Place names occurring in texts can be misleading, ambiguous and/or imprecise. Firstly, several places can share the same name, making the place names unique only within a limited geographic area. There are for instance 26 places in Norway sharing the place name Lade. Secondly, some place names occurring in texts are temporal or cultural conventions rather than official names, requiring the reader to have an understanding of the time, context or cultural environment the place names are used in to be able to link it to some geographic location. For instance, during a military campaign commanders often map a battlefield into areas, naming each area according to some schema other than their official place names. Thirdly, some place names change over time. For instance, the Norwegian capitol Oslo was once named Christiania. Fourthly, the geographic extension that the place name denotes can be extended, reduced or changed over time. For instance, the geographic extension of countries may change during/after wars and the extent of a city may change according to population growth or decrease. Fifthly, the borders of a location can be fuzzy. For instance, Norway and Russia do not agree on the border between the two countries in the Barent Sea. And finally, some place names and spatial designators denote a state of mind or associations linked to an area rather than an actual defined location or area as for instance “southern California” or the Norwegian “syden”. In addition, the same place name can be written differently in different text, either because the author has misspelled the name or because there are different legal spellings of the same place name. Some of these spelling variations can be official variants of the same name within a language or variations between languages.