Miss Richardson wrote:
> One of my principle objectives is to develop the gazetteer element
> of the project, to provide an extensive and authoritative resource for
> named units. I would appreciate the input of the archive and local
> studies community within England, Wales and Scotland both in
> enabling me to further this objective and in informing me of what
> you as potential users would like the GBHGIS project to deliver.
I was just ranting on another list, Old-maps, about the lack of
sophistication of some placename search engines, like OS Landranger. That
doesn't accept wildcards and won't search for anything more than initial
letters. For example, a historical researcher might be working on finding
"St Giles" and would want Chalfont St Giles to pop up in the search results
at some point.
Many English placenames are buried behind prefixes such as Little, East, and
Upper. As well, placenames have varied in spelling over the centuries.
I suggest any placename lookup mechanism have a variety of search methods,
including Boolean, and borrow algorithms (is that the term?) from search
engines for family names, using the soundex and other "fuzzy" systems.
Al Magary
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