Frequently Asked Questions
What is a gazetteer?
What is different about the geoXwalk
gazetteer?
So what benefits does the structure
of the geoXwalk gazetteer offer you?
How can you use the gazetteer?
How can it help other information services?
How does it assist in geographic
indexing?
What are the main aims and objectives
of this project?
What is a gazetteer?
Typically, a gazetteer is a list of places
together with their associated geographic location,
given as a latitude and longitude co-ordinate, or an
Ordnance Survey grid co-ordinate. Occasionally, other
information such as the population or size of a place
may be included.
What is different about the geoXwalk
gazetteer?
The geoXwalk gazetteer is different from
a traditional gazetteer in a number of ways:
-
places will be classified into
types, for example, city, river, lake;
-
places will be recorded with
their geographic ‘footprint’, for example, settlements
represented as areas, rivers as lines (this differs
from traditional gazetteers which represent places
as points, even though they may cover quite large
areas or may be linear features such as rivers);
-
the database will not only be
comprised of places but also other types of ‘geographies’,
including postcode areas, parishes and electoral districts;
-
the current focus of the gazetteer
is ‘near contemporary’ data, but the longer-term aim
is to also include historical information.
So what benefits does the structure
of the geoXwalk gazetteer offer you?
The geoXwalk database will allow for questions
to be asked, such as “where is Ormskirk?” or “what is
to be found at grid ref. NT 258 728?”. More complicated
questions such as “What is the county town of Shropshire?”
and “on which river is York situated?” may also be answered.
How can you use the gazetteer?
The gazetteer can be used:
-
as a reference tool for researchers
and teaching staff for on-line reference and catalogue
purposes;
to aid geographic searching by
other information services;
to assist in the geographic indexing
of information resources.
Back to Top How can it help other information
services?
Geographic searching is very powerful
and whilst a number of information services now provide
this, many are limited to place name and/or postcode
searching. If a service wants to support more types
of searching, it has to hold enough spatial data to
allow a users query to be translated from one form to
another. For example, an address could be translated
into national grid co-ordinates. A gazetteer, such as
geoXwalk, can be used to perform this translation (or
‘cross-walking’). How does it
assist in geographic indexing?
At present, little information is geographically
referenced, as this can be a time-consuming process.
The project team is building a tool which will assist
cataloguers, indexers and metadata creators by semi-automatically
geographically indexing text descriptions. This software
will read electronic forms of documents and/or metadata
records and try to identify geographic names, features
and other geographies. What
are the main aims and objectives of this project?
- to build a demonstrator service which, after evaluation
by the stakeholders, might be extended to a full
service.
- illustrate cross-searching of an existing JISC
service and semi-automatic indexing of descriptions
of JISC resources;
- show the types of queries that could be answered
by a well-populated service via a simple-to-use
interface;
- investigate various technical, operational and
data
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