Traditional gazetteers do not explicitly encode spatial relationships between places/locations supporting spatial reasoning. Performing spatial relevance assessment on the footprints in the gazetteer is possible, but probably too inefficient for information retrieval purposes. [22] proposed an interesting approach to qualitative spatial reasoning in gazetteers. By combining polygon based representation of footprints with a neighborhood graph imposed on the set of geographic footprints, spatial
Place Name Location Feature Type and Other Descriptive Information relevance queries can be handled by traversing the neighborhood graph rather than accessing the polygons themselves, thereby saving computation on the server. This resembles more an ontology approach to spatial reasoning than a traditional map based approach.