Methods of Geospatial Referencing of Toponymic Data and Results of Their Application

The article examines methods of geospatial referencing of toponymic data. The history of collecting, storing, and processing toponymic data at Ural University is reviewed. The structure of the existing toponymic database is discussed, along with the specifics of documenting field materials and subsequently correlating them with geographical coordinates. The article then considers two methods of geospatial referencing of linguistic data: manual referencing, illustrated by the GIS Toponymy of Karelia, which has been successfully implemented at the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences; and automatic referencing, developed for databases of the toponymy of Belozerye and the Kostroma Region at Ural Federal University. The main advantage of the proposed automatic geospatial referencing method is its ability to process large volumes of data (tens of thousands of toponyms), which can subsequently be visualized using QGIS-based solutions, allowing researchers to quickly assess the presence or absence of areal patterns. Using this method, 46,000 records were successfully georeferenced. The method makes it possible to reconstruct the spatial distribution of linguistic data, but not the precise locations of individual objects, which may sometimes be important for the study of toponymic patterns. Another limitation is that the method requires manual preliminary cleaning of the collected field data; in particular, the removal of duplicate records is essential. The application of Natural Language Processing tools to the automatic processing of geographical references expressed in natural language may improve the proposed geospatial referencing method. The use of such tools could reduce the labor costs of data preprocessing and narrow the gap between automatic and manual referencing. Further improvements may include the development of additional scenarios for working with linear objects (primarily rivers and roads) and areal objects (large swamps and lakes) on the map.