I'd like to thank Linda for allowing me to come. Roger, I'm going to be more than 1.9 minutes, I'm sorry. I'm Kathleen O'Brien. I work in the Secretariat of the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names. We're housed in the Department of Natural Resources, in Ottawa, Canada.
A little bit of history about the Committee. In the late 19th Century the need for a single authority to which questions about Canadian geographical nomenclature could be referred was apparent. Such an authority was required because errors and inconsistencies existed in both the spelling and application of Canada's geographical names. Also, resource mapping beyond settled areas, together with the heavy immigration that was occurring at that time, made it imperative to deal with Canada's toponymy and geographical naming procedures. Another factor was foreign scientific expeditions, which went about naming features in the Yukon and other areas of northern Canada and then producing maps with those names on them. As you can imagine, this irritated a lot of people in Canada, so the need for the toponymic authority was discovered and recognized, and the Geographic Board of Canada was established in 1897. Its mandate was to undertake the standardization of geographical names in Canada, and to provide expert advice to federal departments and agencies on the origin, spelling and use of geographical names. The committee itself has gone through a number of name changes - the CPCGN, as we now call ourselves in acronym language, is the third name. We're now working on having a fourth name approved, and that's going to take some time because we've worked on it for a year already and it's been rejected, so we're trying again with another version. The committee itself is made up of members from across Canada from the provinces and territories and federal departments that are interested in naming issues, and that includes translation, national defense, Indian affairs and so on.
The approval and naming of geographical features in Canada today now is the responsibility of each province and territory. Features on Indian reserves, national parks and military establishments require joint approval by the appropriate federal department and by the appropriate province and/or territory. Name decisions are sent to Ottawa to maintain the national database called the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base (CGNDB), and names of municipalities and other administrative entities which are approved under municipal and territorial functions are accepted by us under our Principle 1. Data can be sent to us either in hard copy or as digital files, and then the Geographical Names Section staff enter that into the database. Visitors to our office are allowed to use a read-only version so that they can't make any inadvertent changes to our data. Over 30 attributes are stored for any name and they include a unique identifier. There are various codes to indicate the name's status, the feature type, the region or territory in which the place or feature is found, and several location fields. In some cases, historical information about the origin or history of the toponym is also included. We have had an Internet version of the CGNDB since about 1994, and this allows for querying of geographical names and currently receives over 3000 hits a day. It's allowed our section to respond better to the information needs of our clients, whether they're public or government. Because Canada is an officially bilingual country, the database must respond to the needs of both English and French users, so while names are not translated, the database and the website have been set up so that there are English and French versions of those vehicles.
The information in the fields deliberately avoids the use of terminology that might have to be translated. In 1990 the CPCGN agreed that the database should contain 11 core data fields for approved names, and in addition there were 3 highly desirable fields that were also accepted. Just a couple of weeks ago one of those core data fields was removed because we discovered that we were only distributing it unilingually, so that couldn't be allowed. We are still collecting the information but we just do not distribute it.
Some of the new challenges in standardization that we're facing have to do with native names. Syllabics will become an issue likely as the Nunavut government gets into naming geographical features, and we just recently discovered that the ISO Standard 10646-1 Appendix 11 now includes syllabics. With characters that belong to other native languages we are creating a registry of characters; because there is no standard as yet we have created our own registry. In the database you will see them in curly brackets with a number inside the brackets, and we have a list of what those numbers refer to and what the character is, what language it belongs to and so on. There was a question earlier I heard about Canadian and American names. In 1988 or 1989, Canada and the U.S. signed a transboundary agreement for dealing with names of features crossing the International Boundary.
At this point if you have any questions, let me know. I should give you the
website address, it's http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca
and on that site not only can you find our database but you can find our
principles and procedures. Thank you.