We finally managed to write down our vision for the next generation of gazetteers, the work that has already been done in this area, and point to the missing pieces to make this vision come true. attached is a link to our draft, I will replace it if the paper gets accepted (update: the paper has been accepted, see below).

Abstract: Gazetteers are key components of georeferenced information systems, including  applications such as Web-based mapping services. Existing gazetteers lack the capabilities to fully integrate user-contributed and vernacular geographic information, as well as to support complex queries. To address these issues, a next generation gazetteer should leverage formal semantics, harvesting of implicit geographic information — such as geotagged photos — as well as models of trust for contributors. In this paper, we discuss these requirements in detail. We elucidate how existing standards can be integrated to realize a gazetteer infrastructure allowing for bottom-up contribution as well as information exchange between different gazetteers. We show how to ensure the quality of user-contributed information and demonstrate how to improve querying and navigation using semantics-based information retrieval.

Kessler, C., Janowicz, K., and Bishr, M. (2009; forthcoming): An Agenda For The Next Generation Gazetteer: Geographic Information Contribution and Retrieval. In International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2009 (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2009)