Textual descriptions of pre-modern geography offer a different view of classical geography. The descriptions have been produced when none of the modern geographical concepts and tools were available. In this dissertation, we study pre-modern geography by primarily finding the existing structures of the descriptions and different cases of geographical data. We first explain four major
geographical cases in pre-modern Arabic sources: gazetteer, administrative hierarchies, routes, and toponyms associated with people. Focusing on hierarchical divisions and routes, we offer approaches for manual annotation of administrative hierarchies and route sections as well as a semi-automated toponyms annotation. The latter starts with a fuzzy search of toponyms from an authority list and applies two different extrapolation models to infer true or false values, based on the context, for disambiguating the automatically annotated toponyms. Having the annotated data, we introduce mathematical models to shape and visualize regions based on the description of administrative hierarchies. Moreover, we offer models for comparing
hierarchical divisions and route networks from different sources. We also suggest approaches to approximate geographical coordinates for places that do not have geographical coordinates - we call them unknown places - which is a major issue in visualization of pre-modern places on map.
The final chapter of the dissertation introduces the new version of al-Ṯurayyā, a gazetteer and a spatial model of the classical Islamic world using georeferenced data of a pre-modern atlas with more than 2, 000 toponyms and routes. It offers search, path finding, and flood network functionalities as well as visualizations of regions using one of the models that we describe for regions. However the gazetteer is designed using the classical Islamic world data, the spatial model and features can be used for similarly prepared datasets.:1 Introduction 1
2 Related Work 8
2.1 GIS 8
2.2 NLP, Georeferencing, Geoparsing, Annotation 10
2.3 Gazetteer 15
2.4 Modeling 17
3 Classical Geographical Cases 20
3.1 Gazetteer 21
3.2 Routes and Travelogues 22
3.3 Administrative Hierarchy 24
3.4 Geographical Aspects of Biographical Data 25
4 Annotation and Extraction 27
4.1 Annotation 29
4.1.1 Manual Annotation of Geographical Texts 29
4.1.1.1 Administrative Hierarchy 30
4.1.1.2 Routes and Travelogues 32
4.1.2 Semi-Automatic Toponym Annotation 34
4.1.2.1 The Annotation Process 35
4.1.2.2 Extrapolation Models 37
4.1.2.2.1 Frequency of Toponymic N-grams 37
4.1.2.2.2 Co-occurrence Frequencies 38
4.1.2.2.3 A Supervised ML Approach 40
4.1.2.3 Summary 45
4.2 Data Extraction and Structures 45
4.2.1 Administrative Hierarchy 45
4.2.2 Routes and Distances 49
5 Modeling Geographical Data 51
5.1 Mathematical Models for Administrative Hierarchies 52
5.1.1 Sample Data 53
5.1.2 Quadtree 56
5.1.3 Voronoi Diagram 58
5.1.4 Voronoi Clippings 62
5.1.4.1 Convex Hull 62
5.1.4.2 Concave Hull 63
5.1.5 Convex Hulls 65
5.1.6 Concave Hulls 67
5.1.7 Route Network 69
5.1.8 Summary of Models for Administrative Hierarchy 69
5.2 Comparison Models 71
5.2.1 Hierarchical Data 71
5.2.1.1 Test Data 73
5.2.2 Route Networks 76
5.2.2.1 Post-processing 81
5.2.2.2 Applications 82
5.3 Unknown Places 84
6 Al-Ṯurayyā 89
6.1 Introducing al-Ṯurayyā 90
6.2 Gazetteer 90
6.3 Spatial Model 91
6.3.1 Provinces and Administrative Divisions 93
6.3.2 Pathfinding and Itineraries 93
6.3.3 Flood Network 96
6.3.4 Path Alignment Tool 97
6.3.5 Data Structure 99
6.3.5.1 Places 100
6.3.5.2 Routes and Distances 100
7 Conclusions and Further Work 101
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:79249 |
| Date | 24 May 2022 |
| Creators | Seydi Gheranghiyeh, Masoumeh |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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