FAQs

1. What is a gazetteer?
2. What is different about the GeoCrossWalk gazetteer?
3. So what benefits does the structure of the GeoCrossWalk gazetteer offer you?
4. How can you use the gazetteer?
5. How can it help other information services?
6. How does it assist in geographic indexing?
7. 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 GeoCrossWalk gazetteer?

The GeoCrossWalk gazetteer is different from a traditional gazetteer in a number of ways:

1. places will be classified into types, for example, city, river, lake;
2. 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);
3. the database will not only be comprised of places but also other types of 'geographies', including postcode areas, parishes and electoral districts;
4. 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 GeoCrossWalk gazetteer offer you?

The GeoCrossWalk 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:

1. as a reference tool for researchers and teaching staff for on-line reference and catalogue purposes;
2. to aid geographic searching by other information services;
3. to assist in the geographic indexing of information resources.

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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 GeoCrossWalk, 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?

1. to build a demonstrator service which, after evaluation by the stakeholders, might be extended to a full service.
2. illustrate cross-searching of an existing JISC service and semi-automatic indexing of descriptions of JISC resources;
3. show the types of queries that could be answered by a well-populated service via a simple-to-use interface;
4. investigate various technical, operational and data

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