Ontologies of Place: What are gazetteers about?

Great Britain Historical GIS Project:A Vision of Britain though Time

Ontologies of Place:What are gazetteers about?

Humphrey Southall(University of Portsmouth/

Great Britain Historical GIS)


What kinds of geographical entity?

• Traditional GIS very focused on landscape features• But interpretation of historical texts is about units and places

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Gazetteer Type

Landscape Features

Administrative Units

Places

Typed Yes Yes No

Visible Yes No No

Defined by Existence in landscape

Legal establishment as corporate bodies

Shared perception; mention in texts and discourse – “social tagging”

Defined as (mostly) points legally defined polygons

(mostly) fuzzy polygons


England’s most deprived areas

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• NB units are SOAs, so blame Dave Martin


Jaywick versus Breckfield

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Breckfield? No such place

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Argleton, the town that does not exist

• ‘All Google is saying on the matter is that it does experience "occasional errors" and that the mapping information was provided by a Dutch company called Tele Atlas. And all Tele Atlas's spokesperson will add is that "I really can't explain why these anomalies get into our database.“’

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The Sun in the Sands

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Sun in the Sands Rotary

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Sun in the Sands as a place

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Sun in Sands bus map

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Sun in the Sands as a neighborhood

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Nag’s Head, Islington, c.1905

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Nag’s Head today

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Nag’s Head in Wikipedia

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Nag’s Head Town Center

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Elephant and Castle then and now

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Elephant and Castle is definitely a place

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Four features or one place?

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Feature types in C19 Gazetteers

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Place Feature Type String Source

Gruinard, Ross-shire

a bay, an island, and two streams Groome

Ripon, Yorkshire a city, a township, a parish, a sub-district, a district, a liberty, and a diocese

Imperial

Gloucester parliamentary and municipal borough, city, market and county town, and river-port

Bartholomew

Burghead, Moray a promontory, a bay, a small town, and a quoad sacra parish

Groome

Laxey, Isle of Man a village, a bay, a headland, a rivulet, and a vale

Imperial


What kinds of geographical entity?

• Crowd-sourced extraction of names from geo-referenced historical maps are the obvious basis for rapid construction of large historical gazetteers

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Gazetteer Type

Landscape Features

Administ-rative Units

Places Nameson Maps

Typed Yes Yes No ?

Visible Yes No No On the map

Defined by Existencein land-scape

Law Shared perception,discourse

Nameson maps!

Defined as (mostly) points

legally defined

polygons

(mostly) fuzzy

polygons

(Offset)points

Ontologies of Place: What are gazetteers about?

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