MapSpeller™ Locationaries











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Locationaries™: Maps of Correctly Spelled Words

The term Locationary™ is trademarked; locationaries are copyrighted and the use of locationaries is patented. The term itself is made up from "location" and "dictionary".

Locationaries™ are spatially smart dictionaries; they are "maps" of correctly spelled words; maps of dictionary words.

Conventional dictionaries are not well suited for spell checking location-bound words because of their inability to segregate words spatially, geographically. Location-bound words refer to real-world entities (such as names of places, streets) or any word that has a defined geographic extent of validity^*.

Locationaries keep track of correctly spelled words and the (minimum) geographic locations within which they are considered correctly spelled.

Through the MapSpeller™ Options dialog, users can decide to use personal Locationaries or not. They can also determine what spatial relationship the words being spell checked should have with Locationary words:

The current visible extent: With this option selected, the MapSpeller spell-checker will consider all Locationary features within the currently visible map extent as dictionary words. This is the default option.
A buffer around the word to spell check. When this option is selected, the MapSpeller spell-checker considers only Locationary features that are at least partially within a user-specified distance of the word being spell checked. This is the most precise method, but also the slowest as Locationary features must be selected geographically for each word to spell check.

From the MapSpeller Potential Typos dialog, users can add new Locationary words in two ways to their personal Locationaries by right-clicking and :

Clicking on the Add To Locationary command
Opening the Edit Typo dialog.

In such cases, each word's Locationary polygon would correspond to the Potential Typos':

Flash rectangle, when the typo is an annotation graphic
Polygonal boundary, when the typo is within a polygonal feature
Envelope, when the typo is a linear feature
One-meter buffer, when the typo is a point feature.

Important Notes

Locationaries As Layout Dictionaries

Additional Benefits

The "buffer/radius Locationary" option has two additional benefits:

It would be able to detect geographic names that would be farther from the feature they represent than a specified acceptable distance (the radius).

Should the radius distance be small, this option would also enable the MapSpeller spell-checker to detect features whose "labels" have been switched.

Any Word Could Be a Location-Bound Word...

^* Words that don't represent any real-world entities may also be location-bound. For example, the spelling of "color" could be considered correctly spelled when placed over the U.S.A. on a map while the spelling of "colour" would be considered correct when placed on a map anywhere else in the world, but not over the U.S.A. In such case, it would be considered a location-bound word even though it doesn't represent any real-world entity.

Locationaries can also multilingual.

Jump Starting a Locationary

Users new to MapSpeller may find out that many of the proper words listed in the Potential Typos dialog, such as road or place names, have correct spellings. To avoid seeing those words in, and having to manually add them to their user Locationary from, the Potential Typos dialog, users can create and plug in their own user Locationary into MapSpeller.

Additional Information

In technical ArcGIS terms, Locationaries can be thought of as a new type of feature classes, they are MapSpeller feature classes. They are "feature classes" of dictionary words. Currently, personal Locationaries are implemented as polygon shapefiles where each word (or combination of words) is represented by a polygon whose geographic extent represents the minimum area of validity of the word's spelling. The spelling itself is stored in the Locationary's attribute table. Other formats are expected in the future.

Locationaries are different from GIS feature classes, among others, by the meaning of a feature, by the fact that features don't have to represent real-word objects*; by the fact that they are not built thematically (roads versus towns, etc.). In keeping with the analogy to GIS feature classes, the theme of Locationaries would be that features represent dictionary words and their minimum area of spelling validity (regardless of what the words represent or mean). Locationaries can be made language dependent or not by end users.

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