Bao, Shuming
Beard, Kate
Blair, Nancy L.
Blake, Donna W.
Blum, Stanley D.
Brandt, Lawrence E.
Broome, Frederick R.
Buckley, Aileen
Carroll, Allen
Cole, Daniel G.
Cooke, Donald
Cotter, Gladys
de La Beaujardiere, Jeff
Evans, John D.
Falkenberg, Charles
Flynn, Randall E.
Foresman, Timothy W.
Furr, T. Wayne
Gaines, Alan M.
Gomon, Janet R.
Goodchild, Michael F.
Govoni, David
Gregg, Tim
Hancock, Lee
Hart, Quinn
Hill, Linda L.
Hittelman, Allen M.
Hodge, Gail
Hunter, Judy
Jones, Christopher
Jukes, Scott
Kottman, Clifford
Lanter, David
Larson, Ray
Lopez, Xavier R.
Mangan, Elizabeth
Marsden, Roger
McGlamery, Patrick
Medyckyj-Scott, David
Morehouse, Scott
Moritz, Tom
Mullen, Melissa
Mulligan, Mike
Nebert, Doug
Niemann, Brand L.
Norton, Leslie J.
Norton, Tim J.
O'Brien, Kathleen
Olsen,  Lola M.
Payne, Roger
Pfister, Robin
Ramsey, R. Douglas
Rand, Roberta Y.
Rasmussen, Edie M.
Regan, Priscilla M.
Rivera, Ramón
Rugg, Robert D.
Smith, David G.
Smyth, Carl Stephen
Tahirkheli, Sharon
Vieglais, David
Walker, Robert
Weitzman, Anna L.
White, David K.
Yanega, Doug
Zeng, Marcia Lei

He received his B.S. in computer, M.A. in statistics in China, and his Ph.D. in applied economics from Clemson University in 1996. He was a research scientist at MathSoft for 1996 to 1997. He was the primary developer for the SpaceStat-ArcView extension and the S-PLUS for ArcView. His primary interest is in spatial statistics, GIS, and their applications in social sciences.

I am interested in issues on spatial data deployment in various formats, metadata management on server and client sites, spatial data query over different sites, and online analysis with statistical capabilities.

Shuming Bao, Ph.D.
China Data Center
University of Michigan
Suite 3630, 1080 S. University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
TEL: (734)647-9610
FAX: (734)764-5540
Email: sbao@umich.edu
http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/chinadata/

Dr. Kate Beard is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Spatial Information Science Engineering at the University of Maine. She has been a research faculty with the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) since its beginning in 1989. She holds a M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1988) from the Institute for Environmental Studies, Land Resources Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison where she specialized in geographic information systems.  Her current research focuses on digital libraries, metadata and spatial data quality, uncertainty of spatial data and visualization of spatial data quality. Dr Beard has been a cooperator on the Alexandria Digital Library project centered at the University of California Santa Barbara, she was PI on a project to develop a digital spatial library for the Gulf of Maine, and is currently a PI on a project to develop a digital library for Maine Lakes. Her work on data quality covers metadata representation, management and tracking of errors in spatial databases, and various methods for visualizing and communicating data quality.  Dr. Beard is one of four PIs on a three year grant from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to investigate uncertainty in spatial databases. She is a PI on another NIMA grant that is investigating the integration of geospatial data and imagery. Dr. Beard is also a PI on a two-year grant from NSF to investigate the application of spatial concepts to genome mapping. Other research interests include investigations of spatial resolution and scale issues in the distribution of environmental variables. Dr. Beard has authored or co-authored over 50 articles in journals, books and conference proceedings in the area of geographic information science.

Dr Beard is serving a two year term as board member for the Cartography and Geographic Information Science Society. She serves on the Editorial Board of URISA journal and is a member of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, the Geospatial Information Technology Association, and the Association for American Geographers. She teaches Introduction to GIS, GIS Applications, Spatial Analysis, Community Information Systems and seminars on Uncertainty in Spatial Databases, Automated Generalization and Visualization of Data Quality.

The value of USGS library participation in this workshop would be to discuss the benefits of gazetteer data for indirect geospatial referencing.  A properly constructed gazetteer would facilitate the conversion of non-map and older map catalog records to permit geospatial searching without handling each publication.  It would allow reference librarians and library users to automatically translate the names of county, geographic features, and quadrangles to enhance search retrievals.  The issues of the meeting apply to retrospective cataloging and in designing databases such as the USGS National Geologic Map Database.  Combining the efforts to develop a gazetteer would prevent duplication of work and ensure capability in many contexts.

The Defense Modeling & Simulation Office (DMSO) funds and the Office of the Ocean Executive Agent (OEA) manages the Master Environmental Library (MEL) project, which is being developed to provide access to environmental resources.  The MEL will provide access to geospatial data as well as to related environmental documentation and information.  A key component of MEL is the metadata development.  We are working to the ISO standards for geospatial metadata. I am interested in whether the capabilities that you are discussing for the DGIE are compatible with those that we are developing for the MEL in the search for location, etc.

Stan Blum is the Research Information Manager at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. By academic training he is a systematic ichthyologist (the
classification of fishes; Ph.D. Zoology, University of Hawaii, 1988). Since 1990, however, he has been working full-time in biodiversity and natural history collections
informatics. The two most important themes in his work have been: 1) designing integrated information systems for natural history museums (i.e., systems that support a
wide variety of collection disciplines, collection management practices, and uses of collection information), and 2) developing data standards and software architectures
that will enable data to be integrated across distributed and heterogeneous collection databases. He recently organized "A Workshop on the Compilation, Maintenance,
and Dissemination of Taxonomic Authority Files." The purpose of the workshop was to provide an initial forum for members of the systematics and library/information
science communities to discuss concepts, practices, and technologies that will promote consistency in the cataloging, indexing, and retrieval of biological information.
Workshop results indicated that biological taxonomy and classification would provide a challenging test bed for cross-discipline work involving thesaurus development,
authority control, cooperative cataloging, and multi-thesaurus integration. Participants recommended that the dialog between the communities continue, particularly under
the framework of DL research.

Phone: 703/306-1981
Fax: 703/306-0589
Email: lbrandt@nsf.gov
Home page: http://www.cise.nsf.gov/eia/brandt

(V) 301.457.1056
(F) 301.457.4710
(E) fbroome@geo.census.gov

Dr. Buckley is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon.  Her full CV is available at http://geography.uoregon.edu/buckley/ under "Curriculum Vitae".  Dr. Buckley teaches courses in cartography, GIS, and visualization.  Her research interests include cartographic theory and methods, GIS analysis, and environmental applications of geographic techniques.  She holds the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy (1997) from Oregon State University, Master of Arts
(1993) from Indiana University, and Bachelor of Arts (1982) from Valparaiso University, all in Geography, and has also studied at Michigan State University.  Before starting the doctoral degree, she held an internship at the National Geographic Society where she worked on the sixth edition of their Atlas of the World.  She is now involved in the second revision of the Atlas of Oregon.

