Spatiotemporal Information Extraction from a Historic Expedition Gazetteer

Mafkereseb Bekele,Gaurav Singh,Rolf De By

doi:10.3390/ijgi5120221

Abstract

Historic expeditions are events that are flavored by exploratory, scientific, military or geographic characteristics. Such events are often documented in literature, journey notes or personal diaries. A typical historic expedition involves multiple site visits and their descriptions contain spatiotemporal and attributive contexts. Expeditions involve movements in space that can be represented by triplet features (location, time and description). However, such features are implicit and innate parts of textual documents. Extracting the geospatial information from these documents requires understanding the contextualized entities in the text. To this end, we developed a semi-automated framework that has multiple Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing components to extract the spatiotemporal information from a two-volume historic expedition gazetteer. Our framework has three basic components, namely, the Text Preprocessor, the Gazetteer Processing Machine and the JAPE (Java Annotation Pattern Engine) Transducer. We used the Brazilian Ornithological Gazetteer as an experimental dataset and extracted the spatial and temporal entities from entries that refer to three expeditioners’ site visits (which took place between 1910 and 1926) and mapped the trajectory of each expedition using the extracted information. Finally, one of the mapped trajectories was manually compared with a historical reference map of that expedition to assess the reliability of our framework.

Highlights

Historic expeditions are journeys made in the past with exploratory, scientific, military or geographic intentions [1]
After we extract the spatiotemporal information from the expedition gazetteer texts, we stored the information in a PostgreSQL database that we developed for this task
Defining patterns and listing reference items for all entities that we could find in the expedition gazetteer texts is not ideal

Summary

Introduction

Historic expeditions are journeys made in the past with exploratory, scientific, military or geographic intentions [1]. The spatiotemporal and thematic properties of such historic expeditions are likely to be represented, often in printed documents, which are contextual in nature. The contexts that exist in historic expedition documents are spatial, temporal and descriptive. Element extraction from the textual documents will provide alternatives to represent and visualize those historic events in a spatiotemporal environment. Historic expeditions are past strings of events that are likely documented in unstructured text formats and have possibly left their traces in history. Reading such documents is not adequate for visualizing the events with a full spatiotemporal perspective or for conducting further studies; extracting the spatiotemporal and descriptive contents from the documents is required to get the associated contexts

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