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According to gate.ac.uk a gazetteer is:

A gazetteer consists of a set of lists containing names of entities such as cities, organisations, days of the week, etc. These lists are used to find occurrences of these names in text, e.g. for the task of named entity recognition. The word ‘gazetteer’ is often used interchangeably for both the set of entity lists and for the processing resource that makes use of those lists to find occurrences of the names in text.

How is that different from an "ontology"?

Stanislav Kralin
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smatthewenglish
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1 Answers1

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An ontology (in a Semantic Web context) is a set of axioms in a formal language with a defined inference procedure; it allows to verify entailments.

A gazetteer, from what I can find online, has no inference procedure defined: given an assertion, it can only be considered to be entailed by the gazetteer if it is found explicitly expressed in it. So, a gazetteer represented in a formal language (RDF, RDFS, or OWL, for Semantic Web languages) would be equivalent to an ontology of minimal expressivity, where no new inferences can be drawn.

Ignazio
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