"Having recently been awarded funding, we are in the process of starting up a project to compile a new revision of the Atlas of Oregon.  It is our intent to provide this atlas in both book and electronic formats, using the web to disseminate maps, images, the data used to compile the maps, and other geographic information that will support and supplement the atlas in book form.  We are very interested in participating in the workshop because one part of the digital atlas we will be producing is a digital gazetteer.  The researchers and cartographers involved in the atlas project already have experience in paper and digital atlas compilation as well as serving maps and map data using the Internet. These two activities are often not united, as atlases tend to be released in paper or digital form, but not both.  We are extremely interested in finding ways to supplement the book atlas with an easily accessible, stand-alone electronic atlas, including the gazetteer and all the related geographic information.  Electronic dissemination of the information will serve many more people than those who may purchase the book atlas, including academicians, teachers, researchers, and public and private agency workers throughout the state (and perhaps beyond).  We are currently considering the gazetteer as the primary mechanism to (1) unite the electronic atlas with the book atlas, and (2) provide the gateway into the digital database (including maps, images, text, and more).

We believe this approach to compilation and dissemination of the geographic information in the new Atlas of Oregon is unique and unprecedented.  We would very much appreciate the opportunity to learn from others about the challenges we are sure to meet, and we look forward to an opportunity to share our unique perspectives on the project with others."

From 1991 to 1995, Carroll was art director of National Geographic Magazine, producing historical, scientific, and informational artwork, and leading an  effort to establish a corporate identity program for the Society. Carroll received two gold medals from the Society of Illustrators for his work during this period. Carroll has also served as director of design for the Society's Cartographic Division (prior to its transition to NG Maps), and as art director of the Society's Historical Atlas of the United States, a richly-illustrated history of America in maps, pictures and text produced for the Society's centennial  in 1988. Prior to joining the Society in 1983, Carroll was a free-lance illustrator and designer in Washington, serving clients such as The Washington Post, Smithsonian Institution, Readers Digest, The New Republic, the American Film Institute, and Johns Hopkins University. Self-trained in design, illustration, and cartography, Carroll is a magna cum laude graduate of Connecticut College, and was born and raised in  Indianapolis, Indiana.

Email: acarroll@ngs.org

Dan Cole is the GIS Coordinator for the Smithsonian Institution.  He holds the degrees of Masters of Arts (1979) from Michigan State University, and Bachelor of Arts (1977) from SUNY Albany, and has also studied at Oregon State University.  Prior to gaining the current position in 1990, he served as a research cartographer at the National Museum of Natural History between 1986  to 1990.  He had also previously worked as a cartographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Maryland.  His current research interests include digital cartographic analysis of American Indian land tenure, and investigations of biodiversity through the GIS/Remote Sensing interface.

As a constant user of the GNIS and the GeoNet names server, I am frequently aware of the need for accurate digital gazeteer information.  Because most Smithsonian scientists work in the international arena, we find the need to locate many current and historic place names that often have variant
spellings.   Use of digital gazeteer information enables much more efficient mapping and geographic analysis.

I was a member of the New Haven Census Use Study staff that developed the "DIME" map encoding process in 1967.  DIME was an early implementation of redundant encoding, error checking and topological data structures and served as a precursor to the Census "TIGER" digital street map of the USA.

I've participated in three information business start-ups, all currently operating, including Geographic Data Technology, Inc (GDT), a digital map publisher.  I served on the Board of URISA in the 1970s and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Mapping Science Committee. I
have a bachelor's degree from Yale and spent a year at MIT doing graduate work in information systems and artificial intelligence.

My professional interests currently include implementation of WWW-based update and distribution infrastructure for spatial databases.  The current vision ("Community Update") is a public-private partnership concentrating on street centerline data (like TIGER).  The intent is to capture new street and address information at the point of origin in municipalities in as friction-free manner as possible, marrying the map database strengths of GDT with the proximity of municipal workers to changes.  Benefits should include relieving municipal employees of GIS update technicalities while providing more current spatial data to all GIS users.

I trust that these issues are sufficiently related to the study of gazetteers to provide some useful contributions to the DGIE workshop.

Associate Chief Biologist for Information
U.S. Geological Survey/Biological Resources Division
12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, 300 National Center,
Reston, VA  20192
(703) 648-4090
Email: gladys_cotter@usgs.gov

I work on the technical development and implementation of Digital Earth specifications at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  I contribute to the Digital Earth Reference Model and the OpenGIS Consortium Web Mapping Testbed.  The vision of Digital Earth includes being able to find information about a place, regardless of who collected the data, how it is stored and formatted, and what processing or value-adding was performed.  Gazetteer functionality is essential to this endeavor.

My research seeks to build online geoprocessing services into a robust Web-based infrastructure for more effective sharing of geographic information. Many forms of spatial data can be made more accessible and useful through online services; my recent focus has been digital orthophotos and satellite imagery. Recent accomplishments include interoperability with clients and online services; and replication of open-source client and server components via the Web. This work is sponsored by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and collaborates with the Federal Geographic Data Committee and the OpenGIS Consortium's Web Mapping Testbed.

My primary interest in gazetteers is to define how to plug them into a wider infrastructure of cascading geoprocessing services. Clearly, gazetteers will be crucial in helping people make sense out of vast collections of geographic information: clickable overview maps and bounding-box queries can only get us so far. However, "invisible" uses of gazetteers by software agents are about to become a bigger part of the picture. For instance, creating a simple digital map might silently trigger a dozen gazetteer queries to fill the pick-lists in a graphical user interface.

The coming "geoservices infrastructure" (call it what you will) has a tremendous need for address and placename lookups; but its requirements may be quite different from those of today's direct human users. For instance, within such an infrastructure, a gazetteer server would need to support not only its "native" client, but a wide variety of clients built by others. On the server side, many (most?) data sources to be searched by a gazetteer will not reside in an organized, local, database, with fixed, well-known meanings. Instead, they'll be distributed across a motley assortment of dynamic data sources, some well-known, others murky. Thus, we need well-defined mechanisms for queries to and from gazetteers, and for semantic reconciliation among gazetteer data sources. These are, I think, some of the more important questions to be resolved in plugging gazetteers into a geoservices infrastructure.

Charles Falkenberg holds a B.S. and an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Maryland and has been developing software systems since 1980. He has developed scientific data delivery systems for oceanographers, ecosystem scientists and space scientists for the last 6 years and is currently is working with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) as part of NASA's Earth Science Information Partnerships (ESIP).  He previously worked in Alaska on a data delivery system for ecosystem researchers evaluating the long term impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

One of the goals of the NASA ESIP program is to search and subset science data by geographic region.  The UNH ESIP has therefore made a gazetteer central to the operation of the tool it is building to support terrestrial ecosystem research (WEBSTER).  This web-based data retrieval tool will support standard gazetteer regions, specialized regions of interest to the user community, and regions that have been submitted by individual researchers as part of a single research effort.

Mr. Flynn is the Executive Secretary for Foreign Names of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and serves as the Geographer of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, positions he assumed in 1993.

He holds the degrees of Master of Arts (1977) and Bachelor of Arts (1975) in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Virginia, and has also studied at Indiana University and as an exchange student at Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University, Russia).  Through the Defense Mapping Agency’s Long-Term Full-Time Training Program, he completed the graduate-level program in Geodetic Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, with a concentration in estimation theory (1985).  Before joining the Defense Mapping Agency in 1979 as a geographic names and boundary analyst, he was an Instructor of Russian Language at the University of Virginia, and a free-lance translator.

