Towards Ontology-based Disambiguation of Geographical Identifiers

Geographic names have always been important identifiers. People typically use names and not coordinates to identify geographic features. Therefore to establish identity beyond coordinates, name disambiguation is required to identify the exact geographic feature that is denoted by a name. This paper introduces an ontology-based approach to disambiguate geographical names in texts. The ontology defines the central conceptual basis of our approach and is used to rank geographic features based on disambiguation rules that take into account structural information contained in the ontology (e.g. population of a town), as well as textual indicators contained in the text at hand. Our first evaluation on a subset of the well-known Reuters 21578 corpus indicates promising results both in terms of precision and recall.