Acquisition of Landmark Knowledge from Spatial Description

Maps and spatial descriptions are two different styles in expressing geographical information. Each style has its own merits and demerits. When information is given in one style, it is sometimes required to convert it to the other style. A vast amount of spatial descriptions are available electronically, especially on the World Wide Web. If geographical knowledge extracted from spatial descriptions were supplemented into maps, their usefulness will be increased. We have developed a system of extracting geographical information, especially those concerning landmarks, out of spatial descriptions on the Web and converting into map expression.