Hello, my name is Thomas Fischer and I am a researcher and teacher at the University in Skövde (Högskolan i Skövde).
In the past months, I have worked on a project that makes use of OpenStreetMap data to geolocate/georeference text phases as found in news paper articles or police reports. For example, if a news report is about a traffic accident on E20 near Vårgårda, the software's task is to identify the place were E20 passes closest to the city of Vårgårda. Similarly, if the report talks about Skolgatan, the software shall identify the right instance of a road of this name if the report names the municipality in the same input text. The software is designed specifically for Sweden (hierarchy of road names and administrative structures) and the Swedish language (stop words, for blacklisting certain terms, converting plural forms into singular, ...). A demonstrator of the resulting software is available at http://fish.research.nsa.his.se:9876/ The demonstrator's source code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/thomasfischer-his/pbflookup In my experience, the software is working already quite well. There are two main limitations: - Missing, inconsistent, or erroneous information in the underlying map data from OpenStreetMap (unfortunately) - Lack of a deeper textual analysis: Words are extracted as is from the input text, so the word 'vara' (to be) and the city of Vara are indistinguishable. The software is written in C++, but care has been taken for code quality by using static code checkers and tools like Coverity Scan or Valgrind. The project to develop this softwas was co-financed by Internetstiftelsen I am contacting this mailing list for two reasons. First, I would like to get some feedback such as error reports or ideas for extensions. Second, I would like to pursue this project further, so I am looking for cooperation partners that can (financially) support the project. Examples for cooperation partners can be app developers that want to make use of the JSON/XML interface, news agencies or newspapers that want to add the service of matching their articles to a map location, or governmental, regional, or municipal agencies that want to geolocate their own or citizens' reports (think of 112 calls or citizens reporting broken street lights). So, if you have an existing contact at an organization that may be interested, please forward this mail. If you personally interested in a cooperation, you can contact me directly, of course. Greetings from Skövde, Sweden, Thomas Fischer https://www.his.se/fish
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