Textual-Geospatial Integration Project

Presentation at the NKOS Workshop, JCDL 2002, on Digital gazetteers: integration into distributed digital library services, July 18, 2002

James Frew, University of California, Santa Barbara http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/~frew

The Textual-Geospatial Integration (TGI) Project is developing services to enable geographically-augmented searching of the contents of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Although a fraction of NSDL's contents will be accompanied by metadata linking the content to specific locations on the Earth's surface (e.g. "30 N 90 W"), we expect that most of NSDL's contents will contain only implicit georeferences: textual references to place names (e.g. "New Orleans") or geographic phenomena (e.g. "Mississippi River delta"). TGI services will identify implicit georeferences in documents and match these georeferences to explicit place and feature names in a gazetteer. NSDL clients may use these services to assign "best-guess" geographic locations to arbitrary documents, so that documents may be included in geospatial queries. TGI services may also be used to associate geographic terms with a document, which may then be used in text-based queries for related material.