He has lectured on geographic names database design and national names standardization at the National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping in Beijing, China, at the Main Administration for Geodesy, Cartography, and Cadastre in Kiev, Ukraine, and at the National Land Board in Riga, Latvia.  He is a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), and acts as UNGEGN liaison with the International Hydrographic Organization.  Within UNGEGN, he convenes the Working Group on Toponymic Data Files and Gazetteers.  Mr. Flynn is Vice-Chairman of the Geographic Names Working Group within the Commission on Cartography of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH), and is an instructor in the annual PAIGH course on applied toponymy, having taught courses on geographic names in Bolivia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Peru.  He is a member of the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Subcommittee on International Boundary and Sovereignty Data.

His most recent publication is “Unicode in Geographic Data Bases,” issued in the proceedings of the 13th International Unicode Conference, September 1998.

Topic and Issue Statement:

• Geographic Names Authorities

The United Nations, through its conferences on the standardization of geographical names, has recommended and actively promotes establishment of national geographic names authorities to conduct programs of national toponymic standardization? To what extent has this recommendation been implemented internationally and facilitated the exchange of toponymic information?
•  “Official Standard Names” and “Avoidance of More than One Name for One Feature”

Multiple official names for features is comparatively rare in the United States (excepting the case of official long form and short form names). The same cannot be said for a number of countries with multiple official languages or combinations of official national languages and official local languages. A US perspective on the effect of such linguistic complexity on geographic names usage.
• Digital Gazetteer Information Content

What is a digital gazetteer? At issue is the definition of a conceptual model of “geographic name” as a geospatial entity, and the subsequent definition of data content standards.
• Digital Encoding of Geographic Name Representations

An overview of the issues involved in encoding multilingual and multiscriptual text; national, international, and industry standards for test encoding. Practical steps and advice to ease the exchange of digital multilingual text.
• Emerging Soft Technology: Beyond Data Exchange to Location Exchange

Traditional approaches to toponymic data exchange involve transfer of copies of large complex data sets, essentially duplicating data bases or parts of data bases in multiple unconnected locations. Newer approaches to data exchange involve only the transfer of a static address or identifier (such as an url) of the repository of the needed data, records, or applications.
• Geographic Names as Property

An overview of issues associated with concepts of ownership, licensing, and copyright of toponymic data, and the effect on data exchange and use.

Professor Timothy W. Foresman is the director of the EarthLab in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he teaches courses in GIS, remote sensing, and field survey techniques.  Professor Foresman leads a team of over a dozen scientists and research associates focusing on local, regional, and global Earth science and human ecosystem research issues.  He serves as a principal investigator on a variety of research programs sponsored by NASA, US. EPA, US. Forest Service, National Science Foundation, and other state and local agencies.  Professor Foresman’s real world experience expands over twenty years and includes private consulting, county government, and federal research all dealing with the use of spatial analysis tools to solve human and environmental problems resulting from the impacts of urban/rural expansion.  Professor Foresman is the founder of the Baltimore-Washington Collaboratory, a regional experiment in sharing data and expertise to empower citizens with information and technology necessary for participatory democracy. He is founder of the Maryland National Spatial Data Infrastructure Node. He also serves as co-PI and data manager for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study under the NSF Long Term Ecosystem Research program. Professor Foresman is currently detailed to NASA Headquarters where he leads the Digital Earth program.  He has published over 70 books, chapters, and professional papers.

Mr. Furr has worked in the field of cartography for over thirty-two years. He spent the first thirteen years at the USGS in Denver before accepting his current position as Manager of Cartography with the Oklahoma Geological Survey. Wayne is also the secretary of the Oklahoma Board on Geographic Names. As secretary, he answers numerous questions about Oklahoma’s vast expanse of geographic names, keeps the records of the Oklahoma-BGN, and make recommendations to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. He is a member of the Oklahoma State GIS Council’s Technical Subcommittee, where he promotes official geographic-name usage among other members of the Council. He was a Principal Investigator for the Phase II compilation of Oklahoma names for the Geographic Names Information System. Current projects include: (1) compiling a record of all geologic maps for Oklahoma with entry into the USGS National Geologic Map Database and (2) researching the origins and histories of Oklahoma names for future publication.

In 1973, Wayne received an Associates Degree from Red Rocks Community College, Golden, Colorado, where he studied drafting and surveying; a Bachelors Degree in Geography, summa cum laude (1989) with additional graduate work from the University of Oklahoma. He has taught cartography at the University of Oklahoma and is presently on the Geography Department’s Board of Visitors. He is the Executive Secretary of the Council of Geographic Names Authorities, former Chairman of the Consortium of Oklahoma Geographers, an Executive Council Member of the American Name Society, and a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and the Golden Key National Honor Society.

His interest in the Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange Workshop is that of geographic-name information sharing, especially in the area of standardization. He feels that standardization comes through education about the official geographic names, including the principles, policies, and procedures that apply to their application for placement on maps and in publications.

Email: againes@nsf.gov

Over the last twenty years, Janet Gomon has served in a variety of positions within the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, primarily directing and participating in information programs and initiatives at Institution, national, and international levels.  Her academic training and research is in systematic ichthyology.  Prior to joining the Smithsonian, she worked as research fisheries biologist for EPA’s National Marine Water Quality Lab, Office of Research and Monitoring.

My interest in the workshop is from the perspective of addressing the needs of the natural history/biodiversity research community and from an information architecture viewpoint.  Recent experience has included directing development of a prototype for efficiently georeferencing large amounts of specimen locality records.  This prototype implementation demonstrated a range of gazetteer data and services limitations pertinent to workshop discussions.   As member of the DGIE Workshop Steering Committee, I’ll be assisting with final workshop reports and follow-on proposals.

Email: good@ncgia.ucsb.edu

The underlying principle of "Gateway to Earth" is that a person should be able to find all the information available for a given place on the earth by specifying a geographic point, a named feature, or a particular topic. The concept of a digital gazetteer may be the solution to the indirect geospatial referencing necessary for the type of searches that the Internet implementation of Gateway to Earth will support.  The National Mapping Division Internet Services Coordinator is representing the Division on  USGS  the "Gateway to Earth" activities.

Tim Gregg is Manager of Resource Mapping Section, Engineering Division for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR).  He oversees the photogrammetry, cartography, aerial photolab and state base mapping functions of DNR.  This involves providing geographic products and services to support:  the statewide regulatory responsibilities of DNR;  the proprietary, land management functions of managing five million acres of state trust land; and the citizens of the state of Washington.

He is also the Executive Secretary for the Washington State Board on Geographic Names which has the statutory responsibility for officially designating geographic names in the state of Washington.  He is currently a member of the Executive Committee for the Council of Geographic Names Authorities (COGNA), an organization of state naming authorities that promotes standardization, coordination, education and information exchange.  He has a bachelors and masters degree in forestry from the University of Michigan, and MBA from University of Puget Sound.

His interest in the DGIE workshop is twofold;
(1) to serve the public interest in the state of Washington by establishing naming policies and procedures; coordinating these activities with local, state and federal agencies; and promoting and using official geographic names that retain the significance and color of the early history of Washington.

