Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
than one parish, names such as “Newton” and “Aston.” The usual way
to disambiguate such cases is to identify higher-level units - most obvi-
ously counties - that contain the parish. A reference work that includes
preferred and alternate versions of terms and places them in a hierarchy
is a thesaurus.
By now, anyone with a GIS background will be wondering what the
diference is between a name authority and a gazeteer, and anyway,
why not use coordinates rather than names, removing all problems of
locational ambiguity? Only three out of sixty-two archives in the ADN
survey included a coordinate in their indexing of places. There are three
problems with coordinates. First, archival documents rarely contain
them, so even if we are going to store coordinates in the catalog, we still
need a reference resource that translates the names in the documents to
coordinates. Second, no human being could search a card catalog con-
taining coordinates, and the off-the-shelf records management packages
used by most archives, like Calm and Adlib, are modeled on card cata-
logs and completely lack spatial functionality. No GIS software in exis-
tence provides the broader document management capabilities that ar-
chives require. Third, while one aim clearly has to be to raise awareness
of spatial functionality among archivists and their software suppliers,
there are real performance problems with adding spatial functionality
to heavily used online systems, while name-based searching is computa-
tionally very efficient. Conversely, it is impossible to build a digital name
authority on top of packaged GIS software, as there is no mechanism
for holding multiple names or labels for each entity. W hile card indexes
may be going out of fashion, most people looking for place-specific
information type place-names into Google, and basing our website A
Vision of Britain through Time around an ontology-based architecture
rather than a conventional GIS has consequently led to much higher
usage.
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Obviously, a gazeteer can be a name authority, especially if it in-
cludes variant forms as cross-references to a main entry; several Brit-
ish local record offices use
Bartholomew's Gazeteer of the British Isles
as their main name authority for place-names. However, when the UK
National Council on Archives (NCA) published its
Rules for the Con-
struction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names
in 1997, it prioritized
