Hi all
I would agree with Paul and Nick that the solution is to have spatial searching.
Note that this does not put extra load onto the Heritage Gateway as Paul feared, because the searches are actually processed at the data providers. This is good in the sense that the extra loading is distributed, but it makes it a bit more complicated for the providers to play the game. It means you need a spatially-enabled database engine to respond to such searches, which has not been needed up til now, and this may be tricky for some providers. Bring it on ;-)
Regarding Nick's point about whether or not to record this as an attribute, as well as being able to infer it spatially... well yes MIDAS Heritage it does say it is a mandatory unit, but I'm not sure that necessarily means you need to record this as an attribute. MiDAS Heritage says it must be "stored" and that it must be possible to export it; but actually you could export the administrative areas for monuments as attributes by infering them on-the-fly at the time of export. And if you can do this, then the correct information must have been stored (or you couldn't export it!). So I don't think MIDAS Heritage is wrong in this respect, but perhaps EH could clarify this point?
Aside: why do I have to open three different PDF documents to check this out? ... grrr...
Whether doing this by spatial inference only is good design at this point in time I'm not so sure - there are all kinds of reasons where it is useful to have the administrative areas as attributes, where it would not be practical to generate them on-the-fly. Particular for historic admin areas. In HBSMR we are putting some effort into making sure it is efficient to create these attributes, i.e. they can be created and updated automatically when the mapped geometry changes, rather than abandoning them altogether.
cheers
Crispin
________________________________
From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records on behalf of Nick Boldrini
Sent: Mon 21/05/2012 12:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Heritage Gateway: problems with District/Borough/Unitary Authority list
Hi All
I agree with Paul to a large extent.
I think this whole discussion underlines a more fundamental issue, which is why are we recording Admin areas at all in text databases given the ubiquity of GIS applications?
This may become a rant as this is a bit of a personal bugbear of mine (and given how may time I have talked about personal bugbears today they must breed in my subconscious somehow...)
Anyway, about the time MIDAS Heritage was out for consultation I asked in my response why we needed to record Admin areas as a Mandatory field and never got an answer, but suspect its largely historical. Managing physical records by current Parish is something HERs etc used to do (and many probably still do) so recording them in the digital records made sense. However, HERs can now manage the links between their digital and physical collections in ways that mean Parish is less important other than a way of specifying this bit of shelf as opposed to that bit.
Also, Parish was a common search criteria, but I would suggest that is not true anymore. When was the last time you had an HER request by Parish? The last one I can remember was about 5 years plus ago at NYCC for a parish based community project. We had to search the GIS and Text records to find possibly relevant records, and the number of records found by each didn't match.
We also have other anomalies - non parish areas, parishes which split/merge or generally change boundaries, with the issues of updating the records for them.
All in all, it appears to me that we may be spending dis-proportionate levels of effort to keep things working for a system which has served its time well, but is no longer as relevant, and may in fact be counter productive. The proper place for geographical aspects of the data I would suggest would be best served via GIS, not basing them in text systems.
So can MIDAS people get rid of this mandatory field please?
best wishes
Nick Boldrini
Historic Environment Record Officer
Durham County Council
Tel: 0191 3708840
Fax: 0191 3708897
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From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Cripps
Sent: 21 May 2012 11:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Heritage Gateway: problems with District/Borough/Unitary Authority list
Strikes me that in all such cases a true spatial search would be a sensible way to proceed. Having a detailed knowledge of UK administrative area structures, history and nomenclature in order to find things based on some text value they may have been indexed against at some point in the past is not the most user friendly way of doing things.
Problems:
Firstly, there is a lot of legacy data relating to parishes/wards/counties/districts/etc in our information systems. So unexpected results may be returned using a text based search where areas have changed. Users may also have a different perception of the landscape to how data is indexed: Many people in Coventry for example still think of themselves as being in Warwickshire and some datasets may still be indexed this way but the Gateway returns no results for Coventry if Warwickshire is used as a criteria.
Following on from this, storing such area values as text within a record fossilises the record at a point in time and whilst it is useful information to know how a record was indexed when created it may not necessarily be the most helpful way of retrieving records now. And updating any records to reflect the current state of affairs may lose that historic record of how a record was originally indexed. For example, in my local area, there are cases such as the wreck of the Betty in Southampton (Pastscape ID 899034) which is indexed as being in Parish ZZZZZZZZZZ in the county of Hampshire, New Forest District, when it looks to be in Southampton, based on plotted location and description. Conversely, numerous records indexed as Southampton are well outside what is now defined as Southampton so may not show up in searches within neighbouring areas. Trying to account for all the various changes in local administrative areas in text based searches is fraught at best and any results returned need to be treated with extreme caution.
Basically, to make a text search work, the data being searched would all need to all be indexed against the same master gazetteer(s) and any indices would need to be constantly updated in the Gateway itself and every dataset feeding the Gateway. And users would need to have a full understanding of administrative areas.
