A geo-temporal Web gazetteer integrating data from multiple sources

This paper presents a geo-temporal gazetteer Web service that provides access to names of places and historical periods, together with the associated geo-temporal information. Within the DIGMAP project, this gazetteer serves as the unified repository of geographic and temporal information, assisting in the mining of geo-temporal expressions over text, as well as in resource searching and indexing. We describe the data integration methodology and some of the applications that use the gazetteer. Initial evaluation results show that the proposed system can adequately support several tasks related to geo-temporal information extraction and retrieval.