A Multilingual Gazetteer System for Integrating
Spatial and Cultural Resources

Project funded by NSF IM/ITR grant 0114019, September 2001 through August 2002
Principal Investigator: Lewis Lancaster

Abstract | Proposal | Summary

Digital library research has become concerned with a steadily increasing range of genres and materials and, more challengingly, with the use of diverse digital genres in conjunction with each other. Researchers associated with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative are investigating means of combining textual information with geospatial data, enabling cultural, historical, and social data to be represented in time and space through Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Linking the mention of place names to maps involves three different genres: toponym-rich texts, GIS maps, and, mediating between the two, gazetteers, structured records about locations and their names.

Making gazetteers available to the users and contributors of digital library resources, permitting indirect referencing and GIS mapping of places, is key to communicability among digital resources with geospatial information. Gazetteer resources can also integrate scientific and demographic data about places with the global, multilingual records of human culture, art, literature, biography, history and other fields that are rapidly being digitized.

Important gazetteers are being developed by a number of digital humanities projects worldwide. The rise of a networked environment makes it possible to draw on multiple, network-accessible gazetteer servers. Unfortunately, the effective use of gazetteers in historical and humanities computing is impeded by the lack of standards for both the records about places within gazetteers, and for records describing the gazetteers themselves. The emerging standards for conventional gazetteer entries, based largely upon contemporary North American gazetteers that focus on environmental science, are inadequate for humanities computing. New work is required to extend these standards to accommodate:

  • multiple toponyms in multiple scripts that refer to the same geospatial location
  • the instability of toponyms over time
  • changing boundaries, locations, and spatial footprints of places (as towns become cities or rivers spring their banks)

In addition, the range of types of geographical entities currently used in gazetteer place name type thesauri (bridge, tumulus, church) are simply not detailed enough to accommodate the range of place name types found in the global, historical texts about human culture.

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