Databases and Information Systems

Temporal Streets across the World - dateRome

The goal of this project is to automatically extract and explain street names with date references across the world.

For instance, the "Straße des 17. Juni" in Berlin commemorates the uprising of the East Berliner workers on 17 June 1953, when the Red Army and GDR Volkspolizei shot protesting workers (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stra%C3%9Fe_des_17._Juni).

Street names reveal a lot about a country's identity. We performed the, to the best of our knowledge, first automatic, world-scale analysis of street names -- focussing on street names with date mentions. Such streets are frequently used to commemorate important events. For this, we use the multilingual tagger HeidelTime to process all street names of all countries of the world with respective language settings. Then, we performed in-depth studies on the geographic and temporal distributions of such streets around the world. Finally, we exploited Wikipedia to automatically harvest explanations why a street in a particular region refers to a particular date.

More details can be found in our 2017 WWW poster paper and in our 2018 JCDL full paper:

  • Rosita Andrade, Jannik Strötgen:
    All Dates Lead to Rome: Extracting and Explaining Temporal References in Street Names.
    WWW'17, Perth, Australia, April 3-7, 2017. [pdf]
  • Jannik Strötgen, Rosita Andrade, and Dhruv Gupta:
    Putting Dates on the Map: Harvesting and Analyzing Street Names with Date Mentions and their Explanations.
    JCDL'18, Fort Worth, TX, USA, June 3-7, 2018. [pdf available soon]

The online demo of date-Rome - a system to explore street names with date references and their explanations - can be found here.

Data Sets (complementary data sets for JCDL'18 paper)

Our analysis of temporal streets resulted in the following data sets: