Why Do We Need GeoCrossWalk?

Geographic searching is an important and powerful way of searching. While a number of information services now provide geographic searching, often they only allow one or two types of searching, for example, by a place name or a postcode.

If a service wants to support more types of searching, then that service has to hold enough spatial data to allow a user's query to be translated from one form, say an address, to the native geographic coding used to index the data, say grid co-ordinates. With a gazetteer service you don't have to do this: the service can just ask the gazetteer to do the translation (or 'cross-walking', hence the service name) for them.

The Go-Geo! portal is a user of the GeoCrossWalk service.