ing Surreys past website:
of helping users to find a way through the mass http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.
of information held by The National Archives – uk/themes/places/surrey/waverley/goda
lming
currently about 32 million records in the online
databases and documents. In particular this • The entry for Godalming in the Victoria
would allow: County History, found on the British
History Online website:
http://www.british-
• Visualisation of TNA data through geo- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=
graphical interfaces. 42924&strquery=godalming
• Division between place names and per- • The Wikipedia page on Godalming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godalmin
sonal names (including personal titles, g
such as the Duke of Richmond). This
The fragmented nature of TNA’s databases
can make resource discovery challenging for us-
7
http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/, http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/ers, and the vision of a single catalogue interface 4.1 Sources of Geographical Knowledge
is something which is being actively pursued and
To explicitly geo-reference information relies on
the identification and exploitation of place data
having access to existing geographical knowl-
in TNA’s resources could contribute to this.
edge. The most commonly used resource is the
Because of the nature of data in TNA, a criti-
gazetteer: at minimum a list of place names, fea-
cal challenge that needs to be addressed is the
ture types and spatial positions (Hill, 2006;
issue of change of name over time and the use of
Mostern & Johnson, 2008). Sources of gazetteers
alternative names. The fact that TNA’s data in-
commonly include (Goodchild & Hill,
cludes, in digital form, information from the me-
2008:1039):
dieval period to the present day, means that it
provides a unique environment to test the type of
• Gazetteers of ‘official’ toponyms (e.g.
issues which could arise. Examples of changes of
the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Scale
name over time include:
Gazetteer);
• Indexes accompanying published atlases
• Hampshire, sometimes known by the ab-
(e.g. Multimap.com);
breviation Hants, also (formerly fre-
quently) known as Southampton. • Place identifier tables accompanying
GIS datasets;
• Richmond, Surrey, formerly known as
West Sheen. • Place authority files (e.g. Vision of Brit-
ain) and rules (e.g. NCA Rules for the
• Stepney, formerly also known as Ste-
Construction of Personal, Place and Cor-
bunheath.
porate Names8) used for cataloguing and
4 Geo-Referencing indexing;
• Historical printed gazetteers and ency-
Relating information to geographic location in- clopedias (e.g. Gazetteer of Great British
volves linking between informal means of refer- Place Names);
ring to locations using place names (or • General online resources (e.g. Wikipe-
toponyms) and formal representations based on dia).
spatial referencing systems (e.g. longitude and
latitude or the British National Grid system). Researchers have investigated how to combine
Much of the geographical information contained multiple sources to create more comprehensive
in libraries and archives is based on place names, resources (see, e.g. (Manguinhas et al., 2008).)
however these must be geospatially referenced Example sources which could be used within the
(i.e. grounded) if they are to be used to their project include the following 9 (these are pre-
greatest potential for information access and dominantly UK-biased):
knowledge discovery. Locations are also identi-
fiable in other forms than place names, including • Getty Thesaurus of Geographic
addresses, postcodes, an address fragment, phone Names 10 (TGN) contains more than 1
numbers, URLs and IP addresses. million names and other information
Gazetteers are typically used to provide the about places across all continents (in-
link between informal (place names) and formal cluding political and historical places).
(corresponding spatial references) representa- The locations are organized in a hierar-
tions (section 4.1 presents some example gazet- chical structure (e.g. World>Europe>
teers). A key task for providing geospatial infor- United Kingdom>Scotland).
mation access is the recognition (or extraction) • Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Scale Gaz-
of potential geo-references and their geospatial etteer (OS50k) contains 260,000 names
referencing (discussed further in section 4.2). in Great Britain from the current and
Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) deals previous years’ 1:50,000 Scale gazetteer.
with the indexing of information to enable Locations are represented by points (Na-
searching over it to find information that is po- tional Grid squares) with additional fea-
tentially relevant to some information need (dis- ture type.
cussed in section 4.3).
