The Atlas of Canada - gazetteer service and application

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

Rhian Evans, Peter Morton
GeoAccess Division, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing, Natural Resources Canada.  Rhian.Evans@ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca & Peter.Morton@ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca

The Atlas of Canada is currently working on two gazetteer-related projects. One is a gazetteer service, designed for application developers, which features a distributed linkage between the Canadian Geographical Names Database and Digital Map Frameworks using an Open GIS Consortium-compliant Web Feature Server (WFS) and Web Map Server (WMS).  The other is a gazetteer application ('Find a Place'), designed for on-line users of the National Atlas.  It takes advantage of the library of thematic information that the atlas collects and enables users to find the location and extent of places (cities and towns) and physical features (rivers and lakes) on a map.  In addition, various search tools are incorporated to return National Atlas thematic attribute information for geographical features, and other National Atlas of Canada Web site information related to the same feature. At this time, the database contains 40,000 geographical names.