In geographic information systems, toponym resolution is the relationship process between a toponym, i.e. the mention of a place, and an unambiguous spatial footprint of the same place. The same geographic names have historically been used by emigrant settlers to denote their new homes, leading to referential ambiguity of place names. Sometimes, the original name gets modified (as in "York" vs. "New York"). In many cases, a name is reused without modification ("Boston" in England, UK vs. "Boston" in Massachusetts, USA). To map a set of place names or toponyms that occur in a document to their corresponding latitude/longitude coordinates, a polygon, or any other spatial footprint, a disambiguation step is necessary. A toponym resolution algorithm is an automatic method that performs a mappi