A depth-first branch-and-bound algorithm for geocoding historic itinerary tables

Abstract

The work in this paper is motivated from two different perspectives: First, gazetteers as an important data source for Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) applications often lack historic place name information. More focused historic gazetteers are a far cry from being complete and often specialize only on certain geographic regions or time periods. Second, research on historic route descriptions---so called itineraries---is an important task in many research disciplines such as geography, linguistics, history, religion, or even medicine. This research on historic itineraries is characterized by manual, time-consuming work with only minimalistic IT support through gazetteers and map services. We address both perspectives and present a depth-first branch-and-bound (DFBnB) algorithm for deducing historic place names and thus the stops of ancient travel routes from itinerary tables. Multiple phonetic and character-based string distances are evaluated when resolving parts of an itinerary first published in 1563.