
Senckenberg Research Institute and Museum, Frankfurt	Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem

Abstracts

TDWG 2000: Digitising Biological Collections
Taxonomic Databases Working Group, 16th Annual Meeting
Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, November 10-12, 2000

Linda L. Hill*

Biological collections to digital gazetteers: placenames and site referencing

* Alexandria Digital Library Project, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1205 Girvetz, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA

[Keynote address]

Gazetteers are sometimes referred to as "geographic taxonomies" since they serve to organize the geospatial dimension of information in concert with other organizing dimensions, such as type taxonomies. There is a new conception of and appreciation of the role of gazetteers in information management, especially the role of indirect geospatial referencing of information resources with place names and the process of converting these placename references to map locations. To implement this, we must consider the issues associated with several components: the design of content standards for gazetteer data and the core elements of those formats; the design of gazetteer services such as geolocator services (where is [placename]?), geoparsing services (what location is this resource about?), protocols for searching distributed gazetteers; and data exchange services. This presentation will give a current view of these developments from the viewpoint of the Alexandria Digital Library, which has been experimenting with and developing the structural components of geospatially-defined gazetteers since 1994 and which now provides an operational gazetteer service over the Internet as a service of the University of California, Santa Barbara, library.

TDWG | Participants | Presentations | Senckenberg Museum | BGBM Biodiversity Informatics

This meeting was co-sponsored by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA)