Gazetteers

Placenames

Placenames—also known as toponyms—are our primary way of referring to places, and a great variety of placenames exist. Some of them are authoritative and recognized as the form of the name for a place by various toponymic authorities. Others are local in nature, so-called variant or colloquial names. One place can be known by a number of names, and, conversely, the same name can refer to a number of different places. Usually, the context in which the name is used facilitates understanding of which place is meant; and some names are associated with a well-known place unless otherwise modified. Thus, “Paris” will be assumed by most people to mean “Paris, France,” unless it is made clear that “Paris, Texas,” is meant instead. A name like “Springfield,” on the other hand, is used so widely that it is almost always modified to something like “Springfield, Illinois.” In DGs, the toponym itself in its unmodified form is the name. The administrative hierarchy of the place can be and often is documented as well through relationships such as “Springfield is part of Illinois.” Historical changes in placenames and names in different languages also contribute to the complexity of placename documentation.

Feature Types

A sense of the type or category of a place is always present if not openly stated when we refer to geographic features. Paris is assumed to be a city, though [Page 160]some may call it “a populated place.” If we talk or ask about cities in France, we mean a category of places that includes Paris. “Arkansas,” however, could be the name of the state or the river, so this distinction is made clear through naming (“State of Arkansas” and “Arkansas River”) and, in gazetteers, through the assignment of types (i.e., classes) from a scheme of feature types. Use of a formal feature-typing scheme ensures uniformity of categorization for any group of gazetteer entries, and when that scheme contains hierarchical categories, as in a thesaurus, it provides nested categories and therefore levels of categorical specificity. There is no universally accepted scheme of feature typing. Instead, there are many local and application-oriented schemes, which complicate the interoperability of gazetteer data. Historical changes also affect the types of places. For example, a building at one point in time could be used as a church and later as a school; in this case, the feature is the same (i.e., a building at a certain location), but its function and thus its type have changed. A building could also be used for multiple functions simultaneously and thus have multiple concurrent types assigned to it.

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