Content standards for digital gazetteers

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

Linda Hill, Alexandria Digital Library Project, University of California, Santa Barbara http:www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) Project has been designing, building, and applying a gazetteer component for their geospatial digital library since early in the first round of NSF digital library funding (1994-1998). From this has developed a framework for representing the descriptive data for named geographic places, a Feature Type Thesaurus, and a set of gazetteer services as well as a worldwide gazetteer containing 4.4 million entries. This presentation will introduce the ADL Gazetteer Content Standard and the background for its development and compare this content standard to alternative representations, including hierarchical thesauri and the ISO TC211 draft standard (CD 19112) entitled “Geographic information – spatial referencing by geographic identifiers”.