A spatio-temporal data model for administrative division place name: a case study of Xiamen

摘要

Place names are the signs of geographic entities, and the database of which is an increasingly important form of geographic information. So the construction and the application of digital gazetteers are growing research areas. So far, significant progress has been made in the development of digital gazetteers, but there are still vital issues that require further work: (1)Places and the associated facts change over time, few gazetteer services model temporal ranges for the data; (2)Current gazetteers do not normally hold historical information; (3)The relationships between place name entries in the gazetteers are few concerned in the existing digital gazetteers; (4)Geographic footprints currently used in gazetteers are usually confined to simple representations. In this paper, we proposed a spatio-temporal data model for administrative division place name, which is in a significant and large proportion of place names. We take Xiamen city, located in southeast of China, Fujian province, as a case to describe our model. The model takes spatio-temporal changes and the relationships between entries in gazetteers into account. In addition, the footprint involved in our model is multiscale patch adapted to hierarchical administrative system. Therefore, ours is preferable to previous simple representations when digitizing gazetteers.