Our plans call for continuing to populate the new ADL Gazetteer and promoting the wider use of the Gazetteer Content Standard and the Feature Type Thesaurus. Each would benefit from collaborative development by other groups who are actively building and using georeferenced collections of data and information. This has the potential to open up the vast number of georeferenced materials represented in library catalogs and online bibliographic files to spatial searching. Getting more footprints with spatial extent - most of the publicly accessible gazetteers have only point locations. Extracting embedded gazetteer data in digital geospatial datasets in order to create gazetteer entries with polygonal boundaries from the map representations Developing the temporal equivalent of gazetteers for named time periods.
Gazetteers are key components of georeferenced information systems.
Yet we are not aware of any other efforts to support the integration and interoperability of gazetteer data so that the results of numerous local efforts in creating this information can be shared. If we can create the means to do so, the resulting availability of gazetteer information will bring tremendous gains across the board in all types of information systems. ADL has developed both a Gazetteer Content Standard and a Thesaurus of Feature Types, which we offer freely to others in the hopes that these will encourage standardization and sharing of data. In particular, consideration of shared gazetteer files for taxonomic description should be part of the discussion of taxonomic authority files.