Contextual spatial relations based spatial modelling of vague place names

Place names have been one of the most commonly-preferred georeferencing systems used to communicate geographically-specific information in our daily lives. Gazetteers as specialized geographical information systems bridge the gap between textual place names and geospatial locations. Most place names in gazetteers are thought of as administrative regions and described with official names. However, a place name could also be a thematic region, a functional region or a cognitive region. There is hence a need to enrich gazetteers with such vague place names and extend their applications. Geospatial location and boundary of vague place names can be induced based on the descriptions of its referred geographical entities and spatial relations in context. Here an approach is proposed to approximately model vague place names based on contextual spatial relations. Computational models for qualitative spatial relations are identified to model single spatial relations and a layer-overlapping method is presented to compute composed spatial relations. A few typical examples further explore the detailed processing tasks and performance. Finally, an application case is illustrated and various aspects of the approach are discussed.