PNC / ECAI Joint Meetings
October 19 - 22, 2004
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Schedule | PNC Site

ECAI Plenary
October 19, 1400 - 1530
Room 2
Chair: Lewis Lancaster, ECAI and University of the West
buddhst@socrates.berkeley.edu

“Introduction”
Lewis Lancaster, University of California, Berkeley
buddhst@socrates.berkeley.edu
 
“ECAI - Where are we? Accomplishments and Challenges”
Jeanette Zerneke, University of California, Berkeley
jlz@berkeley.edu


ECAI has accomplished many of the goals it envisioned at its inception. At the same time we have a much greater understanding of the challenges facing implementation of a global infrastructure and standards for interoperative cultural atlases.

The ECAI clearinghouse is stable and hosting significant spatial resources. It is an active portal for cultural spatial data resources. Can it now grow into being a significant global digital library resource? What can we learn about requirements for building the global digital library infrastructure from our experiences with the ECAI Clearinghouse? Can it fit into a future generation of Grid Digital Library resources?

ECAI has developed a global consortium working to develop the genre of cultural atlases. Many scholars are working on digital atlases, including development of local, regional and global atlases. These atlases in turn are linked in a growing web of interactive dynamic atlases. Several recent projects will be highlighted including, Ivories of Begram, Afghanistan and the North American Missions electronic publication.

 
"Recent developments in TimeMap and the TimeMap Open Source Consortium"
Ian Johnson, University of Sydney
johnson@acl.archaeology.usyd.edu.au


Over the past six months the TimeMap project has developed fully automatic publication of TMJava maps to CD-ROM, intranet and Internet sites; launched an Open GIS Consortium WMS-compatible server (with extended functionality for generating Flash animations on the fly) and streamlined the installation of TimeMap for shared computers (e.g. computing labs).

In this presentation I will discuss the current status of the TimeMap software and introduce the recently launched TimeMap Open Source Consortium, which is funding the development of and Open Source version of TimeMap (version 3). The Consortium web site provides access to nightly builds, documentation, application examples and a user forum, which will be demonstrated.

 
“Gazetteers and Maps to Improve Library Catalogs”
Michael K. Buckland, University of California, Berkeley
buckland@sims.berkeley.edu


Library catalogs are limited in their ability to support searching by place, even though there may be multiple geographical clues in a standard catalog record. In the Library of Congress Subject Headings system a place name may be used as a subject heading or as a geographical subdivision to qualify any other subject heading. Place names may occur in the title or among the publication data. In addition the MARC format provides for Geographical Area Code (043) for a special coding for geographical scope.

The paper will report the findings of a project entitled “Going Places in the Catalog: Improved Geographic Access” which is concerned with how a gazetteer could be used in conjunction with an online catalog. A gazetteer could provide improved place name disambiguation when the same name is used for different places and when different names are used for the same place.

Since gazetteers contain latitude and longitude for each place, it becomes possible to display retrieved results as a map display and also to use a map display to help specify or modify a search query. In addition, the codes for “Feature type” (kind of place) become available as possible enrichment of the catalog record both for description and for search query specification.

A statistical analysis of geographical data in 5 million catalog records will be presented. Possible future research will be discussed, including temporal searching (search by named time periods) in library catalogs and the implications of this work for improved bibliographical access. A description of this project is available at http://ecai.org/imls2002/
 
“The Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas: Digital Gazetteer Design for Cultural Atlas Development”
Ruth Mostern, University of California, Merced
rmostern@ucmerced.edu


Variations in time and place are vitally significant to the practice of religion. During the 5,000 years of Chinese history, Daoism and indigenous practices flourished in every region of the realm. Foreign religions including Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Christianity, entered and spread throughout China. These religions are all associated with many locations: temples, pilgrimage routes, sacred spring and mountains, schools, and many other types of places.

In January 2004, the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative began development of a Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas to allow map-based investigation of Chinese religious history. The Atlas is designed as a set of digital gazetteers. These databases of named places allow alternate names in many languages to be associated with each other, related places to reference one another through the use of a relationship type vocabulary, and will include temporal information (such as dates of founding, abolition or name change), bibliographical information, and certainty notes. The multiple gazetteers that comprise the Atlas will be linked to websites, images, related databases, close investigations of particular sites, and map visualization.

In this initial year of Atlas development, collaborators are focusing on content development: identifying experts, finding the most useful digital or paper texts and maps for documenting Chinese religion, designing draft databases, harvesting information from the texts, and collating and refining the information to produce standards-compliant and comprehensive gazetteers of religious information. On the basis of that data, we are creating feature-type and relationship-type vocabularies.
Special challenges for the Religious Atlas include geographically and temporally referencing historical information derived from texts, and creating a system for networking gazetteers which can achieve broad-based buy-in from diverse collaborators.

This paper will discuss recent developments and future plans for the Atlas in light of ECAI’s long-standing interests in several areas: Cultural Atlases as a genre, networked access to georeferenced information, and multilingual cultural gazetteers.