In a nutshell...

GeoCrossWalk is designed to be used by Internet information service providers, for example JISC services which provide portal or direct access to either data and/or metadata. GeoCrossWalk is NOT just for geographical services, it is for any service which provides information which in some way refers to place, in the way that:

• metadata about photographs in an image download service includes the place name of the location the photograph was taken;
• or metadata about an article on working practices in mills in the 19th century in a historical information service refers to a number of key locations.

These non-geographical services can use GeoCrossWalk to add Ordnance Survey Grid References to the metadata and / or add geographic searching (the "where") to the "what", "when" and "who" searches that most services already provide.

Who could use GeoCrossWalk

The following could use GeoCrossWalk:

* Any JISC service which provides access to information (metadata, data) which refers to a geographical location, could use GeoCrossWalk to add explicit geographical coordinates to that information and tools which allow users to search and browse, based on geography (e.g. "find me all articles on pre-industrial revolution trade which refer to places within 10 miles of the River Severn" ). A recent review of all JISC services showed that the majority of the data provided referred to place in one way or another, though only a very small minority provided metadata which contained National Grid references for those places, or a method of geographical searching. In other words, GeoCrossWalk is not just for "geography" resources, but many different resources covering many disciplines.

* Metadata custodians or creators who want to add geographic coordinates (such as a Ordnance Survey National Grid reference) to new or existing metadata records.

* Service providers who want to enhance the searching of the resources they provide. GeoCrossWalk can be used to add a "where?" search, to the existing "what?", "when?" and "who?" search parameters.

*Repositories. Depositors of data could use GeoCrossWalk to add geographical references (e.g. OS National Grid Coordinates) to metadata at the time of deposit. Using GeoCrossWalk, users could search the repository using "where", as well as "what", "who" and "when".

*Portals - geography may be the only common element between many disparate resources accessible via a portal. If the portal uses GeoCrossWalk, how all these separate resources are geo-referenced does not matter. GeoCrossWalk can understand all the geographies and how they relate and return results for the user for whatever area they specified.

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Examples of Use

Go Go-Geo!

Go-Geo! is an online resource discovery tool which allows for the identification and retrieval of records describing the content, quality, condition and other characteristics of geospatial data that exist with UK tertiary education and beyond. The portal supports geospatial searching (using GeoCrossWalk) by interactive map, grid co-ordinates and place name, as well as the more traditional topic or keyword forms of searching. The portal is a key component of the UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure.

See http://www.gogeo.ac.uk

ADS ArchSearch

The Archaeological Data Service (ADS) wanted to include a Postcode search in their ArchSearch application, but the metadata being searched includes OS National Grid Coordinates, not Postcodes. Using GeoCrossWalk, this was not a problem. The user of ArchSearch chooses a Postcode to search by. This is sent to GeoCrossWalk, which holds the "footprint" of all geographic features. GeoCrossWalk sends back to ArchSearch the "footprint" of the Postcode as OS National Grid Coordinates and ArchSearch then selects those metadata records which contain OS National Grid Coordinates which fall within the Postcode footprint. These records are then returned to the user as the results of the Postcode Search

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Potential Applications

Adding geographic searching to a JISC service

Many JISC services provide "what", "when" and "who" search tools for finding resources delivered by each service. Also in many cases, the metadata associated with these resources, includes geographical features, such as place names or towns, cities, counties etc, yet these can only be searched for using a free text search, not a geographically intelligent search. A free text search for "Shropshire" will return all records containing the word "Shropshire". However, a geographically intelligent search for "Shropshire" will return all the records containing Shropshire plus all those records that do not contain "Shropshire" but do contain place names which are within the county of Shropshire. Geographically intelligent searching would also allow more sophisticated resource searching, such as "find all photographs of buildings within 3 miles of the River Severn".

Here is a list of just some JISC services that could use GeoCrossWalk to give their users the benefits of geographical searching:

• AHDS and cross-searching of AHDS resources
• Intute (formerly Resource Discovery Network)
• JSTOR
• BUFVC Trilt
• Education Image Gallery (EIG)
• Film & Sound Online

Enhancing metadata with geographic coordinates

In their current state, many JISC services could benefit from geographically intelligent searching, provided by GeoCrossWalk (see Adding geographic searching to a JISC service). However, to fully realise the potential of the geography hidden in their metadata, the geography needs to be made explicit, by the addition of a full geographical coordinate reference, such as Latitude and Longitude, or an Ordnance Survey National Grid Reference. Ideally this is done at the time of metadata creation, but could be added later.

The GeoCrossWalk GeoParser semi-automatically searches for place names in metadata records and matches them to a OS Grid Reference and is ideally for use by Metadata Curators, Metadata Creators or those depositing data in a repository. Once metadata contains geographical coordinates, many things become possible, from finding links between previously unassociated data (but which have always had geography in common, only it was hidden) to displaying the location of resources on maps ("Show me a map of the locations mentioned in these research papers").

All metadata used in all JISC services and repositories can benefit from this. Currently only a very small amount of metadata contains a proper geographical reference.

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