Challenges of Georeferencing Places: Development of Digital Gazetteers

Linda L. Hill

Alexandria Digital Library
University of California
Santa Barbara, California

Email: lhill@alexandria.ucsb.edu


Gazetteers are fundamentally dictionaries of named geographic places/features; each name entry in a gazetteer is defined by at least one spatial representation and by at least one type (category). Gazetteers can be free-standing or they can be services providing gazetteer access to other sources of geospatial data (e.g., GIS data). Place name access to georeferenced data and information of all sorts (indirect geographic referencing) is a powerful unifying strategy for distributed georeferenced systems. Challenges of broad use of gazetteers in georeferenced systems include shareable data formats, query and response service protocols, efficient text and spatial queries, and complete descriptions of the data for appropriate use (e.g., authenticity, accuracy, temporal attributes). Graphic responses to questions such as "Where is the Mississippi River?" should be answerable from a set of gazetteer and GIS services. We should be able to discover images, text, maps, data, etc. about the Mississippi River Valley area through the use of the place name (indirect georeferencing). The gazetteer role is to translate names to spatial representations so that information is discovered by spatial footprint as well as by names. The Alexandria Digital Library has done extensive work on gazetteer development, including leading an NSF-sponsored workshop on Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange (DGIE). See www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer for further information. In this presentation, it is proposed that geographic names can provide a key to interoperability among various representations of spatial objects.