Minutes from 3/1/2011 Discussion

This was the first meeting of this interest group to discuss issues related to geolocation web services and geocoding materials.

Present: Ed Summers, Library of Congress; Sean Gilles, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World New York University ; Tim Shearer and Mike Graves, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; Karen Coombs and Rick Bennett, OCLC

Each person talked about their interest in geolocation services. Ed discussed the World Digital Library project; Sean discussed ; Tim and Mike discussed projects involving digital collections at UNC; Karen and Ed talked about MapFAST and FAST at OCLC.

GeoNames web service

• RESTful URLs and API
• Linked Data
• Lacks provinance no vetting of data added

Ongoing problems

• Locations aren't always a point. Sometimes they are a polygon.
• Searching based on a polygon rather than a point
• Level of granularity of places (can be City, County, State, Country)
• How to assign multiple coordinates to a object
• How to convert existing text-based thesauri terms to coordinates? Is this effective or not?

Things OCLC could do

• Provide better access to coordinate data in authority files in different formats
• Provide linkages between authority files and GeoNames data via Linked Data
  • 
    Could we add links to GeoNames in the SKOS respresentations on the geographic authorities
• Provide geolocation for Corporate Names
• Provide services that can be incorporated into software for library staff cataloging objects
• Host a vocabulary repository for specialized geographic terms
  • 
    locations/names of places in the ancient world
  • regional specific locations/names of places

Next Steps

• Explorer potential services internally at OCLC
• Setup monthly time to continue conversations