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AGILE 2015 pp 35–52Cite as

Central Places in Wikipedia

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

Central Place Theory explains the number and locations of cities, towns, and villages based on principles of market areas, transportation, and socio-political interactions between settlements. It assumes a hexagonal segmentation of space, where every central place is surrounded by six lower-order settlements in its range, to which it caters its goods and services. In reality, this ideal hexagonal model is often skewed based on varying population densities, locations of natural features and resources, and other factors. In this paper, we propose an approach that extracts the structure around a central place and its range from the link structure on the Web. Using a corpus of georeferenced documents from the English language edition of Wikipedia, we combine weighted links between places and semantic annotations to compute the convex hull of a central place, marking its range. We compare the results obtained to the structures predicted by Central Place Theory, demonstrating that the Web and its hyperlink structure can indeed be used to infer spatial structures in the real world. We demonstrate our approach for the four largest metropolitan areas in the United States, namely New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The title of the current paper alludes to the title of the original publication introducing Central Place Theory by Christaller (1933), translated by Baskin (1966): Central Places in Southern Germany.

  2. 2.

    http://www.geonames.org.

  3. 3.

    http://en.wikipedia.org.

  4. 4.

    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API.

  5. 5.

    http://dbpedia.org/sparql.

  6. 6.

    http://mongodb.org.

  7. 7.

    The distance has been calculated as great circle distance assuming a spherical Earth. The errors introduced by this simplification should be negligible in the context of this study.

  8. 8.

    While the choice of the number of bins is arbitrary, comparable results have been obtained with different bin sizes.

  9. 9.

    See http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Settlement.

  10. 10.

    http://stamen.com.

  11. 11.

    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.

  12. 12.

    http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright.

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Acknowledgments

The base maps used in Figs. 6, 7, and 8 have been provided by Stamen DesignFootnote 10 under a Creative Commons License.Footnote 11 The maps are based on OpenStreetMap data, provided under the Open Database License.Footnote 12

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information and Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, USA

    Carsten Keßler

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  1. Carsten Keßler
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Correspondence to Carsten Keßler .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NOVA IMS, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Fernando Bacao

  2. School of Engineering, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal

    Maribel Yasmina Santos

  3. NOVA IMS, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Marco Painho

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Keßler, C. (2015). Central Places in Wikipedia. In: Bacao, F., Santos, M., Painho, M. (eds) AGILE 2015. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16787-9_3

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