8
http://www.nca.org.uk/materials/namingrules.pdf
9
A comprehensive survey can be found from EDINA:
http://edina.ac.uk/projects/crosswalk/
10
http://www.getty.edu• Ordnance Survey Code-Point provides In addition to these resources geographic data
a National Grid reference for each unit can be mined from the following resources and
postcode in Great Britain. The postcode services:
data is sourced, from among other re-
sources, Address Point, which contains • Wikipedia contains a wealth of place
26 million addresses recorded in the names which can be automatically ex-
Royal Mail Postcode Address List tracted and compiled into useful gazetteer
(PAF). resources (see, e.g. (Overell & Rüger,
• GeoNames11 is a database of over 8 mil- 2006)).
lion place names (and postcodes) from • Geo-X-Walk14is available for use through
all countries. Locations are represented EDINA and provides APIs for UK name,
by points and contain a range of feature postcode and identifier lookup.
types (e.g. country, region, city, body of • Geograph 15 is a project which aims to
water etc.). The database can be collect photographs and information for
downloaded and used free of charge. The every square km of Great Britain. The pro-
data is based on several sources includ- ject provides an Application Programming
ing the GEOnet Names Server (GNS), Interface (API) which can be used to in-
the US Geological Survey Geographic teract with the data. Currently there are
Names Information System (GNIS) and 1,359305 images for Great Britain which
Wikipedia. include place name metadata and an OS
• Gazetteer of British Place Names 12 grid reference.
(GBPN) contains over 50,000 entries • Yahoo Geocoding API 16 is a freely-
(points - National Grid references) refer- available web service (limited to 5,000 re-
ring to places in Great Britain. Each quests per day) that provides coordinates
place name is related to its historic for a given address or place name. (The
county (administrative areas) and vari- GeoNames service uses this as a backup
ants of place names are also included. resource if the place name cannot be
• UK Placename Finder13 is a database of found in its own database.)
more than 31,000 UK place names
(available for purchase on CD-ROM). A more sophisticated form of geographic
Places are referenced to the UK National knowledge representation is an ontology which
Grid. typically organizes locations into hierarchical
• Seamless Administrative Boundaries structures and provides topological relations be-
of Europe (SABE) is a pan-European tween locations (see, e.g. Fu et al., 2004). Recent
dataset of administrative units compiled work has focused on areas such as spatio-
from national contributions (containing temporal modeling (Mostern & Johnson, 2008),
the geometry and semantics of the ad- interoperability (Janowicz and Kessler, 2008)
ministrative hierarchies of 30 European and automatic gazetteer construction (Nadeau et
countries). For the UK, the dataset con- al., 2006; Popescu et al., 2008).
sists of around 22,000 place names.
4.2 Identifying/Resolving Geo-references
• Alexandria Gazetteer contains around
5.9 million place names, with feature A basic task in geo-referencing information is to
type information for all entries. The gaz- identify candidate geo-references. For place
etteer is mainly US-based (U.S. place names (or toponyms), this is commonly referred
names from the U.S. Geological Survey's to as geo-parsing (Larson, 1996) or toponym
GNIS database are used), but also con- recognition (Leidner, 2008) and can be likened
tains around 4 million non-US place to the Information Extraction task of Named En-
names from the GEOnet Names Server tity Recognition (or NER): the process of assign-
(GNS). ing every word or group of words to a set of pre-
defined categories (including “not an entity”).
11 14
http://www.geonames.org/ http://www.geoxwalk.ac.uk
12 15
http://www.gazetteer.co.uk/ http://www.geograph.org.uk/
13 16
http://www.digital-documents.co.uk/archi/placename.htm http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.htmlThese categories commonly include entities such geographical ontologies, spatial indexing and
as location, person and organization. storage of documents, geographical relevance
Most NER systems consist of at least three ba- ranking, the extraction and resolution of geo-
sic components: (1) a tokeniser, (2) gazetteer graphical references, determining the geographi-
lists, and (3) a Named Entity (NE) grammar cal scope (or focus) of web documents, user in-
(syntactic rules that take into account features terfaces and visualization, and methods for the
that describe the surrounding context). Rules for formulation of spatial queries and interaction
NER can be generated entirely by hand (knowl- with the results of geographic search (see, e.g.
