Research Initiatives

ECAI is engaged in research in various fields of information technology. Some of the projects currently under development include:

  • Digital Gazetteers: In collaboration with the Academia Sinica Computing Centre, this is a project to extend the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) gazetteer standard to accommodate historical, cultural and multilingual data and to link gazetteers with texts and other resources in the ECAI architecture and link gazetteer data to GIS visualization. This will enable collaborators who do not collect spatial data themselves to see their work linked to maps. ECAI Gazetteer Project.

  • ePublication Standards Development: ECAI ePublications use GIS and other digital technologies. At the same time, they adhere to conventional standards of rigor, documentation, and review. The initiative will be successful only if we can create publications that are understandable and acceptable to the academic community . Therefore, in collaboration with the California Digital Library, we are organizing focus groups of diverse academic personnel to comment upon published ECAI projects and the ECAI publication process.

  • Query and Discovery Tools: In collaboration with the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems, we are working to bring complex discovery techniques to bear on searches of the metadata clearinghouse and on narrowing, organizing and rectifying the resources that are displayed following a first-level search. This will ensure that users can create the most accurate and precise maps possible based on their interests and will aid in achieving the highest degree of interoperability. Additional projects include work focused on effective catalog searching by place using a gazetteer to disambiguate placenames. The Going Places in the Catalog project addresses these issues. More recently a project titled Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who expands catalog searching further by integrating specialized digital library resources: subject catalogs, gazetteers, chronologies, and biographical dictionaries.

  • GIS for the Humanities: Unlike the fields for which GIS was first developed, humanities scholars often have incomplete, contradictory or ambiguous spatial data. In collaboration with the Polis Center, we are developing a curriculum for training ECAI collaborators in GIS technology and adapting the technology for the needs of these scholars. In collaboration with the UC Berkeley GIS Center, we developed a graduate seminar on the same topic. Karen Kemp, Associate Professor of Geography at Redlands University and an ECAI Strategy Committee member, is also pursuing research on this theme.

  • Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas: Development began on the Religious Atlas of China and the Himalayas in January 2004. The Atlas, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, is based on a set of historical gazetteers--indexes of georeferenced place names. Upon completion in 2006, the Atlas is expected to include names, dates, coordinates, and associated information for several thousand religious places in China and the Himalayas, including mosques, churches and temples; sacred mountains; religious kingdoms; monumental statuary, and other categories of features. Users will be able to make maps and time lines, conduct queries to learn how places are linked by sect, place, personage and other characteristics; and link from the brief records in the gazetteer to rich documentation such as images, scholarship, and additional information about each place. The Atlas is a collaborative endeavor being developed by a team of scholars throughout North America, Asia, and Europe.