[OHM] Mapping Information Wealth and Poverty: The Geography of Gazetteers

[todd.d.robbins at gmail.com]

I just came across this paper and thought it was relevant to our work and
OSM as well:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2587746

*Abstract:*

Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic placenames that have important
> implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By
> containing ‘definitive’ lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological
> power to define what will and won’t be geocoded and represented in
> databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings
> of place.
> This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world’s largest
> freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in
> GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are
> dense clusters of placenames in some parts of the world and a relative
> absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related to not
> just the wealth and population-size of a country, but also its policies on
> internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific
> implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in
> gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making.


-- 
Tod Robbins
Digital Asset Manager, MLIS
todrobbins.com | @todrobbins <http://www.twitter.com/#!/todrobbins>
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