A solution:
The current map search based on a buffer around a selected point is useful but limiting in that it cannot adequately search by administrative areas. So, a potential solution to searching by administrative area(s) could be to use the latest/current BoundaryLine data (now released as Open Data) to mediate any query criteria and undertake a spatial query. This would remove the dependency on text matching and the alleviate many of the problems outlined above.
For example, user clicks on map or draws a polygon/box and a list of all the applicable areas for that location (wards, parishes, boroughs, unitary authorities, non-parish areas, counties, etc) is returned. The user can then choose to search by their hand drawn area or any of the listed administrative areas, selecting one or more. At which point the Gateway displays the chosen area(s) so the user can see the area to be searched (and buffer the area as needed). Then, on submitting the search, the Gateway does a spatial search rather than a text search based on the area provided and the spatial data provided to the Gateway (be that point locations or more complex geometry) from Gateway enabled resources. This would not only make it very clear to users what their search is doing (by showing them the search area) but would remove many of the problems relating to text matching and out of date or mismatching or otherwise 'quirky' indices in source records.
Importantly, maintenance would simply involve refreshing the spatial layers periodically where necessary (eg adding the latest Boundaryline, conservation area, etc layers) so no more time consuming re-indexing of multiple datasets to support text searches.
Such an approach could also be extended, providing the Gateway with some seriously shiny and useful search tools. Using the same basic fundamentals/technology with minimal extra effort as regards development/deployment, it would be possible to be able to use historic and/or other areas for searches as well. For example:
o Wiltshire or Hampshire counties but before the Unitary authorities were split off
o Counties that no longer exist
o A users parish from a particular date
o The kingdom of Wessex
o One of the hypothesised Iron Age tribal boundaries
o non-heritage areas such as within a National Park, Conservation Areas or AONB etc.
o all optionally with buffers applied
This would of course involve creating spatial data for any such areas to be searched by where it does not exist already (and quite a lot of this does exist in some form) and accessioning these into the system but would remove the need to create and maintain text indices across multiple datasets. This would greatly increase the usability of the Gateway not only for basic administrative area searches but for broader research questions.
The technology exists to do all this now and whilst spatial searches would increase loads on the Gateway server compared with simple text searches, this would not be so serious as to make it impossible.
Just some thoughts...
Paul.
Paul Cripps
Geomatics Manager
Wessex Archaeology
Portway House, Old Sarum Park, Salisbury, SP4 6EB
Mob: +44 7765 226746 Tel: +44 1722 326867
[log in to unmask]
http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/geomatics
________________________________
From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of HUGHES, Claire
Sent: 21 May 2012 10:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Heritage Gateway: problems with District/Borough/Unitary Authority list
Thanks for your comments. We are also planning to improve the location based searching in the NHLE and are hoping to be able to implement the CDP single text box prototype there at some point in the near future.
Best wishes,
Claire
Claire Hughes
Heritage Gateway & Access to Designation Data Manager
Designation Department
English Heritage
The Engine House
Fire Fly Avenue
Swindon
SN2 2EH
T: 01793 414560
________________________________
From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Maslen, Jess (DEVELOPMENT & REGENERATION)
Sent: 21 May 2012 07:56
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Heritage Gateway: problems with District/Borough/Unitary Authority list
Mike
I agree with this frustration! I would also add that the same could be said for the National Heritage List for England; the Advanced Search in 'Location' presents the same problem!!!
Not very helpful!
Regards
Jess
Jess F Maslen MRes BA (Hons)
Planning Assistant - Historic Environment (Mon, Tues and Wed am)
Development Management Unit
Planning Service
Department of Place
Floor 9, Civic Centre
Plymouth City Council
Plymouth PL1 2AA
Tel: 01752 305433
email: [log in to unmask]
Council website: www.plymouth.gov.uk/planning
________________________________
From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mike Shaw
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 2:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Heritage Gateway: problems with District/Borough/Unitary Authority list
I spent around 5 minutes looking for Wolverhampton on the District/Borough/Unitary authority list on Heritage Gateway before remembering that it was under C for City. If the HER Officer for the area can't remember this, what chance has anyone else got? Can I ask when this will be rectified? It seems to me that this is the biggest current problem with Heritage Gateway and at a time when I am trying to demonstrate usage to my managers in order to ensure that they continue to pay the maintenance fee I feel that I am doing so with one hand tied behind my back. Anyone from (the Cities of) Bristol, Derby, Kingston-on-Hull, Leicester, Nottingham, Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent and Westminster agree?
Regards,
Mike
Mike Shaw
City Archaeologist
Wolverhampton City Council
Civic Centre
Wolverhampton
WV1 1RP
e-mail [log in to unmask]
Tel: 01902 555493
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