A web platform for the evaluation of vernacular place names in automatically constructed gazetteers

Vernacular place names pose a research challenge in geographic information retrieval. There is a long standing demand from investigators for a reference collection to train their methods and evaluate their models and data. However no large collection of informal place names associated with type and footprint data is currently available to the GIR community. The present contribution discusses the implementation of a web platform to collect such an evaluation data set. Design considerations of the user interface are addressed and we present first results of a nationwide attempt to collect the vernacular place names of Great Britain. Our result will aid further research in automatic gazetteer construction, considering vernacular place names