(2) the development and application of digital data bases to provide geographic products and services that support DNR proprietary and regulatory functions.  DNR currently manages more than a dozen statewide georeferenced data layers that support this work. 

v  949.553.0800
f  949.553.0088
email:  lhancock@go2online.com

I am the Founder and President of Go2 Systems, Inc., an Irvine, California company which has patented and is currently developing and marketing a new geographic referencing system designed for use on the Internet through a variety of web-enabled and ultimately navigation capable electronic devices, including wireless telephones, vehicle navigation systems, personal data assistants and portable computers.  I am the co-inventor on our patents along with Peter H. Dana, and we are currently working with a few very qualified geographers to help finalize the design of the system with a goal of making the system available in late 1999.  One of the components of the Go2 System, which we also refer to as the World Geographic Reference System, or WGRS, is a structured and abbreviated Placename address function which allows for the registration and distribution through the Internet of unique Go2 Addresses for geographic locations which are similar to the structure and registration system for Internet domain names.   While it is anticipated that the Go2 System will be used initially to facilitate real-world navigation and local commerce over the Internet from a variety web-enabled devices, we believe that the system might help provide a standardized geo-referencing system for many other applications.  Another component of the System is a new hierarchical geo-coordinate system which is fully integrated with the Go2 Placename structure and format, and this component of the system may also provide some benefits in connection with the objective of the workshop.

Quinn Hart is a Technical Researcher for the California Resources Agency's CERES Program, the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System.  Quinn is responsible for review and implementation of standards and applications relating to metadata, indexing, and cataloging issues.

CERES: http://ceres.ca.gov

Linda L. Hill, Ph.D.
Research Specialist
Computer Science/ADL
University of California, Santa Barbara
1205 Girvetz
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Desk: 805-893-8587
Fax: 805-893-3045
Alexandria Digital Library website: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu
ADL Gazetteer Development: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer
Homepage: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill
Email: lhill@alexandria.ucsb.edu

Phone:  303-497-6591
Fax:      303-497-6513
Email:  ahittelman@ngdc.noaa.gov
Web: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg

Education: Degrees
Queens College, B.A., Physics-Geology, 1967
University of Chicago, M.S., Geophysical Sciences, 1969

Position:
Director, World Data Center-A for Solid Earth Geophysics
Chief, Solid Earth Geophysics Division
NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80303
Email: ahittelman@ngdc.noaa.gov
Phone: 303-497-6591
Fax: 303-497-6513

Allen Hittelman's professional experience includes three decades of scientific data and information management experience, with extensive interactions in all sectors of the economy -- government, industry, academia and the general public.  He has served as: an oceanographer in the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office, 1967-1975; a senior data administrator in the Atlantic Richfield Exploration Company, 1982-1986, an independent data management consultant, 1986-87; and a senior geophysicist in the National Geophysical Data Center, 1975-1982 and 1987 to date.

Allen Hittelman manages the Solid Earth Geophysics Division, which runs a national and World Data Center (WDC) operation.  He has served as Division Chief and Director of WDC-A for Solid Earth Geophysics since January 1995.  This activity focuses on the integration of terrestrial data (collected in situ, satellite, plane, and ships) for use in numerous Earth science research efforts -- environmental issues, global change, hazard mitigation, academic research, mapping and energy exploration.

Hittelman is active in numerous national and international data management organizations.  Examples include participation in:

• American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Geophysical Integration Committee
• International Lithosphere Program’s (ILP) Coordinating Committee on Data Exchange and Centres
• Steering Committee the American Geological Institute’s (AGI) National Geoscience Data Repository
• Steering Committee for the NASA-sponsored Science Information Systems Interoperability Conference
• Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) National Spatial Data Clearinghouse Working Group
• National Research Council’s Committees on Seismology and Advancement of Strong Motion Programs

He has organized and chaired international workshops to develop data exchange formats and to expand frontiers in data storage, retrieval and display.  He received a Vice-Presidential Hammer Award in 1996 for his work on the Federal Geographic Data Committee.  He has authored numerous Earth science data compilations on compact disc, with access software (and user manuals), integrating multiple scientific disciplines in a desk-top environment; subset data selection and browse (via color maps and data profiles) are supported.  His support of environmental data stewardship, information technology innovation, and improved data fusion/visualization was acknowledged in 1995 with a Department of Commerce Silver Medal (in 1995) and Bronze Medal (in 1998).

Information International Web Site:  www.infointl.com
CENDI Web Site:  www.dtic.mil/cendi
NKOS Web Site:  www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/
E-mail: gailhodge@aol.com

Technology Innovations Manager
U.S. Geological Survey/Biological Resources Division
12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, 300 National Center,
Reston, VA   20192
(703) 648-4215
Email: judy_hunter@usgs.gov

Chris Jones is Professor of Geographical Information Systems at the University of Glamorgan. He has worked previously at the University of Cambridge,  BP Exploration and at the British Geological Survey. He graduated in geology, from Bristol University, and received a PhD, from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, for research on periodicities in fossil growth rhythms. Current research interests include the use of geographical information in hypermedia for public information access; multiscale spatial databases; the computer reconstruction and visualisation of fossils; and automated cartographic design with regard to map generalisation and
automated text placement. He initiated and led the development of the Maplex automated cartographic name placement software.

My interest in digital gazetteers stems from research that I have been engaged in for several years on the use of semantic models of geographically-referenced information for purposes of public information access, particularly in the context of museums. Previous research in collaboration with Douglas Tudhope and Carl Taylor led to the development of an experimental semantic hypermedia architecture which
combined geographic context with non-spatial classification and time. At present I am participating in a follow up project with Tudhope and Harith Alani in which we are developing a geographical thesaurus, which places a major emphasis on place names. We are using a semantic modelling tool to create a prototype thesaurus that includes place name data from the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, in combination with object classification data (AAT) and historical site data for a test area in Scotland. The geographical thesaurus is in some respects closely analogous to a typical gazetteer in that the amount of geometric data is strictly limited (principally point coordinates), but it differs in having richer semantic content.

Our research on geographical thesauri has several objectives that are directly relevant to the exploitation of gazetteers. In particular we are interested in a) automated techniques for approximating the spatial footprint from sparse data; b) including qualitative spatial relations with place names that may used in combination with the sparse geometric data; and c) the development of imprecise query processing through
spatial semantic closeness metrics that can be used to rank the importance of stored place names that do not match exactly the names that may be specified by a user.

I envisage that my main contribution to the workshop would be in highlighting issues regarding appropriate content for a standard gazetteer and in research directions that would assist in exploiting gazetteers in the context of geographical information retrieval.

Some relevant publications include the following:

Jones A.G., C.B. Jones and D. Tudhope (1998) 'Intelligent interpretation of terminology for a public access GIS'. Proceedings GIS Research UK (GISRUK98), Edinburgh, pp 11.11-11.15

Jones C.B. (1997) 'Geographical Information Access in Museums'. Editorial for Special Issue of MDA Information 2(3), pp 1-2.

Jones C.B. (1997) 'GIS and Museums', in Geographical Information Access in Museums, MDA Information 2(3), (special issue, edited by C.B. Jones), pp 21-26.

Jones C.B. (1997) 'Geographical interfaces to museum collections'. Proceedings Fourth International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums ICHIM97, pp 226-236.

Jones C.B., C. Taylor, D. Tudhope, P. Beynon-Davies (1996). 'Conceptual, spatial and temporal referencing of multimedia objects'. Advances in GIS Research II, Proceedings 7th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Delft, Taylor and Francis, pp 2.13-26.

