EDINA Geoservices
• Deliver 24/7 online geo-data, mapping and gazetteer services to HE/FE and beyond
• Highly experienced and skilled team
– provides advice nationally and internationally
– active in standards development
– also active in GI community nationally and internationally
– Over ten years experience in handling spatial data• At leading edge of GI service development in UK
– resulted in participation in projects with OS• Undertake r&D - projects service• Strategic move toward interoperability
Undertake development projects and hosting…for BL…
• BL gazetteer hosting (Collect Britain)
• NOF Vision of Britain :
… and others…
• GIGateway (www.gigateway.org)• AGI Tech SIG
National Services…
• Digimap :
• UKBORDERS :
… and pre-service development projects…• Go-Geo! (www.gogeo.ac.uk)
• Agricultural Census :
• OGS Web Services (e.g OS Pathfinder)
• geoXwalk (www.geoXwalk.ac.uk)
Making geography matter
Aims
Create a placename ‘authority’ file
Make variations in definitions of ‘geography’ transparent
Provide a means to ‘crosswalk’ geographies i.e. translate one geography into another - hence the name
‘Geographic agnosticism’
How?
• Create a digital gazetteer that stores the different geographies and can implicitly resolve the relationships between them
• Provision as a service to service other services
Supporting service searching:
“Photographs of towns along the River Tweed”
Place name - River TweedFeature Type: River
Relation: ‘near’Distance: 1/2 km
Target type: towns
Places...PeeblesInnerleithenMelroseKelsoColdstreamBerwick upon Tweed
Image finder server
(Images indexed on place names)
As online facility to assist metadata creation
• Most extant resources have some form of spatial reference e.g. placename, county name, postcode
• A ‘geoparser’ has been developed which will assist in the semi-automatic indexing of these resources by using the gazetteer as reference.
• The results of the geoparsing can be used to update the documents metadata, making it directly geographically searchable.
Contact details
[email protected], Data Library, University of Edinburgh
telephone +44 (0)131 650 3302
For information on geoXwalk project:
www.geoXwalk.ac.uk
External Service examples
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Internal Service examples: Go-Geo and AgCensus
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Internal Service examples: Digimap
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Internal Service examples: UKBORDERS
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Geoparser
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