EDINA Geoservices

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

James.Reid@ed.ac.ukEDINA, 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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