Unlock

Frequently Asked Questions

Places

1. What is a gazetteer?
2. What is different about the Unlock gazetteer?
3. So what benefits does the structure of the Unlock Places gazetteer offer you?
4. How can you use the gazetteer?
5. How can it help other information services?
6. How does it assist in geographic indexing?
7. What are the main aims and objectives of this project?

What is a gazetteer?

Typically, a gazetteer is a list of places together with their associated geographic location, given as a latitude and longitude co-ordinate, or an Ordnance Survey grid co-ordinate. Occasionally, other information such as the population or size of a place may be included.

What is different about the Unlock gazetteer?

The Unlock gazetteer is different from a traditional gazetteer in a number of ways:

• places will be classified into types, for example, city, river, lake;
• places will be recorded with their geographic 'footprint', for example, settlements represented as areas, rivers as lines (this differs from traditional gazetteers which represent places as points, even though they may cover quite large areas or may be linear features such as rivers);
• the database will not only be comprised of places but also other types of 'geographies', including postcode areas, parishes and electoral districts;
• the current focus of the gazetteer is 'near contemporary' data, but the longer-term aim is to also include historical information.

So what benefits does the structure of the Unlock gazetteer offer you?

The Unlock database will allow for questions to be asked, such as "where is Ormskirk?" or "what is to be found at grid ref. NT 258 728?". More complicated questions such as "What is the county town of Shropshire?" and "on which river is York situated?" may also be answered.

How can you use the service?

The Unlock Places gazetteer service can be used:

• as a reference tool for researchers and teaching staff for on-line reference and catalogue purposes;
• to aid geographic searching by other information services;
• to assist in the geographic indexing of information resources.

Visit the API Documentation pages, or try some Example Queries.

How can it help other information services?

Geographic searching is very powerful and whilst a number of information services now provide this, many are limited to place name and/or postcode searching. If a service wants to support more types of searching, it has to hold enough spatial data to allow a users query to be translated from one form to another. For example, an address could be translated into national grid co-ordinates. A gazetteer, such as Unlock, can be used to perform this translation (or "cross-walking").

How does it assist in geographic indexing?

At present, little information is geographically referenced, as this can be a time-consuming process. The project team is building a tool which will assist cataloguers, indexers and metadata creators by semi-automatically geographically indexing text descriptions. This software will read electronic forms of documents and/or metadata records and try to identify geographic names, features and other geographies.

What are the main aims and objectives of Unlock?

1. to provide georeferencing and tagging tools that will enable cross-searching of existing JISC services;
2. to help other services and users avail of the synergistic benefits the use of geography brings;
3. to assist the JISC Integrated Information Environment use geography as an organising principle it's for diverse resource collections.