Acquisition of Vernacular Place Names from Web Sources

Vernacular place names are names that are commonly in use to refer to geographical places. For purposes of effective information retrieval, the spatial extent associated with these names should reflect peoples perception of the place, even though this may differ sometimes from the administrative definition of the same place name. Due to their informal nature, vernacular place names are hard to capture, but methods to acquire and define vernacular place names are of great benefit to search engines and all kinds of information services that deal with geographic data. This paper discusses the acquisition of vernacular use of place names from web sources and their representation as surface models derived by kernel density estimators. We show that various web sources containing user created geographic information and business data can be used to represent neighbourhoods in Cardiff, UK. The resulting representations can differ in their spatial extent from administrative definitions. The chapter closes with an outlook on future research questions.