6. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the authors have presented the results of a design research project aimed at easing the search
facilities for geographical names (toponyms) in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for standalone or
Web based services. It has been shown, how a GIS component based on a multilingual toponymic ontology,
using specific name matching algorithms and KML and GML can be designed to lead to improved search
results and geographic visualization within and across cultural boundaries, for example in different writing
systems.