A method of spatio-temporally integrating shop/office information including names and locations is developed and applied to whole Japan. A typical example of such shop/office information is a telephone directory. If we can integrate these data of different years spatio-temporally, i.e. identify whether a shop/office at a specific location in a specific year is identical or not with a shop/office in the different years at the same location, we can map the changes and continuation of shops/offices in an entire city or region. The spatio-temporal integration method includes; 1) a geo-coding method at the floor level of a building, 2) a method of identifying shop/office names considering geographic names that appears very frequently at a specific local area. The method is validated in several study areas and finally applied to entire Japan.
