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In conventional spell checkers, words are validated against one or several lists of correctly
spelled words called dictionaries. If a word is in a dictionary,
it is deemed correctly spelled. Otherwise, it is not. If the latter case,
conventional spell checkers typically offer users a number of closely matching, but
correctly spelled, words.
Spell checking maps follows a similar process but is more challenging for a few reasons:
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Many of the words on maps are geographic names. Alphabetic dictionaries,
such as those used in word processors, may contain the spelling of some major geographic
features such as countries, state capitals but are unlikely going to
contain local geographic names, and for a good reason. Many of those
spellings are only valid at certain locations.
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Some words are unlikely found in maps. Even though they exist and
are correctly spelled, they are likely misspellings for other words. For example, sight for site,
pubic for public, bed for bad, stuff for staff.
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GIS Maps, through their underlying databases, can contain
enormous amounts of text.
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