Jones C.B., P. Beynon-Davies, C. Taylor and D.S. Tudhope (1995). 'GIS, hypermedia and historical information access', Information: The Hidden Resource, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of the Museum Documentation Association, Edinburgh, The Museum Documentation Association pp 109-113.

Tudhope, D., P. Beynon-Davies, C. Taylor and C. B. Jones (1995). 'Virtual architecture based on a binary relational model: a museum hypermedia application'. Hypermedia 6(3), pp 174-192.

Beynon-Davies P., D. Tudhope, C. Taylor and C.B. Jones (1994) 'A semantic database approach to intelligent hypermedia systems', Information and Software Technology, 36(6), pp 323-329.

I have recently been involved in devising and implementing an on-line geographic names registration system that is integrated with the State's mapping, and supports the devolution of naming responsibilities to local governing and administering agencies. The foundations of this system address (i) the changing nature of service delivery (esp. the increasing reliance on timely, accurate and unambiguous geospatial information, and the need for data availability and integration); (ii) process streamlining (only possible through re-engineering to suit and realise the opportunities that operating in a digital environment can offer); and (iii) the need to emphasise community input (by utilising and managing knowledge at the local level, and providing a transparent system).

On the national level, currently I am project managing the strategy development and implementation planning for the development and adoption of data modelling/data dictionary/ format /encoding standards Australasia - wide [through CGNA (Committee for Geographic Names in Australasia)].  One of the main drivers of this is not only the setting up of basic geographic naming infrastructure / protocols on a national level and the mechanisms to upgrade the quality of data and service to the customers of the national gazetteer, but to integrate the different State's gazetteers with the ICSM (Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping) topographic data model draft Australian and New Zealand standard.

Dr. Kottman holds a B.S. in Mathematics (Loyola Marymount U., Los Angeles), and a Ph.D. in Mathematics (University of Iowa).  His career has included research and education (at Louisiana State University, and Oregon State University, government and mapping (at the Defense Mapping Agency), systems integrator and software industries (at Lockheed and Intergraph Corporations), and not-for-profit technology companies (at MITRE and the Open GIS Consortium).  As Vice President and Chief Scientist of the Open GIS Consortium, Dr. Kottman leads the OGC Core and Domain Task Forces toward the establishment of consensus implementation specifications in the arena of geospatial information.

Dr. Kottman is a member of: the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping; the Federal Geographic Data Committee; the NCITS Committee L1 on Geographic
Information; the Mathematical Association of America; the American Mathematical Society; the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping; the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing; and he is the OGC Liaison to ISO Technical Committee 211.

Dr. Kottman has research interests in information theory, digital cartography, the representation of digital geographic information and its analysis, the standardization process, image processing, photogrammetry, library science, linguistics and semantics, and signal processing.

The Open GIS Consortium is composed of 185 organizational members, including major information technology corporations, universities, and government organizations who share the marketplace for geospatial information and services.  Our organization exists because major corporations and government agencies recognize that "non-interoperation" of geospatial information causes tremendous waste of resources in public and private projects, and because it is clear that there are great organizational efficiencies to be gained by effectively integrating spatial and place-based information into the corporate work-flow.

OGC membership includes the most important technology, geospatial product and integrator companies in the world, including Oracle, Informix, Microsoft, SUN, IBM, HP, Intergraph, ESRI, Autodesk, Sicad Geomatics, Deutsche PhonSat, MapInfo, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, BellSouth Telecommunications, Inc., Booz, Allen Hamilton, Inc., CSK Corp., Electricité de France, GEOCOM Informatik AG, Geodan Holding BV, GIS Denmark A/S, GTE, Harris Corp., Marconi Information Systems Inc., Matra Systemes & Information, MITRE Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation, NTT Data Corporation, Raytheon Systems Company, Litton/PRC/TASC, TRW Systems & Information Technology Group and Unisys.

OGC membership also includes many key government agencies both in the US and abroad - such organizations as the DOD's National Imaging and Mapping Agency, the US Geological Survey, the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation, the Bureau of the Census, the UK Ordnance Survey, the Mapping Agency of Korea and the Dutch Kadaster.

The membership also includes 56 universities, world wide.

The Consortium is shaping an open and efficient marketplace for geospatial services and information.  Recently, it has developed consensus implementation specifications for interfaces supporting "simple feature access" which include most or all of the behaviors needed by digital gazetteers.

David Lanter is responsible for developing, integrating, maintaining, and assuring the quality of Rand McNally's geographic data and derivative products. He holds a doctoral in Geographic Information Processing from University of South Carolina, a master's degree in Geographic Information Systems from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a bachelor's with honors from Clark University.  He has have taught digital cartography and geographic information systems at the Universities of Washington at Seattle and California at Santa Barbara.

"Prior to Rand McNally: At Microsoft Corp., I led the quality assurance of geospatial data and digital maps used in the company's electronic and internet products.  At Geographic Designs Inc., Rupert Essinger and  I pioneered the development of geospatial metadata software tools.  In addition, I have worked at Navigation Sciences developing real-time navigation systems for boats, and at Grumman Data Systems designing strategic and tactical cartographic applications for the AirForce.

A few items on my Team's wish list for a Digital Gazetteer:

• Prioritization: Found sets should be displayed in order of relative importance, possibly ranked by more than one parameter as determined by the user.
• Flexibility: The user should have some control over the display of found sets and be able to download the found set in a widely recognizable format (such as ASCII.)
• Background: There should be documentation for each country, similar to the Introduction carried in printed BGN volumes.
• Special Characters (Diacriticals): Special characters require special attention. The new BGN Geonet (still under development at this time) allows three ways to view special characters.
• Other Important Attributes: Each record should contain a date of last revision, possibly including source information, identification of language, and georeference information (lat/long.)
• Search Capabilities: The user should be able to combine a wide range of different attributes and criteria into a search.
• Graphical Interface: The ability to define a search area using a map would be helpful for international features."

Ray R. Larson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Information Management and Systems
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, California  94720-4600
Email: ray@sherlock.sims.berkeley.edu

I am the senior product manager for Oracle's Spatial Products Division. Current R&D interests lie in the development of spatial information infrastructures, digital libraries, and on-line catalog services.   My work is dedicated to the integration spatial information into mainline information technology, especially databases, and to enable enterprise and distributed geographic information processing. Germane projects include the delivery of wireless location services, XML spatial data servers, and
integration of vector, geoimage, and gazetteer data within object relational databases.

I am the Head of Technical Services for the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, and I also sit, as a deputy member, on the Foreign Names Committee of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) for the Library of Congress.  The Library's Member on the Board on Geographic Names is unable to attend the workshop because of a scheduling conflict. I am interested in the topic because of the impact on the name and subject authority files, which currently contain authority records for place names, produced by the Library of Congress, and because of my more than 30 years of experience in the the Geography and Map Division and in working toward the establishment of standards.  I was involved in the development of USMARC for cartographic materials, I assisted in the preparation of the FGDC Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata, and I am the current Secretariat for the Anglo-American Committee on Cataloguing Cartographic Materials, editors of Cartographic Matierals:  A Manual of Interpretation for AACR2.

