At 14:49 20/02/2007, you wrote:
>Dear Humphrey,
>
>Further to Francis' message, you might be interested too in the
>following gazetteer:
>
>Gazetteer of Great Britain : giving the positions of all the names
>shown on the Ordnance Survey Quarter-inch Maps in terms of the
>National Grid / Ordnance Survey. - Chessington : Ordnance Survey,
>1953. - 148 p., [2] leaves (fold.) of plates :
>col. maps ; 25 cm.
>
>With about 33,000 names from the OS quarter-inch to the mile maps,
>this has about 3 times the number of names as the 1946/1951
>Gazetteer quoted by Francis, and quotes 4 figure Grid References for
>them all. Although the font is small, I would have thought it ought
>to scan (and perhaps OCR?) quite well.
>
>Chris
Thanks to Chris, and the other people who replied. This is all
looking hopeful, and what I would want to do IS using an OCR system
on the book -- which does not need to be an atlas, of course -- and
then compare the resulting data with the US Geographical Names Server
data and our own "inferred places", using manual checking against the
original book only for the names/locations that did not match.
Paul Cooper said this:
>I would suggest that there is a problem with older UK gazetteers, in
>that one which is out of copyright will also predate the resurgence in
>the use of non-English languages (Welsh, Gaelic, Cornish) in the UK. So,
>you may find that a place is represented in the gazetteer but not by the
>name by which it is currently best known.
This is a problem I think I have to live with: what I am after, for
now, is an authority list of (populated) places, not of place-names,
and it will be tightly linked to our administrative units gazetteer
which DOES track lots of variant names for units.
Now all I have to do is make sure JISC are clear we never promised to
include the names of parliamentary candidates in our version of the
election result data, just the party affiliations for which an
authority list is relatively trivial.
Best wishes,
Humphrey
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
About Britain: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
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