Determining the geographic focus of digital media is an essential first step for modern geographic information retrieval. However, publicly-visible location annotations are remarkably sparse in online data. In this work, we demonstrate a method which infers the geographic focus of an online document by examining the locations of Twitter users who share links to the document. We apply our geotagging technique to multiple datasets built from different content: manually-annotated news articles, GDELT, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Tumblr.
@cite_14: We describe Web-a-Where, a system for associating geography with Web pages. Web-a-Where locates mentions of places and determines the place each name refers to. In addition, it assigns to each page a geographic focus --- a locality that the page discusses as a whole. The tagging process is simple and fast, aimed to be applied to large collections of Web pages and to facilitate a variety of location-based applications and data analyses.Geotagging involves arbitrating two types of ambiguities: geo non-geo and geo geo. A geo non-geo ambiguity occurs when a place name also has a non-geographic meaning, such as a person name (e.g., Berlin) or a common word (Turkey). Geo geo ambiguity arises when distinct places have the same name, as in London, England vs. London, Ontario.An implementation of the tagger within the framework of the WebFountain data mining system is described, and evaluated on several corpora of real Web pages. Precision of up to 82 on individual geotags is achieved. We also evaluate the relative contribution of various heuristics the tagger employs, and evaluate the focus-finding algorithm using a corpus pretagged with localities, showing that as many as 91 of the foci reported are correct up to the country level.
Toponyms are usually stored in a dictionary called a gazetteer. Toponym resolution is a challenging task for a number of reasons: misspellings; the use of abbreviation, which is particularly prevalent in social media microtext services such as Twitter; evolving new and changing location names, for example through urban construction or expansion or through changing vernacular; and, through ambiguities in the use of toponyms. Geocoding literature focuses particularly on the case of topoonym ambiguities of toponyms, of which there are two types @cite_14 : geo geo, where a given toponym can be used to describe multiple distinct locations, and geo non-geo, where a toponym also has a non-geographic meaning.