Aims and Objectives

The primary aim of GeoCrossWalk is to provide middleware infrastructure and tools that will support and enhance existing geographic searching and indexing capabilities within the JISC IE. The goal is to make geographic based searches as common as those by more traditional criteria such as subject or author.

Given that an estimated 80% of ALL information has some form of geographic reference, it is clear that geographic searching for resources is potentially a very powerful and broadly applicable information retrieval objective.

The key problem to achieving this lies in the plethora of extant georeferencing schemes and coding conventions in common usage (e.g. place names, postcodes, numeric identifiers for small areas etc.). GeoCrossWalk addresses this issue by acting as a 'babel fish' that can 'crosswalk' one form of geographic encoding into its equivalent alternate forms.

At a strategic level, it is hoped GeoCrossWalk can be considered as one instance of a shared service within the JISC IE and thus can be used:

• To share experiences and feed findings into JISC's shared services programme.
• To present a well thought-out business case as a model for self-sustaining middleware.