Patrick McGlamery is the map librarian at the Map and Geographic Information Center Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut.  The map library is the host to a networked collection of over 20,000 geodata files for the state of Connecticut.  The on-line collection represents digital products of federal, state and municipal agencies.  MAGIC also serves as the state's NSDI site. MAGIC is moving toward a 'digital library' with stronger search components, internet mapping applications, cataloging/metadata and archiving responsibilities.  Mr. McGlamery has had an abiding interest in gazetteers and human links to the geographic landscape.  He was on the Advisory Board of the OmniGraphics Gazetteer of the United States and contributed the chapter, "Acquiring and Using Maps and Other Cartographic Resources."  Mr. McGlamery's interest in the Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange Workshop is based on creating natural language links to the geographic information of Connecticut.

The Data Library, based in the University of Edinburgh, has been part of the UK academic research infrastructure for more than a decade. The Data Library hosts EDINA (Edinburgh Data and Information Access), which is one of three national data centres funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). EDINA provides the academic community with access to both bibliographic datasets and geospatial research data.  EDINA supports some 20,000 users across 159 academic and research institutes. It successfully runs the UKBORDERS service on behalf of the ESRC/JISC 1991 Census Programme.  This delivers 37 different types of historical and current digitised boundary data of Great Britain to over 1200 registered users.

The Data Library has recently been awarded the contract by the JISC to establish a national service, called EDINA Digimap, providing on-line access to Ordnance Survey (OS) digital map data. One of the data products available through the Digimap service is the OS 1:50000 Place Name gazetteer. With over a quarter of a million entries the gazetteer is a comprehensive guide to place names within Great Britain from  'A' Bheinn Bhan' to 'Zulu Fm'. The gazetteer contains all place names that are present on Ordnance Survey's published 1:50 000 Landranger® maps. The Digimap team is developing an easy to use front end to this database that will allow the user to search by various means, e.g. 'find me all places in the county of X', and retrieve for each relevant entry the type of feature represented by the name; the latitude and longitude; the 1 and 20 km National Grid squares; the county the entry is in; the number(s) of the published Landranger® map sheets; and the date the entry was added to the gazetteer.

The Data Library is also involved in a number of gazetteer projects. The most important is its work with the Historic Data Service, part of the ESRC Data Archive, on a project to develop and provide an online, fast, scaleable and extensible British and Irish gazetteer which can handle changed and changing geographical boundaries. In order to do this the online British and Irish gazetteer would incorporate both historical and modern geographical perspectives, and hold a wide range of information about geographic names, units, and hierarchies. Staff in the Data Library are also involved with the Scottish Place-name Database project, and the place names components of the Scottish National Dictionary (Post 1700) and the Dictionary of Old Scottish Tongue (pre 1700). The Data Library is being considered as the service provider of the electronic resources resulting from these projects.

My interest in the workshop is in developing information systems which maintain and define digital gazetteers and in the conceptual mappings among different place name geographies (for example, is "ventura county" in "southern california"?).

Tom Moritz is Director of the Library at the American Museum of Natural History and currently is Principal Investigator on a $2 million, five year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to produce a digital library integrating all forms of natural history information -- including collections (specimen and artifact) data.  He is a long time participant in initiatives to develop inclusive strategies for capture and managment of museum information. (SEE
Spectra: (International Journal of the Museum Computer Network), Summer 1989, v.16(2):18,20. )  And at the Annual ESRI Users' Conference [GIS] in 1997 co-authored a presentation on the use of ARCVIEW to plot multidisciplinary, multi-institutional museum specimen data.  He is also Chair of the Information
Management Task Force for the World Commission on Protected Areas of IUCN (The World Conservation Union) and is vice-Chair of BCIS (the Biodiversity Conservation Information System) an international consortium of international organizations focusing on the managment and delivery of biodiversity information (SEE <www.biodiversity.org>).

Hopes for this meeting are that the needs for inclusion of retrospective ("obsolete") place names as needed by the museum, archaeological, art history and historical community can be entertained in gazetteer development and that a mechanism or mechanisms for distributed contributions to a common utility that meets this need can be developed.  Development of effective access to inclusive global map servers (current and retrospective maps) is another intertest.

Melissa is the Administrative Assistant for the Alexandria Digital Library Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and also the Administrative Assistant for the DGIE workshop.

Mike Mulligan works in the area of Informatics Research in the Center for Biological Informatics in Denver, a unit of the U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division. Prior to this assignment, he worked on information infrastructure with the National Biological Service, with the National Park Service's GIS program , with the Defense Mapping Agency, and with the Wetlands Habitat Inventory Unit for the NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation. He has an undergraduate degree in English and two Master's degrees in Geography: Cartography, 1982 (SUNY Oneonta) & GIS, 1992 (SUNY Buffalo).

Statement of Interest for the Workshop: For the international base of the Geospatial Data Clearinghouse it would be very helpful to establish a searching convention for the return of structured geospatial "place" information, similar to a DNS or LDAP response such that a user/software could retrieve authoritative or non-authoritative coordinate and reference info for a place. This is a type of geographic names service. Microsoft has proposed something similar, called Uniform Geographic Locators in the past, but I have not heard further work. The creation of a protocol and syntax for the query and retrieval of geographic place information would be a most useful outcome that geographic service providers could adopt. These should include governmental and commercial sources of place information and not be limited to traditional mapped locales but should support address matching for maximum application.
--
Douglas D. Nebert
Clearinghouse Coordinator
FGDC Secretariat
Phone: +1 703 648 4151
Fax: +1 703 648-5755
Pager Messaging: http://fgdclearhs.er.usgs.gov/dougmsg.html
Email: ddnebert@usgs.gov

I am responsible for an interagency digital library of the state of the environment (http://www.sdi.gov/diglib.htm) which involves creating metadata for documents that include both geographic places and environmental themes. I am also part of the Interagency LandView Planning Group (Census, NOAA, EPA, USGS, etc.) that makes GIS software and Federal geospatial databases and their metadata available to the public and for educational purposes including the USGS's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) (http://cdserver.er.usgs.gov/lviii.htm). I would like to make my digital library content searchable by coordinates as well as by place name and theme and include a Digital Gazetteer in our next public release of LandView on DVD-ROM and in our LandView-FGDC metadata clearinghouse. I have participated and made presentations in other Digital Government Workshops and recent digital library and metadata meetings.

Leslie Norton is the Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Arizona Department of Library, Archives and Public Records.  Duties include legislative liaison to the Arizona Legislature and responsibility for Department projects and reports.   Leslie is also the Administrative Assistant to the Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names, with responsibilities of: liaison for communication and activity between the board and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names; liaison for the board with city, county, state, federal, tribal authorities, and the general public; researching and processing name inquiries and proposals; coordinator and participant in outreach efforts to educate the public about the work of the board.

Leslie earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from Portland State University, Portland, Oregon.

Tim Norton was appointed to the Board on Geographic & Historic Names by the Governor in January 1993. He was elected Chair in January 1994 and has been re-elected every year since. He was re-appointed to the Board by the Governor in January 1998 for a 5 year term. He is one of two "public" Board members specified by statute. Prior to official status on the Board, he attended meetings as interested citizen.

He is a Phoenix Police Officer, with 19.5 years service, and currently serves as Administrative Officer to Assistant Police Chief over Investigations Division. He served 5 years with Arizona DPS (Highway Patrol).

