TAME II: A Modern Geographic Text Annotation Tool

Toponym resolution can be defined as the process of mapping each toponyms in a document or corpus unambiguously to an associated spatial footprint corresponding to the location intended by the writer of a document. Various toponym resolution methods have been proposed that use the latitude and longitude of the centroids as the spatial representation, but arguably large cities regions or countries are poorly represented by a single point. Two decades ago, Leidner presented TAME, the first geo-annotation tool described in the literature, but it (a) lacked extensibility (such as support for multiple users and multiple gazetteers), (b) it is not publicly available, and (c) it did not support polygon footprints. As a consequence, to date, in all annotated text collections, place names are associated exclusively using gazetteers with centroid geographic footprint representations. In this paper, we present TAME II, a more flexible system for creating labeled corpora for the training of and evaluation of toponym resolvers, which supports multiple kinds of geographic footprint types (polygons, centroids and bounding rectangles. It has been implemented as a modern Web-based application that is available for the public on the Web. To the best of our knowledge, TAME II is the first text annotation tool that supports gazetteers with polygon footprints, and the first Web-based tool generally available.