Matthew Laurenson, The Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand, Mt Albert Research Center, New Zealand.

My own use of the ADL Gazetteer Protocol has been very limited to date, but I would like to do further work in this area. We have been making a set of "data brokers" for various kinds of spatial data, such as weather data and digital elevation models. More information about our project is at www.agmodel.org. I wanted to create a service that provided applications with a list of the bounding boxes of countries, and those country's first-level administrative regions, so that users could choose a starting point for browsing available data. My requirements perhaps differed a little from the ADL Gazetteer in that I needed to provide the names of countries and regions in multiple languages, and to link the system to an existing mechanism for editing such multilingual information (ResourceServer).

I used a Java SAX-based program, much like Greg Janee's example on the ADL gazetteer protocol site, to get an initial list of countries and bounding boxes from ADL Gazetteer, and I appreciated Greg's help with that work.
(I initially tried to use a "JAXB"-based approach, but the GML schema used XML Schema facilities that JAXB couldn't handle).

I gleaned the country names in multiple languages from the Java Locale class and semi-manually set up administrative regions for several Asian countries.

The prototype system (implemented as a Java EJB using JBoss) is now available as a web service at:
http://pc120.narc.affrc.go.jp/jboss-net/services/CountryServer?WSDL - the WSDL file describes the service in Web Service Definition Language.

A variety of demos on the page http://www.agmodel.org/index.html use the services of CountryServer - most are applets requiring that one download the Java Plug-in from Sun.

Unfortunately we haven't yet made a "CountryServer" web page on that site or publicised the system, but when we do so we would acknowledge the involvement of ADL in supplying data.

I moved from Japan at the end of last year, and this project was completed close to my departure.

If our project advances further we would be interested in providing users with the facility to search for place names in their own language. We would very much like to create a broker that searches multiple gazetteers, as there are many "non-standard" place name databases on the Web. I would envisage much closer work with ADL at that stage.

Matthew Laurenson, matthewl@NARO.AFFRC.GO.JP, 2004/03/04