Where the Streets Have Known Names
Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. This paper prese
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Minho University, Braga, Portugal {b6301,jgr}@di.uminho.pt Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK [email protected] 3 Universit¨ at Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany [email protected]
Abstract. Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. This paper presents a three-fold contribution. We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between street names and the entities that they refer to. The method is based on Wikidata, a knowledge base derived from Wikipedia. The accuracy of this mapping is evaluated on a sample of streets in Rome. As this approach reaches limited coverage, we propose to tap local knowledge with (2) a simple web platform. Users can select the best correspondence from the calculated ones or add another entity not discovered by the automated process. As a result, we design (3) an enriched OpenStreetMap web map where each street name can be explored in terms of the properties of its associated entity. Through several filters, this tool is a first step towards the interactive exploration of toponymy, showing how open data can reveal facets of the cultural texture that pervades places. Keywords: Digital humanities · Toponymy · OpenStreetMap Wikidata · Linked open data · Volunteered geographic information
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Introduction
All web maps show street names, supporting us in wayfinding. What is overlooked is that, behind each street name, that there is a rich and complex story. Street names are dedicated to notable people, places or events. They are frequently used to honor notable citizens or celebrate events and revolutions. Therefore, they often provide important insights into the culture, politics, and history of a locale. In this pilot project we aim at creating an interactive web application where users can trace the stories behind street names, relying on OpenStreetMap1 and 1
http://www.openstreetmap.org.
c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2016, Part IV, LNCS 9789, pp. 1–12, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42089-9 1
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P.D. Almeida et al.
other open data sources. As a first step, users can explore streets named after individuals, filtering them by gender, date of birth, and profession. Wikipedia is used as an information source. More specifically, we use Wikidata2 and DBpedia3 , two knowledge bases designed to extract structured information from Wikipedia, to link the street name with the corresponding resource described in the knowledge bases. To show the potential of linked open data, the process will be as automated as possible. This paper describes the automatic mapping of street names with resources from these knowledge bases and rank those resources according to their relevance. The preliminary results, obtained on a sample of streets in Rome, show that there are many missing relations. To increase the co
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