Newsline from EDINA
June 2006: Volume 11, Issue 2
Lead with a vision statement, they said: imagine the contents of the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) accessible via a virtual globe. Zoom to your area of interest. Typing in a search term, together with a post code, county or a country, you are 'flown' to that area on the globe and with a click, you can access pictures, movies, journal articles, historical maps, and teaching and learning materials.
No, this is not an advert for Google Earth, although Google deserves credit for popularising geographic access to so much that is spatial. The purpose here is to alert representatives of the JISC user community and other JISC service providers to two things.
First, much of the metadata describing information available through JISC services and projects contains references to location in one way or another. This applies to nearly all services, and to much that is being digitised and held in digital repositories. That became very apparent when EDINA assisted the British Library in geo-tagging digital objects in their Sense of Place project. Second, JISC has been funding the development of GeoCrossWalk as a shared service to help JISC service providers make use of the hidden geography in the data and metadata to which they provide access: enabling services to be geo-smart and geo-enabling the JISC IE.
At the heart of GeoCrossWalk is a database of geographical features, like towns, rivers, roads, administrative areas. It stores the name of the feature (e.g. 'Morpeth'), the type of feature (e.g. 'town') making sure that there is a standard geographical location for that feature - both a Grid Reference and its entire footprint on the Earth, the latter helping to define the spatial relationship between features.
The benefits of adding 'geographic intelligence' and geo-enabling services are high, and require a relatively small amount of effort: