Search Results (5)

Toponymy, a transversal discipline for geography, linguistics, and history, finds one of its main supports in cartography. Due to exhaustiveness on the territory, cadastral cartography and its toponymy have the ideal characteristics to develop systematic geographical analyses. Moreover, cadastre and geographical names are part of the geographic reference data according to Annex 1 of the INSPIRE directive. This work presents the design, implementation, and application of a methodology based on Geographic Information Systems and Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools for detecting coincidences between the cadastral geoinformation and the official gazetteer corresponding to the province of Gipuzkoa, Spain. Methodologically, this study proposes a solution to the issues raised by bilingualism in the study area. This problem is approached a priori, in the previous data treatment, and a posteriori, applying semantic criteria. The results show a match between the datasets of close to 40%. In this way, the uniqueness and richness of the analyzed source and its outstanding contribution to the potential integration of the official toponymic corpus are evidenced. Full article

Place names, or toponyms, provide a useful geographical reference system; they can help analyse past landscapes, recover history and understand changes. Among place names, plant place names (phytotoponyms) can be used to analyse the current and past distribution of plants and plant communities and to highlight changes in land use due to human impacts and climate change. We assessed the feasibility of using place names related to species and forest ecosystems to evaluate changes that have affected the forest landscape. As a case study, we considered Calabria, a region in southern Italy rich in toponymic studies. We used the official topographic maps of Calabria, at scales of 1:25,000 and 1: 10,000, and literature data on Calabrian toponymy. To interpret toponyms related to plants and avoid errors, we performed a joint linguistic and naturalistic analysis. A total of 1609 phytotoponyms were identified relating to 45 forest species (28 trees and 17 shrubs) and 399 place names generically related to woods and forests. The most frequent plants associated with place names were Castanea sativa (8.3% of all plant place names), Quercus pubescens s.l. (7.2%), Salix sp. pl. (6.9%) and Quercus frainetto (5.6%). All the phytotoponyms were georeferenced and mapped in a GIS. Phytotoponym distribution maps were compared with current Calabrian forest vegetation, using digital orthophotos, land use maps and literature data. A close correspondence between phytotoponyms and forest vegetation for the mountain belt was identified. In contrast, in the basal belt, we found poor correspondence between phytotoponyms and current forest vegetation, especially for wet forests, that can be accounted for by the severe changes in the landscape due to the agricultural and urban transformations that have occurred. The spread of phytotoponyms concerning species linked to forest degradation, such as Spartium junceum, emphasises the ancient anthropic impacts on forests. Our study shows that phytotoponyms are an important tool for analysing changes in vegetation over time. They make it possible to reconstruct changes in the landscape and the intended use of the territory and provide useful information on the restoration of forest ecosystems. Full article

The article presents a process of collecting unstandardized toponyms, in particular urbanonyms (place names denoting objects located in the cadastre of the city), within the territory of two municipalities in the Czech Republic. The collecting process was performed in two phases by crowdsourcing, using a web map application created especially for this purpose. In the first phase (October 2019–September 2020) it was collecting as many unstandardized toponyms as possible. In the second phase (October 2020–January 2021) we focused on the degree of the knowledge of these toponyms among the population living within the studied territory. The interest on the side of the general public was surprising in both phases. In the first phase, over five hundred respondents submitted more than two and a half thousand place names, most of them during the first two weeks. More than nine hundred respondents actively participated in the second phase, thanks to which we received an average of 200 responses for each place name. As regards the motivation of the public, it was most often altruism, patriotism, and curiosity that stimulated them; in the second phase, the element of gamification, embedded into the map application, also had a positive effect. The collected data can be used, for instance, in the activities of local authorities in the process of standardization of place names or as reference data for maps used within the integrated rescue system. Full article

This commentary points to the problems inherent in critical place names studies in terms of classic research topics, methodologies and geographies. It expounds the limits of the official “index”, that is, the variety of traditional urban inscriptions on which critical toponymy scholars rely in interpreting modern urban spatialities—e.g., lists of street names, official street signage, gazetteers, archival materials, etc. The argument is that in Southern urban contexts, where informality in planning can reach up to about 80 percent of the city, researching official naming and signage renders a distorted image of the city and its namescape production. A comment is thus made on the need to embrace more innovative and almost ethnographic research methodologies for understanding place referencing, place attachment and everyday navigational channels in Southern cities. These will generate a more substantial contribution towards the creation of global urban toponymy and a further de-colonization of Eurocentric presumptions regarding governmentality, urban management, and the accompanying role of street naming systems. Full article

The Internet is increasingly a source of data for geographic information systems, as more data becomes linked, available through application programing interfaces (APIs), and more tools become available for handling unstructured web data. While many web data extraction and structuring methods exist, there are few examples of comprehensive data processing and analysis systems that link together these tools for geographic analyses. This paper develops a general approach to the development of spatial information context from unstructured and informal web data sources through the joint analysis of the data’s thematic, spatial, and temporal properties. We explore the utility of this derived contextual information through a case study into maritime surveillance. Extraction and processing techniques such as toponym extraction, disambiguation, and temporal information extraction methods are used to construct a semi-structured maritime context database supporting global scale analysis. Geographic, temporal, and thematic content were analyzed, extracted and processed from a list of information sources. A geoweb interface is developed to allow user visualization of extracted information, as well as to support space-time database queries. Joint keyword clustering and spatial clustering methods are used to demonstrate extraction of documents that relate to real world events in official vessel information data. The quality of contextual geospatial information sources is evaluated in reference to known maritime anomalies obtained from authoritative sources. The feasibility of automated context extraction using the proposed framework and linkage to external data using standard clustering tools is demonstrated. Full article