The ADL Gazetteer Protocol is a lightweight, stateless, XML- and HTTP-based protocol for accessing gazetteers: dictionaries of geographic placenames. The protocol supports querying gazetteers (by placename, by geographic area, by feature class, by inter-placename relationship, etc.); retrieving standard placename reports; and downloading gazetteers in bulk.
An open source gazetteer protocol client and matching server, both written in Java and based on Java web application technology, can be downloaded below. The client supports querying and viewing results against a background map of the world. The server maps protocol operations to JDBC/SQL relational database operations. The server software is dependent on ADL-developed schemas that implement the ADL Gazetteer Content Standard; for those interested in applying the server software to other data sources, the software's schema dependencies are well-isolated in a handful of classes and the mapping from protocol queries to database queries is described using a simple declarative language.
last modified 2009-09-23 20:26