Geocoding place names from historic route descriptions

Abstract

Many gazetteers contain only a small amount of historic place name information and spelling variants of places. Even more focused historic gazetteers are far from being complete and often specialize on certain geographic regions or particular time periods. On the other hand, there are huge amounts of historic route descriptions, so called itineraries. They represent massive knowledge sources from which historic place names and spelling variants can be deduced. The analysis and geocoding of those route descriptions---often done by hand---is an important task in the humanities. To cope with these problems, we present preliminary ideas how to automatically deduce historic place names and thus travel routes from historic route descriptions.