Geographical Terminology Servers - Closing the Semantic Divide

The user interfaces of most geographical information systems are project specific, imposing upon the user a particular organisation's view of the information content. As geographical information becomes more widely available across multiple domains, the requirement arises to provide information retrieval facilities that recognise geographical terminology from multiple perspectives at multiple levels of abstraction. This paper elaborates upon these issues and describes techniques for making imprecise matches between user terminology for geographical places and concepts and the relevant stored terms. These techniques exploit an experimental ontology that derives semantic relations and classification terms, from existing thesauri of place names and cultural information concepts, and includes a parsimonious spatial data model combining qualitative relations with sparse quantitative geometry.