He has made a presentation on "Arizona history and history of place names in Arizona."

He has a Bachelor Of Arts degree in Management from the University of Phoenix, 1986. His interests include:  photography, Arizona History, travel in Arizona and delving into "why is it called that?"

"I have been a user of maps and names information for many, many years and am considered a "ground pounder" when it comes to using the back roads and maps to figure out where I am or have been.  Names along the way are very useful to me and I always want to know more about the history behind the place name."

"My interest in this workshop lies in the following realms:
·       As a state names authority with decision making power regarding “official” names of the state of Arizona
·       As a state names authority using and contributing data
·       As a state names authority establishing and sharing data
·       As a “user” (i.e. public) of gazetteer information.

In addition, both of the individuals who provide research support to the Board are librarians.  The information gained from the workshop would be passed on to them to assist in their research and referral efforts."

Kathleen is the Coordinator for the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (CPCGN).  She has a Bachelor's degree in English and Latin and in 2001 will earn a Bachelor's degree in Geography.  Her first involvement with gazetteers came in 1973 as a student when, as part of her tasks,  Kathleen proofread the Gazetteer of Canada:  Alberta and did verification of information for the Gazetteer of Canada:  Ontario. Since 1976, Kathleen has worked on various facets (prefatory material, verifications of contents, decisions on format, etc.) of every gazetteer volume that has been published by the CPCGN, including the Concise Gazetteer of Canada published in 1997.  The CPCGN's card-index registry was automated in the late 1970s. As Senior Toponymist, Kathleen is responsible for entering correctly into the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base (CGNDB), all names decisions made by members of the CPCGN or by municipal authorities. Discrepancies or errors in the decisions must be referred back to the issuing province or territory for resolution. The decisions are transferred to topographic maps in the CPCGN's files, ready for the compilation of the next map edition.  Starting in the 1980s, the gazetteer volumes were created from the CGNDB.  The first digital version of a published gazetteer was the Gazetteer of Canada:  Nova Scotia in 1993.  In 1994, we put a copy of the CGNDB on the Internet <http://geonames.NRCan.gc.ca>.  Since December 1990, Kathleen has been lead editor on several issues of Canoma  (a publication about news and views on Canadian toponymy), including the issue celebrating the Centennial of the CPCGN.  She has written several geographical names articles for this publication over the years, including one for the issue celebrating the Centennial of the USBGN.  Several of her articles appear on the GeoNames SchoolNet web site  <http://geonames.NRCan.gc.ca/english/schoolnet>.
Kathleen has written several articles on geographical names and other subjects for local newspapers and the local historical society's newsletter. In 1998, Kathleen took on the first of eight genealogical web sites.

I am concerned about how you show verbal locational information to more than one language community in a gazetteer.  I expect to have other comments from
members of the CPCGN shortly.

It is important to have standards for digital gazetteer data.  Data should be obtainable from one central source.  Data at the province, territory, or state level should be the same as at the national level for the jurisdiction but might include information specific to that jurisdiction.  Changes to the data should only be made by designated persons, usually staff members. Outsiders should not be allowed to change the data.  Gazetteers and digital data bases should serve the language needs of their users.

Lola M. Olsen holds a B.S. degree in Biological Science from Michigan State University, a Masters' Degree in Geography/Earth Science from the University of North Carolina, and has completed course work for a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina in climatology.  She taught in the Earth Sciences Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte through 1985, then served as Project Manager for NASA's Climate Data System until 1994 when she became Project Manager for the Global Change Master Directory.  Ms. Olsen also taught Remote Sensing at the University of Maryland from 1992 - 1995 and annually mentors university students with remote sensing and GIS interests. She chairs the interagency Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS) subgroup of the US Global Change Research Program.

Email:  rpayne@USGS.GOV

For the past 7 years I have worked with NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Information Management Subsystem (IMS) team. Prior to this I worked with NASAs Pilot Land Data System and on various science projects with NASA and NOAA. My B.S and M.S degrees are in Geosciences and Remote Sensing from Purdue University.

As Lead Information Management System Engineer for EOSDIS, I am responsible for system interoperability, associated data management and user interface development.  Our users have a need for a gazetteer tool as part of our user interface.  A gazetteer can serve multiple purposes in our system. It serves the obvious need of connecting place names with geographic locations, but it can also serve as a way to connect geophysical phenomena and events with space and time coordinates so that users have much more flexibility in specifying search criteria.

Doug Ramsey is currently the director of the Remote Sensing and GIS laboratory at Utah State University.  He is a plant ecologist, remote sensing, and GISspecialist. Dr. Ramsey has a Bachelors of Science Degree in Range Resource Management, and a Masters of Science in Plant Ecology from Brigham Young University. His Doctorate is in Geography from the University of Utah. Dr. Ramsey's main interest lie in applying digital remote sensing data to ecosystem modeling and developing GIS data bases to aid in resource management and research. He has 11 years of practical experience using LANDSAT MSS and TM, AVHRR, SPOT, as well as aerial photography and airborne videography. Dr. Ramsey has conducted research in the Western U.S., Mexico, Egypt, and Iceland in semi­arid, forested, agricultural, and urbanized landscapes. He has developed techniques for analyzing spatial data using GIS to solve problems in natural resource management, geology, landscape ecology and archeology. He has extensive experience with the ERDAS image processing and GIS system, ELAS image processing software, and ARC/INFO vector based GIS. At present he is on the faculty of the Department of Geography and Earth Resources, College of Natural Resources, Utah State University.  His main responsibilities are to conduct research in remote sensing and GIS, as well as teach introductory and advanced remote sensing and GIS courses. He has organized and taught 4 week­long and 1 month­long workshops in remote sensing and GIS for natural resource managers, and works closely with land management agencies to train personnel in the use of remotely sensed data and GIS.

Email: rrand@nal.usda.gov

Edie Rasmussen is currently Professor in the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.  She has also held appointments at the School of Library and Information Studies at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, at the School of Library Science at the Institiut Teknoloji MARA, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  Dr. Rasmussen holds a B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia and an M.Sc. degree from McMaster University, both in Chemistry, an M.L.S. degree from the University of Western Ontario, and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of Sheffield.   She has been active in the Digital Library research community, serving as Conference Chair for the 2nd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries in 1997, and on the Steering Committee and Program Committee for the 1998 and 1999 Conferences.  She was a plenary speaker at ISDL'97, an international symposium on digital libraries held in Japan.  Her current research interests include indexing and information retrieval in text and multimedia databases.  She is currently working on PEN-DOR, a project to create a digital library to support authoring of multimedia curricular materials for the K-12 educational environment, funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

My research interest in geographic information systems involves the possibility of identifying particular people or groups of people through identification of place.  For two decades my research has focused on the privacy implications of new communication and information technologies.  As geographic systems become more sophisticated and more powerful, it is possible that privacy implications might be raised by these systems.  I would see my role at the workshop as in helping to identify the research and policy issues that are assoicated with the development of digital gazetters.

Mr. Rivera is a University teacher of history and geography in Honduras C.A. He has a Bachelor degree in Social Sciences, a License degree in History, and a Master's degree in Geography from New Mexico State University. He has created geographical dictionaries and a gazetteer of Honduras places. In addition, he has worked as an Instructor to the Pan America Institute of Geography and History's Geographic Names Course, made in Latin American countries.

