Affiliation
University of Lisbon; University of ChesterPublication Date
2017-11-30
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Historical itineraries, often accessible as lists or tables describing places visited in sequence, are abundant resources and also important objects of study for humanities scholars. This article advances a novel method for automatically geocoding tabular itineraries, combining approximate string matching with a cost optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming. Experiments with a dataset of historical itineraries, with ground-truth geocoding annotations provided by domain experts and leveraging also the GeoNames gazetteer, attest to the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results show that while approximate string matching can already achieve very low median errors, with many toponyms matching exactly against GeoNames entries, the combination with cost optimization can significantly improve results in terms of the average distance towards the correct disambiguations.Citation
Santos, R., Murrieta-Flores, P., & Martins, B. (2017). An automated approach for geocoding tabular itineraries. Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, Heidelberg, Germany. https://doi.org/10.1145/3155902.3155908Additional Links
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3155902.3155908Type
Conference ContributionDescription
This article is not available on ChesterRepSponsors
Funder: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; FundRef: 10.13039/501100001871; Grant(s): PTDC/EEI-SCR/1743/2014 Funder: Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Science and Humanities; Grant(s): HJ-253525ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1145/3155902.3155908