GeoCoder

GeoCoder assigns geographical coordinates (e.g. latitude and longitude) to names of locations in a text, making their visualization on a map possible.

Given the output of EntityPro, the module disambiguates a location using a repository of toponyms (i.e. GeoNames) as an index and, for each location, it provides both a fine grained category (e.g. City for “Madrid”) and its coordinates.

Algorithm: a statistical disambiguation algorithm that considers distances of locations occurring in a document.

Resources: GeoNames repository.

Reference:

Davide Buscaldi and Bernardo Magnini. Grounding Toponyms in an Italian Local News Corpus. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR 2010), Zurich (Switzerland), 2010.