It is a pleasure to attend the DGIE Workshop in which I will find people who work as myself in gazetteers and geographic names. I am really interested in sharing information, sources and knowledges among colleagues and friends around America and the world.

Along with Roger Payne, I served on the Features Working Group of the National Committee for Digital Cartographic Data Standards, a project of ACSM that led to the adoption of the Spatial Data Transfer Standard as a Federal Information Processing Standard.  The Features Working Group developed Part 2 of SDTS, "Spatial Features."  Following the adoption of SDTS in 1993, I went on to lead the work item on "Feature Cataloguing Methodology" of the newly formed International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics).  I have also served since 1993 on the American National Standards Institute accredited technical committee L1 (for GIS standards) as the project leader for "Geospatial Objects and Codes."  (The L1 committee would be the logical place to refer a proposed work item for the standardization of digital gazetteer information.)

I question the assertion in the workshop proposal that feature type schemes "need to be hierarchical."  Relationships and operations are at least equally important as bases for feature classification, and the resulting classes are unlikely to be hierarchically ordered.  Hierarchies vary with applications and with cultures.  I strongly doubt there is such a thing as a "generally applicable" hierarchy of feature types.

The fundamental question in devising a strategy for standardization is the definition of a "digital gazetteer."  In particular, what aspects of geographic data searching and retrieval are not included in this concept, if any?  Depending on the answer to this question, either (a) there are many current and proposed GIS standards for which digital gazetteers are already in scope or (b) digital gazetteers may constitute a new and somewhat different area for future GIS standardization.

Because the State Department's mandate is international affairs, we are interested almost exclusively in data dealing with areas outside of the United States.  Our specific work projects tend to be dictated by international crises, which often occur in places where geospatial data is relatively scarce. We are currently working to apply the use of GIS in a variety of projects for the Department.  Recently Kosovo has been a major focus of our work, and a NIMA-produced gazeteer of that region
proved invaluable during the recent crisis.

I have been a State Department officer since 1974.  My degrees are in economics (B.A., Rice University) and Latin American history (Ph.D., University of Texas), and I have done post-doctoral study in demography (Georgetown University) and geography (George Mason University).  In recent years I have been working with various GIS applications.

Email: Snt@agiweb.org
(703) 379-2480  (phone)
(703) 379-7563  (fax)

Through my involvement with GeoRef for the last twenty-five years, I have become interested in the use of geographic identifiers for search and retrieval in bibliographic databases.  The GeoRef database is a bibliographic geoscience database referencing studies of the Earth throughout the world.  Defining specific geographic areas is essential to usage of our data and, as part of that need, we have developed controlled terminology for approximately 13,000 geographic areas. Where possible we have also defined these areas using latitude and longitude boxes.

Email: vieglais@ukans.edu
Phone: 785-864-7792
Fax: 785-864-5335
http://chipotle.nhm.ukans.edu/NABIN

Primary interest: Programatic interface to world-wide gazetteer to provide automated determination of latitude and longitude (+elevation) from locality information, specifically, but not exclusively, for georeferencing natural history specimens.  The interface must work across the internet using a well known protocol such as CORBA, Z39.50, or HTTP+XML, and must provide rapid determination to a large number of clients simultaneously.

Secondary interest: Providing additional information for gazetteer layers from biodiversity information held in biological collections databases and simulated organism distributions via conformance to the GEO Z39.50 profile.

tel +44 1954 251003
fax +44 1954 201999
email robwalker@cix.co.uk

I am an independent consultant specialising in geographic information, working mostly in the utility and government sectors. I am active in standards making, and am a member of the British Standards Committee on geographic information. I have a particular interest in spatial referencing and data quality, and was the principal author of the British Standards for street gazetteers and addressing. As the UK representative on ISO/TC 211 WG3 Spatial data administration, I am Project Leader for Spatial referencing - Geographic identifiers.

I am the primary coordinator for research and collections informatics projects for the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.  Among other duties, I coordinate the collections (including taxonomic and geographic) databases and web-enabled databases for the NMNH.  I am interested in using digital gazetteers to enhance our large (ca. 5 million records) and growing specimen databases.  We have both tremendous needs and tremendous untapped resources in this area.

I am also a Ph.D. systematic botanist and Research Associate in the Department of Botany.  As a researcher I see nearly endless needs and uses for georeferenced data in systematic research.  In turn, better data for systematics studies will allow for better understanding of biodiversity.

Mr. White's educational background includes a Masters Degree in Public Administration and a Bachelors Degree in Geography, both from West Virginia University, and a certificate in geographic information systems from Northern Virginia Community College.   Other academic accomplishments are an internship with a regional economic development organization and commissioning as a reserve officer through Air Force ROTC.  Additionally, Mr. White has significant training in systems management, object-oriented technology, imaging sciences, remote sensing , and contract management.

Mr. White's has worked for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) and the Defense Mapping Agency (NIMA's predecessor) for the past ten years, first as a production cartographer, then systems manager, and now as a physical scientist.  His duties for the last three years have been as a project manager and as a contracting officer's representative of R&D projects.  A majority of the projects have dealt with object-oriented approaches for geospatial applications and data interoperability issues.

Interests in the DGIE are how the ideas could be incorporated into existing geospatial data interoperability efforts. The goal is to examine ways to overcome barriers to interoperability without losing data quality. Particular attention will be to examine how DGIE  ideas  may be used in treating features and their attributes (names, metadata, etc.) as objects.

I am the Senior Museum Scientist here at UCR's Entomology Research Museum, in charge of some 2 million insect specimens (in the top 25 insect collections in the US). I have also designed and am doing the data entry for the database we are using to inventory this collection, and I make DAILY use of the GNIS and GEONET on-line gazetteers, as I add georeferencing information to the records. While our needs may differ little in most respects from those working with other types of natural history collections, I think the sheer volume of geographic data associated with even an average insect collection makes those of us who work with them especially well-suited for inclusion in a workshop of this sort; the *scale* of the task of georeferencing several million specimens is such that possibly no one else stands to derive greater practical benefit from ANYTHING that can help streamline the acquisition of gazetteer data. My personal experience as a database designer (I've designed databases now in use at the University of Kansas, Illinois Natural History Survey, and UCR), and regular contact with other folks in the bioinformatics circle, such as Peter Rauch, Dan Janzen, Chris Thompson, Len Krishtalka, Rob Colwell, and Jim Beach.

MARCIA LEI ZENG, M.A., Wuhan University; Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh.
Major research interests: knowledge organization and representation, multilingual information processing and publishing, information retrieval, indexing and abstracting, and database quality control.  Recent research projects include (1) a system designed for cross-thesauri searching and for multi-thesauri management (http://circe.slis.kent.edu/mzeng/macmed/tmshome.html) for a complementary and alternative medicine resource; (2) a study of various metadata for describing historical fashion objects; and (3) a Chinese text segmentation program and a large-scale term dictionary which supports the segmentation (http://circe.slis.kent.edu/mzeng/carlseg.html).  My interests that overlap with this workshop's focus reside on two major areas: multilingual issues involved in indirect spatial referencing of information resources through geographic names, and the potential usage of digital gazetteer in information exchange among various countries and cultures. I also hope to contribute to the workshop through my knowledge of multilingual processing and my research in classification and vocabulary control.