Calculating of match degree in Digital Gazetteer Services

The development of Internet calls urgently for the ability to deal with massive textually represented geographical knowledge. Digital Gazetteer Service (DGS) plays a foundational role in this process. To help users to check and confirm the proper places quickly and efficiently, one of the key points of DGS is to rank place names according to their satisfaction with query conditions set by users. Match degree that varies between 0 and 1 is proposed to evaluate the extent of the satisfaction. In this paper we will give a list of factors that influence the match degree and classify them into four aspects: Target Object, Reference Object, Spatial Relationship and Context. Based on the analysis of the factors, quantification for the influence is proposed to calculate the match degree. Additionally, we will introduce a number of methods that we adopted to quantify the different factors´ influence and present a model to implement them.