Gazetteer Services: A Scottish Perspective
Bruce Gittings
- definitions
- short-form gazetters
- long-form (descriptive) gazetteers
- thematic gazetteers
- address gazetteers
- Scottish Context
- problems
- regular change admin geogrphies
- multiple nearby places of same name
- gaelic names (no agreed versions)
- no definitive place name gazetteer
- advantages
- lots of mapping versions (from Pont in 16th C.)
- detailed contry-wide mapping from 1860s
- scottish placenames survey (1980s) but not digital
- demands
- who is the custodian of place names?
- palce is the connection between heritage projects (but they don't realize that!)
- there's a lot of money there, and they need a way to connect, but they're not connecting
- efficient government
- problems
- Importance of Gazetteers / Gazetteers for contextualizing places
- local search providers, integrated with mapping
- imagery and geo-referenced texts are key to these services
- gazetteers are vital to provide the linkages
- Definitive Address Gaz for Scotland
- DNA-Scotland
- aggregated from local corporate address gazetteers created amdn maintained by local authorities
- may or may not be postal addresses
- will provide national view of local data
- aim: trusted address source of choice within scottish public sector
- basis: property, but individuals connected to property - so there are privacy issues
- seen as standard means of connecting other databases together
- well funded
- BM7666 - a british gazetteer standard
- Modernizing Government Framework: MGF3 - National Gazetteer Specification
- probably not available to private sector and public
- A Case for Textual Geographical Information (GI)?
- are points, lines and polygons with attributes enough?
- do these fully represent the world aroudn us?
- how do we navigate from one place to antoher?
- maps are often not terribly well understood by non-sepcialists
- use features which are not currently part of maps or GI databases
- landmarks
- descriptions or textures of buildings
- color of features
- may be seasonally dependent
- maybe we need richer data
- building frontage data is being captured by videographers
- textual GI is one form of this richer data
- Importance of descriptive geographical information
- exactly what google etc. is trying to search
- a tradiontional form of GI, whichh has recently been forgotten
- complements the map
- potentially mor comprehensible by public
- geographical equivalent of the geological map and monograph
- helps solve navigation problems
- The gaz of scotland
- Scotland: An encyclopedia ...
- originally planned as a book
- 13,500 entries
- places in it which are not on OS maps
- heavily used website
- http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/
- not a service, a web interface for individual members of public; but could easily form hub of a short-form gazeteer service
- historical descriptive gazetteers
- richnes of textual description
- text maintains subtleties of histoy and details ephemeral knowledge much more easily and often more effectively than a map
- recent tren towards "tourist guides" rather than systematic descriptioni of places, whihc tradiionally formed gazetteers
- problems:
- no good tools for interrogating descriptive GI or making inferences
- data mining only the beginingg
- not good tools for creation either
- how to differentiate between multiple places with same name that are very close together?
- Problems with place names
- Defining places
- Textual GI helps us define places
- govt, industry, communities need to be able to locate and describe places
- first step in community-building and social inclusion
- conclusions
- descript gazs can include history which gives authority
- gaz svcs vital because
- can act as blue to join up other svcs
- can provide deifinitive names, stats and poss. even descriptions
