Geo-tagging for imprecise regions of different sizes.

Extracting geographical information from various web sources is likely to be important for a variety of applications. One such use for this information is to enable the study of vernacular regions: informal places referred to on a day-to-day basis, but with no official entry in geographical resources, such as gazetteers. Past work in automatically extracting geographical information from the web to support the creation of vernacular regions has tended to focus on larger regions (e.g. “The British Midlands” and “The South of France”). In this paper we report the results of preliminary work to investigate the success of using a simple geotagging approach and resources of varying granularity from the Ordnance Survey to extract geographical information from web pages. We find that the data gathered for smaller regions (compared with larger ones) is more “fine-grained” which has an effect on the type of resource most useful for geo-tagging and its success.