In this article we are going to see how to install a great opensource tool called CLAVIN (Cartographic Location And Vicinity INdexer) that can extract and parse geographic entities from an unstructured text. The installation will be done on Ubuntu 18.04.

Here is an example of what you can do: http://clavin.berico.us/clavin-web/

Here is the description of the tool coming from the official website:

CLAVIN does not simply “look up” location names – it uses intelligent heuristics to identify exactly which “Springfield” (for example) was intended by the author, based on the context of the document. CLAVIN also employs fuzzy search to handle incorrectly-spelled location names, and it recognizes alternative names (e.g., “Ivory Coast” and “Côte d’Ivoire”) as referring to the same geographic entity.


Prerequisites

Install Maven

Update your system to the latest stable version:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Install Java if necessary:

sudo apt-get install -y default-jdk

Verify it is correctly installed with:

java -version

Install Maven:

cd /opt/
sudo wget https://www-us.apache.org/dist/maven/maven-3/3.6.0/binaries/apache-maven-3.6.0-bin.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvzf apache-maven-3.6.0-bin.tar.gz
sudo mv apache-maven-3.6.0 maven

Set environment variables by adding the following lines in the /etc/profile.d/mavenenv.sh file:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java
export M2_HOME=/opt/maven
export PATH=${M2_HOME}/bin:${PATH}

Give the execution rights on the environment variable file:

sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/mavenenv.sh

Load the env file:

source /etc/profile.d/mavenenv.sh

Add this command at the end of your ~/.zshrc file:

source /etc/profile.d/mavenenv.sh

Verify it works with:

mvn --version

Install CLAVIN API

Clone the CLAVIN REST API repo:

git clone https://github.com/Berico-Technologies/CLAVIN-rest
cd CLAVIN-rest

Edit the pom.xml file and add the following lines inside the <properties> tag.

Build the jar executable:

mvn clean install

or $ mvn package

Download Geonames:

curl -O http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/allCountries.zip
unzip allCountries.zip

Download CLAVIN yaml configuration file:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Berico-Technologies/CLAVIN-rest/master/clavin-rest.yml

Create a CLAVIN dictionary or index of geographical names (also called gazetteer):

java -Xmx4096m -jar ./target/clavin-rest-0.3.0-SNAPSHOT.jar index clavin-rest.yml

Run the REST server:

java -Xmx2048m -jar clavin-rest.jar server clavin-rest.yml

The API will be available at: http://localhost:9090/api/v0/geotag