Abstract
Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic place-names that have important implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By containing ‘definitive’ lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological power to define what will and will not be geocoded and represented in databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings of place. This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world's largest freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are dense clusters of place-names in some parts of the world and a relative absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related not just to the wealth and population size of a country, but also to its policies on Internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making.
Highlights
Gazetteers play an often understated role in our contemporary informationalised lives and economies
In containing a dictionary of placenames, they offer the informational canvas from which a huge variety of geographic meaning is made, playing “a vital role in information systems” (Goodchild and Hill, 2008)
Because of the ‘data revolution’ and the exponential growth in the availability of information about most facets of everyday life (Kitchin 2014; Graham and Shelton 2013), we have seen a synergistic cycle between the presence and use of geographic data (Graham 2013)
Summary
Gazetteers play an often understated role in our contemporary informationalised lives and economies. Because of the ‘data revolution’ and the exponential growth in the availability of information about most facets of everyday life (Kitchin 2014; Graham and Shelton 2013), we have seen a synergistic cycle between the presence and use (or supply and demand) of geographic data (Graham 2013). By presenting lists of structured information about the world, gazetteers have always had the power to shape and structure how geographic meaning is made. Because of the importance and ontological power of gazetteers, it is important to better understand the specific biases embedded into them. To do this we map the world’s largest freely available gazetteer: GeoNames
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