Digital Gazetteers in the UK : the geo-X-walk Project at

EDINA

Presented by: Andy Corbett (Development Engineer)

James S Reid (Project manager)

18.7.02

Roadmap

•Context - JISC , EDINA & gazetteers

•Gazetteer Content

•Technical and Implementation Issues

•The future...

EDINAEDINA*

(Edinburgh Data and Information Access) •a JISC-funded national datacentre based at the University of Edinburgh,Scotland

• offers the UK tertiary education and research community networked access to a library of data, information and research resources.

•services are available free of charge to members of UK tertiary education institutions for academic use, although institutional subscription and end-user registration are required for most services.

•30+ services - bibliographic,MPS and geo

•Service focus + development project-to-full service strand

* "Edina" is also the ancient and poetic name for Edinburgh, Scotland. Robert Burns wrote "Address To Edinburgh", which begins, "Edina! Scotia's darling seat!"

The JISC Information Environment is…

• a national digital library... for higher and further education

• a managed collection of resources

• a distributed resource supporting learning and research in the UK

• heterogeneous… bibliographic, images, data, video, geo-spatial, etc.

• an information environment that enables people to discover, access and use a wide variety of quality assured resources

• simple underlying functional model of the Information Environment - discover, access, use, publish

JISC are interested in applying this model to geographic information and

also desire to look for ways to enable geographic searching of the Information Environment

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is the strategic advisory committee for the UK

academic sector.

geo-X-walk - a gazetteer service

• Digital Gazetteer - An electronic list of geographic features together with their associated spatial location

• Digital Gazetteer Service - A network-addressable middle-ware server supporting geographic referencing and searching

• aim: develop a demonstrator gazetteer service suitable for extension to full service

• a shared service within the JISC IE

• phase II demonstrator project - commenced June 2002

• builds on the ideas of the ADL

• similar to the ADL approach (Linda Hill et al)

• structural model: metadata model v. hierarchical thesaurus

• emphasis on implicit spatial relationships over explicitly stated relationships

• represent objects by correct geometry

• feature type thesaurus important

• merge data from various sources

• comprehensive description but with small set of core elements– temporal aspects of names, footprints, relationships, …– document source, spatial accuracy/scale of footprint

• technically challenging and many data related issues….

geo-X-walk : Overview

Reference use

Information server

Information server

Searching

Geo-parsing &indexing

The geo-X-walkServer

Assist information services with searching

• geographic searching is an important and powerful information retrieval facility

• need to support a full range of geographic search options

• more efficient to map a user view to native spatial coding scheme

• use implicit spatial relationships to ‘cross-walk’ between geographies

• machine to machine interaction (m2m)

Geo-parsing and indexing

• increasing demand from data providers, archives, libraries, and museums to support geographic searching

• BUT large number of information resources NOT geographically indexed

• assist in the geo-referencing of information objects– parse documents, metadata records etc. to identify geographic names,

features and other geographies– semi automatic indexing

• ideally everyone should use standard spatial coding scheme – why? Because wide variety of geographies exist which change over time!– geographic coordinates preferred choice i.e GB National Grid /lat long– convert into geographic 'footprints’

Reference Use - Example queries

What is at grid ref. NT 258 728?

Where is Ormskirk?

What is the county town of Shropshire?

List me all places ending with ‘chester’

What parishes fall within the Lake District National Park?

On what river is Liverpool situated?

Which Roman roads pass through Leicestershire? By what alternative names

has York been known?

Anticipated uses of gazetteer service

• Reference source for researchers, libraries and museums

• Assist metadata creators– Convert different geographic identifiers to standard coding scheme– Geo-parser for semi-automatic indexing– Facilities to resolve variant names etc.

• Provide services with means to support full range of spatial searching– no need to hold data to resolve spatial query

• Interest outside academic sector

Roadmap (reprise)

•Gazetteer Content

•Technical and Implementation Issues

•The future...

Edina Gazetteer

• 4 ‘M’s:– Multi-source

– Multi-scale

– Metadata model

– Multi-problem!

• ‘Near contemporary’ focus

•Boundary data - EDINA UKBORDERS service

•Contemporary places - Ordnance Survey•1:50,000 (medium scale) Placename

Gazetteer •1:1250 (large scale,cartographic) Land-

line product

•Additional features - range of OS products•miscellaneous ‘special’ gazetteers

•e.g. GB Waypoints•a gazetteer of Cold War sites in the UK

Major Issues of:

Complexity

Feature Typing

Positional accuracy

Alternative Names

Time stamping

Data incompleteness

Before we started...

Boundary Complexity•Over digitisation => thousands of points in a geometry•‘Region’ polygons (i.e. > 1 polygon)•Different sources, different scales - which is ‘correct’?

Placename Problems•Cartographic vs geographical placement•Feature typing - high proportion of ‘miscellaneous’ features•Placename changes through time•Alternate names e.g. multilingual representations

Licensing•Stakeholder involvement•Terms and conditions of use

In particular...

Boundaries in Fife, Scotland

Gazetteer Architecture

• ADL Model

• Modified ADL Feature Type Thesaurus

• Ingres Relational Database

• Spatial Searching

•Continue database population

•Benchmarking alternative implementations - bespoke/Oracle/Laser-scan

•Interfaces - human:machine / machine:machine

•Data issues - rights to data / limitations of use

The Future

A going away thought

http://edina.ac.uk

EDINAData LibraryGeorge SquareUniversity of EdinburghEH8 9LJScotland,UK

Tel: +44 (0)131 651 1383Fax: +44 (0)131 650 3308James Reidjames.reid@ed.ac.uk

Contacts and More Info @

EDINA http://edina.ac.ukData LibraryGeorge SquareUniversity of EdinburghEH8 9LJScotland,UK

Tel: +44 (0)131 651 1383Fax: +44 (0)131 650 3308James S Reidjames.reid@ed.ac.uk

Contacts and More Info @

Geo-spatial data“data that have some form of spatial or geo-graphic reference that enables them to be located in two- or three-dimensional space”

Statistical Account of Scotland

NUMBER XIII.

PARISH OF CULLEN.

(COUNTY OF BANFF, SYNOD OF ABERDEEN, PRESBYTERY OF FORDYCE.)

By the Rev. Mr. ROBERT GRANT.

Royalty, Extent, Climate, etc.

CULLEN, as appears from old charters, was originallycalled Inverculan, because it stands upon the bank ofthe Burn of Cullen, which, at the N. end of the town, fallsinto the sea: but now it is known by the name of Cullen on-ly. Cullen is a royal burgh, formerly a constabulary, ofwhich the Earl of Findlater was hereditary constable. Theset, as it is called, of the council, consists of 19, in which num-ber are included the Earl of Findlater, hereditary preses, 3bailies, a treasurer, a dean-of-guild, and 13 counsellors. Theparish extends from the sea fouthward, about 2 English milesin length.

JISC Information Environment

Portal

Content providers

End-user

Go-Geo! Portal

Broker/Aggregator

Authentication

Authorisation

Collect’n Desc

Service Desc

Resolver

Inst’n Profile

Shared services

Portal

Provision layer

Fusion layer

Presentationlayer

geo-X-walk

Example application

Go-Geo! Portal

Gazetteer Server

geo-X-walk

geo-X-walk

Geo-parser Server

ContentProvider 1

ContentProvider 2

ContentProvider 3

ContentProvider 4

customised requests

crosswalk spatialcomponent

geo-parse records (exp)

initiate search('Edinburgh')

return resultset

content spatiallyindexed

content not spatially indexed

content providerprofiles

JISC IE