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<Paper uid="W03-0111">
  <Title>Defining and identifying the roles of geographic references within text: Examples from the Great Britain Historical GIS project</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="1839" end_page="1839" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper is an initial discussion of a large topic, mainly concerned with practical examples and problems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Although the descriptive gazetteers and travellers' accounts are very different kinds of material, the second far less structured than the first, in both cases analysis requires not simply the identification of place-names but an identification of their roles.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> With the gazetteer entries, identifying the actual subject of each entry is trivial, as it always appears at the very beginnings of each entry. However, to discover the geographical location of each entry we need to extract additional 'containing' place-names.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This is also relatively straightforward provided these names appear in our existing ontology/gazetteer. This is well illustrated by one of the few mistakes made by the existing parsers: the following entry is placed in Dorset, a mainland county, because the Channel Islands did not appear in the gazetteer: * Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, about 7 miles from the coast of Normandy and 50.miles SE. from Portland Bill, Dorset; separated from Cape La Hague in France by the Race of Alderney.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Roles in the travellers' tales are clearly more diverse, and harder to define, but some notion of subjects, containers and relatives still seems appropriate, along with the rarer but more interesting metaphors. Work is clearly needed to extend and possibly to substantially change current mark-up systems to capture such information.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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