Introduction to digital gazetteer research

Digital gazetteers provide information on named features, linking the feature's name with its location and its type. They have been growing in importance recently as the basis of a range of services, including way-finding, georeferencing, and intelligence. This introduction to the following collection of five research papers expands on contemporary applications of digital gazetteers, explores the issues associated with each of the three types of information, and defines three broad areas of research: the components of gazetteers; the process by which places are named and evolve; and the issues of interoperability between digital gazetteers. Each area is represented by at least one paper in the collection. Digital gazetteers increasingly form the interface between the informal discourse of humans and the formal world of geographic information science.