edge-based) or automatically, using machine (Hill, 2006:185-214; Purves et al., 2007)).
learning (or statistical) techniques on previously
classified texts (see, e.g. (Zhou & Su, 2002; 5 Discussion
Curran and Clark, 2003)). The most common
5.1 Example Applications
approach is to use gazetteers together with syn-
tactic rules. For example, Curran & Clark (2003) By geo-referencing data from TNA, a number of
use a Maximum Entropy model to perform NER applications could be developed to enhance ac-
using features such as Part-Of-Speech tags, a cess and support knowledge discovery. These
history of preceding and following NEs, ortho- include:
graphic information and gazetteers. Their ap-
proach was used on historical texts in the Geo-X- Geographical search/browse: an obvious ap-
Walk project (Nissim et al., 2004). plication is providing users with functionalities
Once recognised, a candidate place name must to search and navigate the TNA archives through
be resolved, i.e. given a spatial reference (Larson place, thereby making the current search spa-
(2006) calls this geo-coding; Leidner (2008) re- tially-aware. Browsing across archives and
fers to this as toponym resolution). This may in- search results would be enhanced through visual-
volve disambiguating the place. There are two ising records on a map. Users could also initiate
main ambiguities in geo-references: (1) referent a search by entering a place name, selecting
ambiguity and (2) reference ambiguity. The for- names from a list (or ontology) or selecting
mer occurs when the same place name is used to points (or a region) from a map. A gazetteer or
refer to more than one location (e.g. “Chapel- geographical ontology could also provide search
town” refers to a location in South Yorkshire assistance by suggesting locations spatially re-
(UK), Lancashire (UK), Kent County (USA) and lated to the current search position (Purves et al.,
Panola County (USA)). This also includes a geo- 2007).
graphical reference being used for other entities
(e.g. the name of a person or company), which is Collection overviews: to support more ex-
called referent class ambiguity. (Amitay et al. ploratory search paradigms (i.e. users with no
(2004) separate ambiguity into geo/non-geo and specific search goal in mind), a summary of loca-
geo/geo.) tions represented in different archives could be
Reference ambiguity occurs when the same created. For example, through mapping all
location can have more than one name, e.g. due documents to grid cells and shading these to in-
to the historical deviation of a location name dicate document density. This would indicate the
over time (Smith & Mann, 2003), transliteration coverage of the content from the archives (Hill,
(Kwok & Deng, 2003) and implicit formats and 2006:211).
character encoding (Axelrod, 2003). An exten-
sive summary can be found in (Leidner, 2008). Co-occurring concepts: through statistical
analysis of term co-occurrences, terms could be
4.3 Geographical IR (GIR) identified that help to characterise a location (e.g.
Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) is con- it is common to find the terms “Sheffield” and
cerned with finding documents relevant to que- “steel” co-occur). This could be analysed with
ries which include some geographical context respect to time to see changes in concepts related
(Larson, 1996). Information is assigned one or to specific places (or between archives). Map
more footprints and documents are retrieved and visualizations overlaid with co-occurring con-
ranked according to thematic and spatial rele- cepts (and timeline controls) could help to high-
vance (results can also be visualised using maps). light concepts or themes which relate to specific
Research in this field has addressed a wide regions (see, e.g. (Purves and Edwardes, 2008)).
range of relevant areas such as the building of5.2 Research Plan to use tools such as GATE 17 (Cunningham,
2002) and OpenCalais18 from Reuters for NER,
The goal of our proposed work is to investigate
OpenSpace19 from Ordnance Survey and Google
geo-referencing within TNA (a set of distributed
Maps20 for mapping, Solr21 for interaction func-
archives) to enable geo-spatial information ac-
tionality including faceted browsing and Post-
cess to the archive collections. This will include
GIS 22 and LocalLucene 23 for spatial/textual in-
the following key stages:
dexing and retrieval.
Stage 1: establishing user (and system) re-
Stage 5: evaluating prototype applications
quirements for geo-enabling TNA resources.
with users and TNA. This will involve previous
This will involve understanding the current use
work on relevance assessments in GIR (Purves &
of place in the search for archived material (e.g.
