Das Projekt "Improving Access to Unstructured Text through 'Folk-centred' Approaches (FolkOnt2)" wird/wurde gefördert durch: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung. Es wird/wurde ausgeführt durch: Universität Zürich, Geographisches Institut.In this proposal we request a modest 6 month extension of SNF project FolkOnt (No. 200021-126659), a three year project which commenced on 01.04.2010. This extension will be used to consolidate existing results and take advantage of a new dataset which has emerged as an excellent testbed for our methods during the first 2.5 years of the project. The FolkOnt and FolkOnt II project are based in the domains of Geographic Information Re-trieval (GIR) and, in particular the use of methods from GIR to explore landscape characterisation. Thus, our research also contributes to understandings of how landscape descriptions vary in both space and time, and at a broader level seeks to develop methods which improve access to unstructured data for both expert and lay users. The overall aim of FolkOnt and FolkOnt II can be stated as follows: 'How can the vagueness and ambiguity present in unstructured descriptions of natural landscapes, and particularly protected areas, be captured such that geographic and conceptual queries are effectively resolved for both expert and lay communities?' To date, the project has developed methods which allow us to distinguish between and disambiguate fine granularity toponyms referring to natural features, and link corpora of natural language descriptions to space. We have therefore been able to explore how natural landscape descriptions have varied in space and time in a Swiss corpus. Work has been presented at number of conferences including the American Association of Geographers (2011), Geocomputation (2011), Swiss GeoScience Meeting (2011), AGILE 2012, Congress of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics (2012) and GIScience 2012. Furthermore, a journal paper, based on a related Masters thesis has been published, and another is currently in revision. Work in the project extension will focus on two issues. Firstly, we will develop methods to explicitly link the folksonomic representation of landscape terms thus far extracted from our text corpus with geographic data describing landscape variation in Switzerland (for example Corine and Arealstatistik). Secondly, we will complete development of a system showcasing both how the methods in FolkOnt can be used to retrieve information spatially and thematically, and how such information can be used to characterise geographic regions. The project will be hosted in the Geocomputation Group at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich, but will continue to take the form of collaborative research with the Data Centre Nature and Landscape (DNL) of Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.