Using Gazetteers to Annotate Geographic Catalog Entries

A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary containing a list of geographic names, together with their geographic locations and other descriptive information. A geographic metadata catalog holds metadata describing geographic information resources, stored in a wide variety of sources, ranging from the researchers' personal computers to large public databases. This paper argues that unique characteristics of geographic objects can be explored to address the problem of automating the generation of metadata for geographic information resources. The paper considers federations of gazetteers and geographic metadata catalogs and discusses in detail two problems, namely, how to use gazetteers to automate the description of geographic information resources and how to align thesauri used by gazetteers. The paper also argues why such problems are important in the context of a federated architecture.