KIDGS: A geographical knowledge-informed digital gazetteer service

This paper describes the design and implementation of a geographical knowledge-informed digital gazetteer service, KIDGS. It is a standard web service that provides unified XML-based access interfaces for various applications. At present, many digital gazetteer systems are implemented directly based on relational databases. In other words, place name entries are managed by data tables. However, several components in geographical knowledge, such as category and relation information, should be explicitly represented to support various queries. In KIDGS, we adopt OWL and Protégé to model the conceptual level of knowledge, and use PostGIS to store place names. This article also introduces an application developed based on KIDGS.