Notes from the introductory meeting of the
Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange
(DGIE) Working Group, December 11, 1998, USGS Room 1B215, Reston VA
Written up by Linda Hill.
The meeting was convened by Linda Hill of the Alexandria Digital Library
Project of the University of California at Santa Barbara, CA and hosted
by the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey. There
were 22 attendees from 8 government agencies (USGS, NIMA, NASA, NOAA, Census,
NPS, LC, & Smithsonian), one professional association (AGI), and one
university (UCSB).
Hill passed out a pre-publication paper on the Alexandria Digital Library
gazetteer research and development and presented the information in the
paper.
Following discussion identified the following issues:
-
Roger Payne expressed concern about the effect of "non-authorized" gazetteers
on the use of place names by federal government agencies. The BGN is authorized
to standardize the use of place names by the federal government.
-
Fred Broome noted that changes are constantly taking place in the names
of places and in the boundaries of administrative areas and that ways to
accommodate and manage this change must be part of gazetteer development.
This is part of the updating and management aspects of gazetteers to keep
them current by incorporating changes from various originators and suppliers.
-
For international and multi-lingual purposes, representations for extended
character sets need to be incorporated into the exchange format. For example,
XML coding that specifies UNICODE format. We should also be aware that
we will have to "deliver" basic ASCII as well as UNICODE since many "receivers"
will not be able to use the extended character sets due to hardware and
software limitations.
-
Fuzzy areas, such as "The Midwest", cannot be part of the official BGN
gazetteers because there is not a consensus about what area that is exactly.
They can, however, be represented in other gazetteers and need to be there
to support information retrieval – e.g., "what does the information system
know about the Midwest?" would be a reasonable end user question. There
need to be ways to elicit and represent such fuzzy areas and ways of presenting
them to users so that the generalized nature of the footprint is clear.
In an information retrieval system, the user should be able to accept the
area’s "footprint" as a query area or modify it and then use it as a query
area.
-
Bibliographic files, such as library catalogs and indexing services, use
place names from authority files or thesauri to describe the geographic
areas that documents are "about." These files are typically not geospatially
referenced (GeoRef’s place names are the exception). An area of investigation
is how well can we use spatially-referenced gazetteers to apply geospatial
footprints to the documents in bibliographic files.
-
The accuracy of the boundaries represented in gazetteers needs to be documented
so that users can properly evaluate what they are being shown.
-
NASA is looking into the use of spherical quadtree representations for
spatial footprints.
-
Physiographic features are of particularly high value and should have priority
in building gazetteers for information systems.
-
In the world of natural history museums, there are community-developed
gazetteers that are developed for the particular purposes of that community.
Professionals working in that environment create place name definitions
as part of their activities but probably are not aware that they are in
fact creating gazetteer data. We should develop ways for this information
to "migrate to" or be "harvested by" gazetteer systems.
-
Historical place names and historical footprints are very important for
inclusion in digital gazetteers.
Everyone in the group indicated that they would like to continue as part
of the working group to put together a proposal for development of a Digital
Gazetteer Information Exchange (DGIE) project. In particular, we will aim
for a proposal to submit to the NSF Digital Government Initiative by their
March 1 deadline. Roger Payne will chair the Working Group as head of the
Board on Geographic Names. The next meeting of the DGIE WG is scheduled
for the morning of January 8th. Between now and then, proposal
documents will be developed and distributed for comment.
In particular, the following comments were recorded by agency:
Census: Fred Broome will be the initial contact but as the structure
and focus of the WG is developed either the technical or the taxonomic
Census group will be the primary contact. The Census role is seen to be
as a data contributor with limited personnel involvement. They will be
both a contributor and a user.
Smithsonian: Can contribute small gazetteer data sets, user requirements,
user testing and evaluation. Janet Gomon is primary contact.
Board on Geographic Names: Includes NIMA (Randy Flynn), USGS/BGN/GNIS
(Roger Payne), and Library of Congress (Ron Grim and Elizabeth Mangin).
USGS: USGS/NMD (Beth Duff), USGS/FGDC (Barbara Poore)
NASA: Karen Moe will be the primary contact. NASA interested primarily
as a user of gazetteer data and in querying gazetteers as part of the EOSDIS
project.
NBII/BRD: The National Biological Information Infrastructure and the
Biological Resources Division of the USGS in interested in developing testbed
sites, developing user requirements, and in proposal development.
National Park Service: Leslie Armstrong will be the primary contact.
NOAA – Will have to discuss involvement further.
GeoRef (Sharon Tahirkheli) will continue as an observer.
Attendees: Initial Meeting of Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange (DGIE)
Working Group, 12/11/98
Abbreviations you might not know
AGI = American Geological Institute
BGN = Board on Geographic Names
BRD = Biological Resources Division
FGDC = Federal Geographic Data Committee
GCMD = Global Change Master Directory
GSFC = Goddard Space Flight Center
NBII = National Biological Information Infrastructure
NESDIS = NOAA Earth Science Data and Information System
NIMA = National Imagery and Mapping Agency
NMD = National Mapping Division
UCSB = University of California, Santa Barbara