Phrases that reference locations relatively to a place name or pseudo place name can also be ambiguous or imprecise. For instance, the phrase “200 kilometers south of the capitol of Russia” certainly denotes a geographic location. However, appearing in a text, the distance 200 kilometers might be an approximation suitable only in the contexts it was used. In a small scale environment where the topic of the text is giving an overview over Russian cities the approximation might be feasible, whereas using this reference as a basis for a footprint in a larger scale environment might give an error of certainly up to 20-30 kilometers. Also, the direction given might be erroneous.
Often, people are imprecise in giving geographic direction, using one of the four general directions north, south, east or west, when the actual direction might be somewhere in between. Again, in small scale environments this imprecision might be not be important, where as in a larger scale environment the error in the footprint created on the basis of this phrase might lead to a loss of important information in a search context. The given phrase is also ambiguous because of the reference to the capitol of Russia. The capitol of Russia has been placed in todays Moskow and in todays St.Petersburg, so the footprint associated with “the capitol of Russia” is dependent of the time-frame of the text the phrase appears in.