In geographic information systems, toponym resolution is the relationship process between a toponym, i.e. the mention of a place, and an unambiguous spatial footprint of the same place.

The places mentioned in digitized text collections constitute a rich data source for researchers in many disciplines. However, toponyms in language use are ambiguous, and difficult to assign a definite real-world referent. Over time, established geographic names may change (as in "Byzantium" > "Constantinople" > "Istanbul"); or they may be reused verbatim ("Boston" in England, UK vs. "Boston" in Massachusetts, USA), or with modifications (as in "York" vs. "New York"). To map a set of place names or toponyms that occur in a document to their corresponding latitude/longitude coordinates, a polygon, or any other spatial footprint, a disambiguation step is necessary. A toponym resolution algorithm is an automatic method that performs a mapping from a toponym to a spatial footprint.

Some methods for toponym resolution employ a gazetteer of possible mappings between names and spatial footprints.

The "unambiguous spatial footprint of the same place" of definition can be in fact unambiguous, or "not so unambiguous". There are some different contexts of uncertainty where the resolution process can occur:

The toponym resolution sometimes is a simple conversion from name to abbreviation, in special when the abbreviation is used as standard geocode. For example, converting the official country name Afghanistan into an ISO country code, AF.

In annotating media and metadata, the conversion using a map and the geographical evidence (e.g. GPS), is the most usual approach to obtain toponym, or a geocode that represents the toponym.

In contrast to geocoding of postal addresses, which are typically stored in structured database records, toponym resolution is typically applied to large unstructured text document collections to associate the locations mentioned in them with maps. If some of those text documents are geotagged --- e.g. because they are micro-blog posts with latitude and longitude automatically added --- they can be used to infer the varying geographical specificity of arbitrary terms, e.g. "cable car" or "high tide" .

The process of annotating media (e.g., image, text, video) using spatial footprints is known as Geotagging. In order to automatically geotag a text document, the following steps are usually undertaken: toponym recognition (i.e., spotting textual references to geographic locations) and toponym resolution (i.e., selecting an appropriate location interpretation for each geographic reference).