A semantic web based gazetteer model for VGI

Abstract

The recent and expanding phenomena of volunteered geographic information (VGI) have potential for building locally rich geographic knowledgebases. Volunteer contributions include a broad range of geographically associated content that has the potential to contribute to collective digital place knowledge, but contributions are scattered over the web with little to no common structure or formal metadata. This paper explores some organizing principles and a potential structure for integrating VGI. Characteristics of VGI suggest organization around features rather than layers, support for multiple representations that capture different contributor perspectives, and integration around the concept of place. A semantic web based gazetteer model that manages features, multiple representations of features, and varying levels of association of features to places is suggested as an integration framework. Semantics of the gazetteer and inference on these semantics provide support for integrating diverse VGI content around hierarchies of officially named places as starting points. Preliminary work illustrates the approach with samples of VGI data from Maine.