Comparing Semantic Geographic Information of Toponyms through Landscape

Abstract

Toponyms are names assigned to particular geographic objects. They could contain a greater degree of semantic meanings, particularly those about landscape, compared to names of other objects. Various research has been conducted to investigate the relationship between toponyms and landscape, seeking the way that people perceived landscape characters to name geographic objects, in various regions and countries including Switzerland. However, only small subsets of toponyms in Switzerland were studied, via somewhat limited methods. In this research, I aimed to focus on more generic parts, which usually serve as the spatial classifiers in toponyms, of Swiss toponyms in German and Italian, to study and compare the landscape they denote. I first extracted nature-related generic parts (but not related to water areas or very tiny landforms) from gazetteer, together with studying their meanings via multiple sources. Then, I selected the generic parts that were found to be about convex landforms, and those about open areas as case studies for comparisons. Landscape, including topography and land cover, of related objects’ peripheral areas were investigated by first calculating histograms regarding elevations, slopes, and land cover types for each of them, then constructing bag of words using these histograms for each generic part. For each case study, all the bags of words were first aggregated, then partitioned using K-Means clustering, and patterns of each generic part were found according to their histograms’ distribution based on the clustering result. Cosine similarities were also calculated, and the clustering of each individual bag of words was also conducted to compare generic parts with their patterns together. The research found that some of the generic parts can represent different kinds of landscapes. What’s more, even though some generic parts were told to denote similar kinds of landscapes, they show different patterns in this research. Besides, cross-language comparisons were also conducted, via which I drew the conclusion that generic parts in different languages are not translatable. In all, this research uncovered the meanings of a larger set of generic parts in Swiss toponyms, which could potentially pave the way for further investigations about the processes by which people assigned names to geographic objects.