Abstract
Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. This paper presents a three-fold contribution. We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between street names and the entities that they refer to. The method is based on Wikidata, a knowledge base derived from Wikipedia. The accuracy of this mapping is evaluated on a sample of streets in Rome. As this approach reaches limited coverage, we propose to tap local knowledge with (2) a simple web platform. Users can select the best correspondence from the calculated ones or add another entity not discovered by the automated process. As a result, we design (3) an enriched OpenStreetMap web map where each street name can be explored in terms of the properties of its associated entity. Through several filters, this tool is a first step towards the interactive exploration of toponymy, showing how open data can reveal facets of the cultural texture that pervades places.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ballatore, A., Bertolotto, M., Wilson, D.: Linking geographic vocabularies through WordNet. Ann. GIS 20(2), 73–84 (2014)
Ballatore, A., Wilson, D., Bertolotto, M.: A survey of volunteered open Geo-Knowledge bases in the semantic web. In: Pasi, G., Bordogna, G., Jain, L. (eds.) Quality Issues in the Management of Web Information. ISRL, vol. 50, pp. 93–120. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Ballatore, A., Mooney, P.: Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography. Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci. 29(12), 2310–2327 (2015)
Bizer, C., Lehmann, J., Kobilarov, G., Auer, S., Becker, C., Cyganiak, R., Hellmann, S.: DBpedia-A crystallization point for the Web of Data. Web Semant. Sci. Serv. Agents World Wide Web 7(3), 154–165 (2009)
Brown, M., Sharples, S., Harding, J., Parker, C., Bearman, N., Maguire, M., Forrest, D., Haklay, M., Jackson, M.: Usability of geographic information: current challenges and future directions. Appl. Ergon. 44(6), 855–865 (2013)
Buscaldi, D., Magnini, B.: Grounding toponyms in an Italian local news corpus. In: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2010, pp. 15:1–15:5. ACM, New York (2010)
Cohen, S.B., Kliot, N.: Place-names in Israel’s ideological struggle over the administered territories. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 82(4), 653–680 (1992)
Goodchild, M.F.: Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal 69(4), 211–221 (2007)
Kadmon, N.: Toponymy and geopolitics: the political use-and misuse-of geographical names. Cartographic J. 41(2), 85–87 (2004)
Kuhn, W., Kauppinen, T., Janowicz, K.: Linked data - a paradigm shift for geographic information science. In: Duckham, M., Pebesma, E., Stewart, K., Frank, A.U. (eds.) GIScience 2014. LNCS, vol. 8728, pp. 173–186. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Qi, S., Wu, D., Mamoulis, N.: Location aware keyword query suggestion based on document proximity. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 28(1), 82–97 (2016)
Vrandečić, D., Krötzsch, M.: Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledge base. Commun. ACM 57(10), 78–85 (2014)
Zaragoza, H., Rode, H., Mika, P., Atserias, J., Ciaramita, M., Attardi, G.: Ranking very many typed entities on wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2007, pp. 1015–1018. ACM, New York (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Almeida, P.D., Rocha, J.G., Ballatore, A., Zipf, A. (2016). Where the Streets Have Known Names. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications -- ICCSA 2016. ICCSA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9789. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42089-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42089-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-42088-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-42089-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)