The Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International has had several projects that have made heavy use of the Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer. All of these involve the application of deductive inference to coordinate multiple information sources. In each case, geographical inference was an important component and the ADL Gazetteer was one of the most frequently invoked sources. Other sources included the CIA World Factbook, the DAML Semantic Web, satellite imagery, and selected English text. <http://www.ai.sri.com/project/ComposeMultipleSources>

In the NASA-funded project, Deductive Composition of Multiple Data Sources, deductive inference was used to answer questions posed in English by an Earth Systems Science researcher. In the ARDA-supported Aquaint: From Question Answering to Information-Seeking Dialogs, similar methods were used to answer questions from an intelligence analyst. In the DARPA project Knowledge-Creation Tools for DAML, an English-language front end was provided for the Semantic Web.

The ADL Gazetteer was used to find bounding boxes and lat/long pairs for named places, for confirming that a place was within a specified administrative boundary, for recognizing variant names for a given place, and for locating places of a specified geographical type within a given bounding box. Furthermore, the taxonomy of geographical feature types that the Gazetteer provides was incorporated into the formal axiomatic geospatial theory that was used as the basis for geographical reasoning.

This work is described in the following publications:

1. Deductive Question Answering from Multiple Resources (2003), by Waldinger, R., Appelt, D. E., Fry, J., Israel, D. J., Jarvis, P., Martin, D., Riehemann, S., Stickel, M. E. , Tyson, M., Hobbs, J., and Dungan, J. L. In New Directions in Question Answering, edited by: Mark Maybury. Published by AAAI, Menlo Park, CA http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/full.php?id=986

2. Pointing to Places in a Deductive Geospatial Theory (2003), by Waldinger, R., Jarvis, P., and Dungan, J. In NAACL Workshop on Analysis of Geographical References; Human Language Technology Conference, Edmonton, Canada, May-Jun 2003, pp. 10–17. http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/full.php?id=956

3. Using Deduction to Choreograph Multiple Data Sources, by Waldinger, R. , Jarvis, P., and Dungan, J. In Semantic Web Technologies for Searching and Retrieving, 2nd International Semantic Web Conference
Oct 2003, Sanibel Island, Florida, Oct 2003. http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/full.php?id=993

4. Program Synthesis for Multi-Agent Question Answering, by Waldinger, R., Jarvis, P., and Dungan, J. In International Symposium on Verification (Theory and Practice), Taormina, Sicily, Italy
July 2003.; Festschrift celebrating Zohar Manna’s 64th Birthday, edited by: N. Dershowitz. Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/full.php?id=973

5. Deductive Coordination of Multiple Geospatial Knowledge Sources, by Waldinger, R., Reddy, M., Culy, C., Hobbs, J., and Dungan, J. In American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 4-10 2002.
http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/full.php?id=974

6. Deductive Response to Geographic Queries, by Waldinger, R., Reddy, M., Culy, C., Hobbs, J., and Dungan, J. In GIScience 2002, Boulder, CO, Sep 2002. http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/full.php?id=907

Richard Waldinger, waldinger@ai.sri.com, 2004/03/12