I just came across this paper and thought it was relevant to our work and OSM as well:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2587746 *Abstract:* Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic placenames that have important > implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By > containing ‘definitive’ lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological > power to define what will and won’t be geocoded and represented in > databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings > of place. > This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world’s largest > freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in > GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are > dense clusters of placenames in some parts of the world and a relative > absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related to not > just the wealth and population-size of a country, but also its policies on > internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific > implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in > gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making. -- Tod Robbins Digital Asset Manager, MLIS todrobbins.com | @todrobbins <http://www.twitter.com/#!/todrobbins>
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