Building a Gazetteer

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read

Date

Jan 23, 2014

Attendees

  • bess - Stanford

  • Darren Hardy - Stanford

  • Jack Reed - Stanford
  • Eliot Jordan - Princeton
  • Alicia Morris - Tufts
  • Longshou Situ - UCSD
  • Vivian Chu - UCSD
  • Arwen Hutt - UCSD

Goals

  • In the GIS in Hydra working group, there was a lot of discussion about gazetteers, and concern for how we might build it. This is a session to grapple with that.

What's a gazetteer? 

A gazetteer is a tool for disambiguating places. Each place has a place name, unique id, location (lat/long), alt names, names in other languages. 

The gazetteer we're building at Stanford links all place names in our collection with GeoNames (http://www.geonames.org) and Library of Congress Name Authority Files (LOCNAF) for place names. 

A library might want to build a gazetteer to track local place names, historic place names, alternate place names. 

What tools can you use to build a gazetteer? What linkages might you want? How might you use it?

We want to be able to drive a spatial search off of the library of congress geographic subject headings, but to do that we need to connect each subject heading with a lat/long. We can get that from GeoNames, as long as we map everything. UCSD wants the same functionality. Desire in the room to move toward linked data for geographic subjects instead of strings. 

Remember: place names and locations can be contested! It's best to have a field for assertion. Who says this place is called by this name? (E.g., places in disputed territory might go by different names depending on who is publishing the map)

Other data sources: TGN (thesaurus of geographic names, not published as linked data); getty vocabularies

GeoNames aggregates many of these. GeoNames also has a functionality where you can add an alternate name. Maybe we could start adding LCNAF names here?

Some NAF records in LoC have GeoNames lat/long values: http://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?AuthRecID=3286363&v1=1&HC=1&SEQ=20140123192910&PID=4Nu1fBIotg3hALd4YiXHB0ReKWlr

Jack edited a geonames record and added an LC subject heading here: http://www.geonames.org/1279344/adilabad.html and now you can search geonames for the LC id number and it returns it!

Interesting Links:

Added LOC named link to GeoNames Entry

LOC entry: http://lccn.loc.gov/n2007200836

GeoNames entry: http://www.geonames.org/1279344/adilabad.html

Action Items