DGRP Session 1 Response

  • Beth Driver (NGA) and Ray Larson (University of California, Berkeley)

Beth Driver

  • 3 themes
    • function of names
      • context: names static/frozen data (maps, documents)
      • context: names in discourse
      • organizing the world, or a collection of data, by means of data
      • numbering the things we look at
      • names used to assert dominion
        • over place
        • over language
        • over people
        • over defintions
        • over pronunciation
      • revealing/asserting (or not) identity through choice of name (particularly in discourse)
      • speaker and speaker's attitude to interlocutor
    • function of sets of names
      • collections turn out to be useful, even when we didn't know what the eventual use would be when we created them
      • indices to other kinds of information
      • tell us things about communities
        • what we name and why
        • nature of boundaries
        • how names are selected and created
        • arbitrary or patterned - can inferences be drawn from patterns in naming
        • are names indicators, or do they indicate (or can they be interpreted to reveal) change
        • bounds of consistency? - could these help us bound collections of names and help us related them
        • what makes a set of names consistent or not?
        • who or what enforces naming conventions in practice? practical? economic? brute force?
          • does observng this help us learn anything useful?
    • set of services for access to names
      • what constitutes quality and what are the associated metrics?
      • protections against misuse? (beyond privacy and access)?
      • incentives to capture/reveal/use as a class of services

Ray Larson

  • authorities: the library of congress as an example (authorities.loc.gov ...)
    • they track variants and sources/attribution
    • reusing this resource, because it's made available to other
  • reaction: yes, more authorities, more integration of resources across multiple agencies and sources
    • sometimes linkage won't be perfect, but if adequate, it can be helpful

Questions and Commments

Linda Hill

  • We've mostly talked about place names, but gazetteers are more than that:
    • classification of features (types)
      • not many shared schemes
      • culturally determined
      • RM@UCM: g's will have very particular kinds of feature type lists ... this is problematic
        • different hierarchies
        • different languages
        • how to deal with this in a way that allows local/domain-specific approaches to persist, but then how to merge/harmonize/federate?
    • role of IDs for features
      • do these help us (really) with homonymous, closely-located places?
      • ??@??: permanance!?!
      • ??@??: an important role for authorities
      • BF@UCSB: not assigning unique identifiers to *concepts*, not to *places*
    • ??@??: locations and coordinate systems and topological relationships
    • if gazetteers are "information tools embedded in information systems, primarily for the purpose of information retrieval"
      • what kind of "footprints" belong "in" "gazetteers"?
      • the more detailed the footprints, the more expensive and difficult to deal with them in the IR context/systems
      • what can you do with generalized footprints? is that good enough?

Mike Goodchild

  • Pronunciation as an issue
    • computer audio can play a very useful role, but we're not using it
    • TE@Pleiades: I wonder whether we should encode pronunciation for our placenames? Or, rather, give our users the option to do so?
      • whose pronunciation?
    • RF@NGA: recognized crying need for further research into these issues, both with respect to names and gazetteer services
      • relating the spoken placename to other components of place data

General discussion produces

  • ??@??: collaborating with other resources
    • don't merge it all into one big database - insurmountable resource problems
      • there will always be myriad databases
      • how do you establish linkages and connectivity amongst many thousands of such datasets
      • how do you evaluate the reliability and relevance of the data you retrieve from interacting with them
    • automatic grouping is very difficult (metacarta sees this problem)
      • semi-automated ways? but doesn't work when there's a single place need
      • users want to reach out to a single bit of data in a single local gazetteer, but they don't know where/what it is nor how to ask that question that way
  • ??@??: RISE, part of INSPIRE process (European spatial infrastructure stuff): data harmonization
    • purpose-driven gazetteers
    • use cases are glaring omission from most of this discussion
      • very hard to identify
    • grassroots vs. top-down approaches
      • encourage grassroots within a framework that says harmonization is an essential component of the process

  • KJ@UMuenster: formal theory of identity of place?
    • to what degree does "a place" persist, despite time-wise changes in names and geometries and dominions?