Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange (DGIE)
Presentation at the NKOS Workshop, ACM DL’00, San Antonio, June 7, 2000

Linda L. Hill
University of California, Santa Barbara

Sixty-six representatives from various communities attended an NSF-funded workshop in October 1999 at the Smithsonian Institution to discuss the research and development needs and opportunities of indirect geographic referencing using digital gazetteers. Digital gazetteers are defined as geospatial dictionaries of placenames that can support the translation of placenames to geographic locations expressed in latitude and longitude coordinates or other georeferencing schemes. The results of the workshop will be summarized and subsequent steps to develop a common request and response convention – a gazetteer protocol – presented.