Future Directions for Geolibraries

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Future Directions for Geolibraries

• Michael F. Goodchild
• University of California
• Santa Barbara

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Geolibrary

• A library that is searchable by geographic
  location
• "What have you got about there?"
• impossible in the physical library
• space is continuous and multidimensional
• enabled in the digital world

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From the UCSB Map and Imagery Laboratory to the
Alexandria Digital Library

• NSF funding 1994-2004
• Universal access
• www.alexandria.ucsb.edu
• Searchable catalog
• a subset of FGDC
• MARC compliant
• approaching 3 million records
• Downloadable objects
• Map, coordinate, and gazetteer interfaces

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1994-1999

• Proliferation of warehouses, geospatial data
  libraries, clearinghouses
• user interfaces, catalogs
• How to know where to look?
• the knowledge of the SAP
• by data type
• DOQs, DEMs, DLGs, DRGs
• by regional emphasis
• by thematic emphasis
• the collection-level metadata problem
• How to achieve interoperability?

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CLM of the Alexandria Digital Library
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http//www.thesalmons.org/lynn/wh-greenwich.html
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Geoportals 2000-2005

• A single point of access
• Geography Network
• Geospatial One-Stop
• Offering both data and services
• "Live data"
• using OGC standards
• Providers "publish" to the site
• Automated metadata harvesting
• from collaborating sites
• GOS at 76,000 data sets in 1/05

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GOS coverage, 1/05
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There Will Always Be More Than One Shop

• Competition
• between agencies, levels of government, public
  and private sectors
• Segmentation
• not all providers of geospatial information are
  content to be part of a single whole
• Disciplines
• not all disciplines see the geospatial content of
  data sets as their primary characteristic
• Jurisdictions
• GOS is national

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CLM revisited

• Regional partitions
• a data set is most likely to be found on a server
  located within the region
• Thematic partitions
• Data type and format partitions
• Level-of-government partitions
• a data set is most likely to be found on a server
  maintained by an agency whose footprint most
  closely matches that of the data set

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Functions

• The library model
• search and retrieval of information objects
• legacy granularity
• OGC standards support subset but not superset
• gatekeeper
• Towards an information model
• answers to queries
• independent of the source
• which is the world's highest capital city?

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Geolibraries as GIS

• Focus on queries rather than data acquisition
• Fully functional servers
• Accurately georeferenced

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The future of geolibraries

• Mixed models
• libraries serving information objects
• information sources responding to queries
• The CLM problem
• SAPs have an assured future
• Multiple sources will not agree
• conflation
• "A person with one watch always knows what time
  it is a person with two is always uncertain"