In a nutshell...

Put simply, GeoCrossWalk is a database of geographical features (like towns, rivers, woodlands and counties), their name and location. In other words, a gazetteer. GeoCrossWalk does not just store a feature's location as a point, it stores the feature's "footprint".

Amongst other things, GeoCrossWalk can be used to:

• enhance resource searching by making data, metadata and services geo-smart, so users can search for resources based on geography. Many existing online services contain data, or records about the data (called "metadata"), which refer to geographical features but contain no information about the geographic location of the features. So although a user can define a search by specifying "what", "when" and "who" they are searching for, they can not specify "where". GeoCrossWalk allows such services to make use of the under-utilised geographical information in data and metadata and adds the "where" to resource searching.
• enhance portal cross-searching by translating between different geographic reference or search terms. E.g. a portal may search many resources, all with different types of geographic referencing. A user is searching by Postcode but the resources are referenced by National Grid Reference, placename or parish code - not postcode. With GeoCrossWalk between the user and the resources being searched, these inconsistencies don't matter: GeoCrossWalk translates the user's postcode into whatever type of geographical reference is needed to search resources in the portal. All this occurs invisibly to the user, who will enter a postcode and receive a list of results, unaware that the geographical crosswalking has taken place.
• geoparse and index, adding geographic referencing to text based documents, such as websites, word processing documents and metadata records, which have textual references to geographical features in their contents.

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GeoCrossWalk is many things...

JISC service | gazetteer | beyond a traditional gazetteer | middleware | suite of products

GeoCrossWalk is...

...a service in the JISC Shared Services Programme (opens new window). For details of the service and related documents, see the GeoCrossWalk Service Documentation

...a gazetteer of geographical features within Great Britain (and crucially, their location) built, predominantly, from Ordnance Survey data.

...more than a traditional gazetteer because:

1. places are classified into types, for example, city, river, lake;
2. places are 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 is not only comprised of places but also other types of 'geographies', including postcode districts, woodlands and electoral wards
4. the current focus of the gazetteer is 'near contemporary' data, but the longer-term aim is to also include historical information.

...middleware, in that it is software that sits between services and communicates between machines, rather than directly with a user of a service. E.g. a user searches for photographs in an image service using a geographical search ("find all pictures of industry within 10 miles of the River Severn"). The user communicates with the image service, the image service communicates with GeoCrossWalk, GeoCrossWalk replies to the image service, which returns results to the user.

...a suite of potential products:

• a reference gazetteer, used directly to add geographic coordinates into previously non-georeferenced databases - spatially enabling databases.
• a gazetteer query graphic user interface for reference use in, for example, libraries.
• a middleware service (machine to machine), whereby existing services communicate with GeoCrossWalk to provide geographically enabled functionality to their users, for example, when searching many information servers via a portal.
• a GeoParser which can add geographic referencing to text based documents, such as web sites, word processing documents and metadata records, which have textual references to geographical features in their contents. Such a tool could help add geographical coordinates to the vast amount of existing metadata which contain textual references to place (geographic features) yet have no explicit geographic referencing (e.g. the inclusion of Ordnance Survey National Grid coordinates).