To install the Edinburgh Geoparser, download the software bundle from the LTG’s geoparser software page [https://wp.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/geoparser/] and unpack it in a suitable location (in your home directory, say). The directory structure produced will be as shown in the File layout Figure.
The visualisation components use Google Maps and the gazmap and gazmap-top scripts contain API keys obtained for the ed.ac.uk domain, held in the defkey variable. That kind of API key is no longer available from Google so, rather than suggest you insert your own key, we have left ours in place. If you do have a suitable API key (obtained before 2013) please insert it in these scripts in place of ours.
The geoparser runs on 64 bit linux and Macintosh platforms. The underlying LT-XML2 components are available in source code for local compilation, from the LTG software page [https://wp.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/] , but some required components are binary only.
The geoparser can reference a range of different gazetteers, hosted on the web, on Edina’s Unlock service [http://edina.ac.uk/unlock/] or locally. For the web-based and Unlock gazetteers (see -g gazetteer parameter) no additional software is needed.
It is possible that you will want to set up a local copy of a gazetteer and in this case you will obviously need to install and manage it. The pros and cons of using a local gazetteer are discussed in the Options for Local Gazetteers section and two examples - for which the geoparser is already configured - are described: Geonames [http://www.geonames.org/] and Pleiades [http://pleiades.stoa.org/]. Both of these examples use a locally managed MySQL database. If you plan to use the geonames-local or plplus-local options you will need to set up the gazetteers as described and edit the gazlookup-geonames-local and gazlookup-plplus-local scripts to contain the correct connection string for your MySQL database. This is also explained in the Options for Local Gazetteers section.
To test the pipeline, do this:
cd scripts
cat ../in/172172.txt | ./run -t plain -g unlock
This uses the option of plain text input and uses unlock as the gazetteer. The output xml file is sent to stdout.
Note that the order of the -t and -g options is immaterial. This applies to all the command line options.
To run and create visualisation files:
cat ../in/172172.txt | ./run -t plain -g unlock -o ../out 172172
Same as before except that -o takes two args, an output directory ../out and a prefix for the output file names 172172. The output directory must already exist. The results appear in the output directory (../out):
../out/172172.display.html ../out/172172.geotagged.html
../out/172172.events.xml ../out/172172.out.xml
../out/172172.gaz.xml ../out/172172.nertagged.xml
../out/172172.gazlist.html ../out/172172.timeline.html
../out/172172.gazmap.html
The other files are ones used or the map and timeline display or ones which may be useful in their own right.
By default, all candidate placenames are shown in the display, with the top-ranked one in green and the rest in red. If the -top option is added to the command line then three extra display files will be created, which show only the top-ranked candidate for each place, not all the alternatives considered. For the example used above the extra files would be:
../out/172172.display-top.html ../out/172172.gazmap-top.html
../out/172172.gazlist-top.html
The options for -t type and -g gazetteer are:
-t plain (plain text)
ltgxml (xml file in a certain format with paragraphs marked up)
gb (Google Books html files)
-g unlock (Edina's Unlock service)
os (Just the OS part of Unlock)
naturalearth (Just the Natural Earth part of Unlock)
unlockgeonames (Just the GeoNames part of Unlock)
geonames (online world-wide gazetteer)
plplus (Pleiades+ gazetteer of ancient places, on Edina)
deep (DEEP gazetteer of historical placenames in England)
[ geonames-local (locally maintained copy on ed.ac.uk network) ]
[ plplus-local (locally maintained Pleiades+, with geonames lookup) ]
The last two gazetteer options will only be usable if local gazetteers are maintained; they are included in case useful. See Options for Local Gazetteers for how to make use of them.
If your input is xml with paragraphs already marked, it may be worth converting it to ltgxml format. See the example in/172172.xml for the format.
For Google Books input, which can be extremely untidy, pre-processing is done to ensure it doesn’t break the xml processes in the pipeline.
If you know the creation/writing date of the document you can supply this with -d docdate:
cat ../in/172172.txt | ./run -t plain -g unlock -d 2010-08-13
cat ../in/172172.txt | ./run -t plain -g unlock -o ../out 172172 -d 2010-08-13
This will be used in event and relation detection and timeline display.
If you know that toponyms in your text are likely to be in a particular geographical area you can specify a bounding circle -l locality or a rectangular -lb locality box. The geoparser will prefer places in the area specified but will still choose locations outside it if other factors give them higher weighting.
To specify a circular locality:
-l lat long radius score
where
To specify a locality box:
-lb W N E S score
where
For DEEP [2] a new -c county option has been added. This allows the user to specify the county that the document is about in order to only consider DEEP gaz entries for that county. Multiple uses of -c allow several counties to be specified. For example:
cat <infile> | ./run -t plain -g deep -c Oxfordshire -c Wiltshire
The values for -c are the county names in the DEEP gazetteer:
Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, Durham, East Riding of Yorkshire, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, North Riding of Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Surrey, Sussex, The Isle of Ely, Warwickshire, West Riding of Yorkshire, Westmorland, Wiltshire, Worcestershire.
Note that county names with white space need to be enclosed in double quotes:
cat <infile> | ./run -t plain -g deep -c Oxfordshire -c Wiltshire -c
"North Riding of Yorkshire" -c "East Riding of Yorkshire" -c "West
Riding of Yorkshire"
A new -r begindate enddate option is also available for DEEP to restrict the choice of DEEP gazetteer records which have attestation dates within the date range:
cat ../in/essexff.txt | ./run -t plain -g deep -c Essex -r 1000 1400
Footnotes
| [1] | The timeline display has been tested in various browsers and works without problems in Firefox and Safari on linux and Mac platforms. With Chrome, the “allow-file-access-from-files” option is required (on the command line when Chrome is started). |
| [2] | DEEP, Digital Exposure of English Placenames [http://englishplacenames.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/], was a JISC-funded project to digitise and make available the 86 volumes of the Survey of English Place-Names. See placenames.org.uk [http://placenames.org.uk] for the source material it worked with, which covers the evolution of placenames in England. The 86-volume county by county survey details over four million variant forms, from classical sources, through the Anglo-Saxon period and into medieval England and beyond to the modern period. |