A Method of Georeferencing Linear Locality Descriptions

Objective Massive spatial data are currently stored with textual locality descriptions but not geograph-ic coordinates.In geographic information systems,the lack of geographic coordinates makes these datadifficult to query and analyze.Georeferencing of textual locality descriptions makes these data morevaluable by allowing them to be used in spatial analyses.Existing methods do not analyze spatial con-straints between reference points in linear locality descriptions.This paper proposes a new method forgeoreferencing linear locality descriptions.On the basis of traditional method,local extent directionwas employed to compute a probability distribution of linear locality at each reference point.Moreo-ver,fuzzy visibility concept was introduced to compute vague distributions of linear locality amongreference points.Experimental results show that the proposed method is useful for georeferencing lin-ear locality descriptions.