Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange

1
Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange

• NSF-sponsored DGIE workshop, October 1999, at the
  Smithsonian Institute (Hill Goodchild, co-PIs)
• 66 participants from academic, state and federal
  government, and commercial sectors international
  representation
• Presentations and final report have been
  published online at www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazett
  eer/dgie/DGIE_website/DGIE_homepage.htm
• On-going activity to develop gazetteer service
  query and response protocols through OpenGIS

2
DGIE Workshop Purpose

• Develop an understanding of the potential of
  indirect spatial referencing of information
  resources through geographic names
• Identify the research and policy issues
  associated with the development of digital
  gazetteer information exchange

3
Geographic Referencing

• Direct Geographic Referencing Systems
• Latitude and Longitude
• Grid referencing

• Indirect Geographic Referencing
• Santa Barbara
• Southern California
• 93106
• Camino Real Shopping Center
• 1404 Long Street
• Mississippi River
• Prepositional Referencing

4
Participants

• U.S.
• 24 Federal Govt
• 17 Academic
• 9 Corporate
• 5 State Govt
• 4 Non-profit
• Non-U.S.
• 4 Government
• 2 Academic
• 1 Corporate

• By Type
• 14 Biological / Environmental Applications
• 11 Geospatial Applications
• 10 Gazetteer Producers
• 9 Information Science Library Applications
• 8 Computer Science
• 7 Geography
• 3 Social Sciences
• 4 Other

5
Highlights from the DGIE Workshop

• Acknowledgement of the immediate opportunity and
  requirement to coordinate the building of
  shareable digital gazetteer data in the interest
  of digital earth applications
• The importance of the temporal aspects
  of
  gazetteer data
• The need for a gazetteer service protocol to
  support distributed gazetteer services

6
Summary of Workshop Outcomes

• Key everyday life tool - embedded in many
  applications - early education component
• Enable publishing of digital gazetteers -
  commercial, personal, group
• Access to gazetteer data embedded in other
  products (e.g., GIS datasets)
• Footprint representation
• Fuzzy locations
• Sufficing of generalized footprint for IR -
  related to use and scale
• More feature extents

7
Summary of Workshop Outcomes

• Seamless access to digital government data
  through indirect geographic referencing (place
  names)
• Geo-name Services
• import and export gazetteer data
• distributed, interoperable gazetteer model
  (query-response protocols)
• registry service for gazetteer data/service
• gazetteer creation tools

8
Summary of Workshop Outcomes

• Policy issues
• security and confidentiality authentication
  (digital signature)
• intellectual property, rights (constraints)
• attribution, provenance, authority, confidence
  (level of trust)
• indication of quality (name, footprint, )
• currentness
• Evaluation of uses of gazetteer services
• User communities, current and potential uses
• Interaction modes, scenarios of use

9
Preliminary View of Workshop Outcome

• Multicultural issues
• Language and alphabet
• Cultural sensitivity
• Collaborations - Partnerships
• Other sustainable systems, duplicate management,
  registries (inventories)

10
http//www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/lhill/dgie/DGIE_we
bsite/DGIE_homepage.htm
11
Gazetteer Search/Retrieval Protocol

• Doug Neberts preliminary presentation for the
  design of a GLS protocol for distributed sources
  of placename information
• end