Clough, 2005).
log analysis and user interviews) and analysing
user’s information needs. 5.3 Potential Challenges
Stage 2: developing suitable geographical re- By geo-referencing material from The National
sources that can be used for geo-referencing the Archives, we will be able to provide additional
collection. Resources such as the OS50k gazet- functionality to explore the content with respect
teer and GeoNames will be used as a starting to place (as discussed in section 3.3). However,
point and initial analysis will be undertaken to the particular context of TNA provides several
compare and understand these available re- challenges, particularly with respect to applying
sources (and others). Techniques to combine and automated text processing techniques. Chal-
extend existing geographical resources to deal lenges include the following:
with historical variations and vernacular expres-
sions and add further information (e.g. feature Multiple archives: each TNA database exhib-
types) will be explored based on mining existing its different geographical characteristics (e.g.
data from the TNA (e.g. from the E179 database) ARCHON includes address information; E179
and online sources (Uryupina, 2003; Jones et al., include historical variants; Documents Online
2006; Popescu et al., 2008; Manguinhas et al., contains unstructured text). Decisions regarding
2008). A key task in this activity will be deciding how documents will be indexed in this distrib-
how to create spatial coordinates for places uted setting must also be considered (e.g. central-
which do not appear in existing resources (e.g. ized or distributed indexes; single search or me-
historical names, (Crane, 2004)). In addition, this tasearch).
work will explore a suitable document represen-
tation and annotation scheme for the TNA data. Understanding references to place: geo-
references are used in a number of different con-
Stage 3: developing suitable methods for texts (e.g. could refer to the location of the
toponym recognition and resolution (addresses document’s author or publisher; the geographical
will also be considered for the ARCHON data- scope of its content; or the location of a physical
base). Simple approaches for NER based on gaz- entity, e.g. a library). Simply identifying geo-
etteer lookup and minimal syntactic rules references and attaching these to documents or
(Clough, 2005) will be tested; together with more records may not be sufficient.
sophisticated approaches based on machine
learning (Curran & Clark, 2003). An existing Extracting and resolving toponyms: ambi-
method for resolving ambiguous toponyms using guities in natural language always present chal-
default senses and gazetteer resources (Clough, lenges to natural language processing. In particu-
2005) will be tested, together with approaches lar, extracting and referencing toponyms which
which utilize spatial proximity (Pasley & do not exist within the current resources (e.g.
Clough, 2007). We plan to investigate the suit- historical variants) will require attention. Al-
ability of different approaches though approaches in NER can successfully
17
http://gate.ac.uk/
Stage 4: developing “light-weight” prototypes 18
http://www.opencalais.com/
based on using publicly-accessible resources (i.e. 19
http://openspace.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/openspace/
20
mashups (Erle et al., 2005)) and a suitable archi- http://maps.google.co.uk/
21
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
tecture for providing GIR functionality. We plan 22
http://postgis.refractions.net/
23
http://locallucene.sourceforge.net/identify place names, the main problem is how to Amitay, E., Har'El, N., Sivan, R.. and Soffer, A. (
spatially ground the references (i.e. can we find 2004) Web-a-Where: Geotagging Web Content, In:
spatial information for known places which are Proceedings of the 27th annual international con-
likely to co-occur with historical variants?) ference on Research and development in informa-
tion retrieval (SIGIR04), Sheffield UK, 2004, pp.
273-280.
Integrating space and time: in many contexts
space and time is linked and should therefore be Axelrod, A. E. (2003) On building a high perform-
modeled together (e.g. Buckland & Lancaster, ance gazetteer database. In: Kornai, A. and Sund-
2004; Mostern & Johnson, 2008)). Current spa- heim, B. (eds.) Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL
2003 Workshop on Analysis of Geographic Refer-
tial indexing methods may not be suitable for
ences, Alberta, Canada: ACL, 63-68.
supporting representation of space and time
without major re-design. Buckland, M. and Lancaster, M. (2004) Combining
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Implementation: one goal of this work is to las Initiative, D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 10(5).
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