On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Sean Phelan wrote:
> Content-MD5: ka922mgSeR1J0frGR0n38A==
> Content-MD5-Origin: gizmo.lut.ac.uk
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> Are there any directories or other sites that are making use of
> the DC.coverage tags ?
For spatial coverage, the most common vocabulary is the Getty Thesaurus of
Geographical Names. As far as I can tell, that thesaurus covers a better
part of the and contains in addition to names of countries, cities, rivers
etc, also coordinates and brief historical notes on places. To my
knowledge TGN is one of the most comprehensive tools of its kind and it
has a fair chance to become a de facto standard. There are a number of
different kinds of licensing.
Since it does contain GIS information, it should be possible to add a map
based user interface on top of the thesaurus.
> My company implements interactive maps on web pages, and we are
> about to launch a world map service. We've been running maps of
> Great Britain for a couple of years now, and we implement
> reciprocal links between our maps and web pages containing local
> information.
>
> We want to do the same on the world maps, and rather than do
> anything proprietary we are thinking of encouraging sites that
> want reciprocal links to implement the DC.coverage meta tag.
>
> So, does anybody know of any precedents out there?
I'd say that your world maps and TGN could possibly form an extremely
powerful combo. The notion of having a single user interface for metadata
creation and searching for diverse things like the pizzerias in
Vladivostok and archological excavation areas in Sicily is very attractive
to me.
> Better still, are there any existing directories or similar
> repositories that are already collecting DC.coverage tags and
> would be interested in linking to our interactive world maps?
We are already using such a TGN based system in
<URL:http://safari.hsv.se/> for metadata creation and searching of Swedish
research information. The service is using a metadata tool for the
creation of embedded metadata and harvesting robot for gathering.
The search engine is a Z39.50 server with a WWW gateway, and currently
using an external TGN browser which will enter the TGN language
independent countrie codes into a search form. I'd love to be able to do
the same using maps instead.
>
> Best regards
> Sean
>
Siggie
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