GeoTxt: a web API to leverage place references in text

Abstract

Associating place name mentions in unstructured text with their actual references in geographic space is vital to enable spatial queries and analysis. In this paper, we introduce GeoTxt, a web API plus human-usable web tool designed and implemented to tackle three components of place-reference processing from text, namely: extraction, disambiguation, and geolocation of place names mentioned in unstructured text. Current GeoTxt development is focused particularly on support for processing short microblog posts.