SWI: A Semantic Web Interactive Gazetteer to support Linked Open Data

Abstract

Current implementations of gazetteers, geographic directories that associate place names to geographic coordinates, cannot use semantics to answer complex queries (most gazetteers are just thesauri of place names), use domain ontologies for place name disambiguation, make their data sets available in the Semantic Web or support the use of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). A new generation of gazetteers has to tackle these problems. In this paper, we present a new architecture for gazetteers that uses VGI and Semantic Web tools, such as ontologies and Linked Open Data to overcome these limitations. We also present a gazetteer, the Semantic Web Interactive Gazetteer (SWI), implemented using this architecture, and show that it can be used to add absent geographic coordinates to biodiversity records. In our tests, we use this gazetteer to correct geographic data from a big sample (around 142,000 occurrence records of Amazonian specimens) from SpeciesLink, a big repository of biodiversity collection records from Brazil. The tests showed that the SWI Gazetteer was able to add geographic coordinates to around 30,000 records, increasing the records with coordinates from 30.29% to 57.5% of the total number of records in the sample (representing an increase of 90%). © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.