Frequency and Proximity Clustering Analyses for Georeferencing Toponyms and Points-Of-Interest Names from a Travel Journal

Abstract

This research study uses geographic information retrieval (GIR) to georeference toponyms and points-of-interest (POI) names from a travel journal. Travel journals are an ideal data source with which to conduct this study because they are significant accounts specific to the author’s experience, and contain geographic instances based on the experiences made at a specific time and location along a traversed route of a trip. Using a travel journal, toponyms and POI names are georeferenced to locate where the author visited or what the author observed along a travel path. GIR relies on algorithms to maximize the georeferencing of spatially sensitive data while minimizing issues related to semantic ambiguities, which can incorrectly place geographic content due to shared names by other geographic or non-geographic contents.