Merging Local and Global Gazetteers

Most gazetteers with a local scope contain few local names, and gazetteers with a local scope mostly do not contain foreign names. However, people often use both local and foreign place names in a discourse. We describe some of the challenges in mapping local and global gazetteers that serve different needs and hence may have different structure, granularity and coverage. We pay special attention to the problem of identifying duplicate place descriptions in such registries.