Gazetteer Protocol Introduction

Update: The ADL and ESRI Gazetteers are no longer operational.

This is a hands-on introduction to the ADL Gazetteer Protocol. The forms below allow you to submit requests to, and observe responses from, two operational gazetteer protocol servers: the ADL Gazetteer and the ESRI Gazetteer. Only two of the three services defined by the protocol are demonstrated in this page, get-capabilities and query; a separate page of test forms allows all protocol services to be exercised and debugged.

In the eight sample queries shown below, the query constraints can be changed (subject to the rules of the protocol's query language, of course). For example, you can replace "las vegas" with "santa barbara". In queries that include a class constraint, the query must reference a term from a thesaurus associated with the gazetteer being queried. The sample queries below are intended for the ADL Gazetteer and thus reference terms from the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus. To query the ESRI Gazetteer, change the thesaurus name in the query to "ESRI-Type" and use one of the following terms:

term     meaning

ALL     all feature types
AA     administrative areas
ZC     postal codes
CT     cities and towns
PI     points of interest
GL     geographic landmarks/features

First, use the menu below to choose a gazetteer server. Or, manually enter the URL of a gazetteer server in the text field:

(edit menu)

The following request asks the above-selected gazetteer server to return a statement of its capabilities. Press the "submit" button to submit the request shown below. A slow response is likely due to the fact that this page must, for technical reasons, use a proxy to communicate with the server.

get capabilities

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that have a name that contains the phrase "las vegas".

name query

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that 1) have a name that contains the phrase "las vegas", and 2) have the class "airport features".

name & class query

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that 1) have a name that contains the phrase "las vegas", and 2) overlap the region bounded by latitudes 34° 39' N and 42° 20' 24" N and longitudes 113° 41' 24" W and 120° 21' W. Note that geographic coordinates are expressed in signed decimal degrees in west/south/east/north order per the Geographic Markup Language (GML) standard.

name & footprint query

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that 1) have a name that contains the phrase "las vegas", and 2) no longer exist.

name & place status query

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that 1) have class "airport features", and 2) lie completely within the region bounded by latitudes 35° N and 38° N and longitudes 118° W and 120° W.

class & footprint query

The following query says: return a standard report for the gazetteer entry whose identifier is "adlgaz-1-600-1c". To query the ESRI Gazetteer, try an identifier such as "600".

identifier query

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that 1) have the "part of" relationship to the entry identified by "adlgaz-1-600-1c", and 2) have class "cemeteries".

relationship & class query

The following query says: return standard reports for all gazetteer entries that 1) have a name that contains the word "cherokee", and 2) lie completely within the footprint of the entry identified by "adlgaz-1-600-1c".

name & indirect footprint query

last modified 2009-09-23 20:31