Allen Carroll (National Geographic)

  • The power of placenames: Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf). Had to change home phone number ... "the one issue that unites all Iranians"
  • Society founded in 1888 -- transformation from gentleman's club to international media organization
  • Mission and much of content = geography ... desire to organize all content by place therefore

  • key assets
    • brand: venerable and revered -- staleness a danger
    • content: lots, but much is restricted by rights
    • multiple outlets and distrib channels
    • cartography
    • storytelling
  • goals for georeferencing project
    • create infrastructure for organizing and accessing content geographically
      • archival and new content
    • leverage for print, internet, mobile applications
    • integrate with cartography
    • create new ways to tell stories: spatial storytelling
    • become "best source of curated, authoritative information about the world, organized and accessed geographically
  • archival content
    • challenges
      • content archived by multiple divisions
      • little or no consistency in databases and naming conventions (placenames)
      • much/most content has poor location information
  • new content
    • goal
      • deploy gps-enabled cameras and video equipment
      • meanwhile seek temporary solutions -- placenames, addresses, descriptive text
      • incorporate georeferencing into editorial and archiving workflows
  • creating an enterprise gazetteer
    • starting point: ngmaps placenames database = supports NG world atlas
      • advantage: high quality and accuracy
      • dis: 140,000 placenames (relatively tiny)
      • currently associated with cartographic, not geographic attributes
    • create a hierarchical structure based on standars and practices of existing online gaz svcs
      • fine-tuned for special needs
    • a single, primary display matched with spatial information (geometries), matching ng list against NGA and USGS gazetteers
    • provide a strucutre for future retrieval
    • harmonizing/crosswalking gaz with other divisions
      • data hamrmony's thesaurus master software
      • essentiallly done manually, vetted by library and and information svcs group
      • tap Getty gazetteer for additional names
      • combined total of more than 100K data entries

  • parsing text
    • likely to use MetaCarta?'s text parsing tools
    • dynamic text parsing -
    • geotagging, viewing and catalogin new content - also Red Hen systems (media server for visual media)
  • cartography
    • later phase: fully integrate the gazetteer with web-enabled cartobraphy (atlas matches what's online - and online all features are linked)
    • meanwhile: incoroporating NG content into the MapMachine?, produced in partnership with ESRI
      • goal: mapmachine becomes an alternate access interface to all ng content
      • currently a pilot project
      • strategy to lump/stack content into a manageable number of icons
        • icons have numbers on them to indicate how much content
        • mouseover gives you a summary by content type
        • clicking gives you access to the full list
        • you can filter out content types
        • icons disaggregate as you zoom in -- function limited with archival data that is only grossly georeferenced
  • spatial storytelling
    • cartographic itineraries as a way to organize content into a narrative sequence
  • why?
    • make content visible/accessible/versitle for staff
    • serve new markets (mobile/GPS?)
    • form content distribution relationships to help diffuse geographic knowledge and make money
    • integrate multimedia with cartography

  • quality over quantity: authoritative/trusted data
  • contact/credit to georeferences
    • Jess Elder (jelder at ngs dot org)
    • Anne Marie Houppert (ahoupper at ngs dot org)
    • jessica Wdowiarz

  • comment issues
    • trust - how constructed/communicated
    • authority - how/what?
    • aggregative creation of gazetteers
    • attribution
      • corrections from the public - how managing (NG reacts to and uses "complaint letters" that come in, but they don't track these after they make the decision or publicly credit the individuals)
      • annotation of provenance (pedigree of data)
      • how do our formats and structures track and transmit this information
      • reconstructing the ancestry of a particular piece of data
      • trust derivse from transparency, so these are interrelated points
  • GNIS tracks lineage
    • where these 2 millions of names came from
      • half came off existing paper maps (and from that you can get back to the original surveyor - if you go to the paper archive)
      • other half came from an augmentation process dealing with "local authorities", which vary from state to state (state hierarchy of things)
        • there are now formal arrangements with names authorities at state level
        • their formality varies significantly from state to state
      • contributor interface - geonames.usgs.gov
  • what makes a name authoritative?
    • just that somebody calls it that?
    • or does it go beyond that?

  • wordreference.com
    • wiki-like chat area, where people can provide contextual use anecdotes
  • aspect of authority: temporality
    • it's also time-stamped in some way
    • names have a time they originated
    • they also have a cessation time
    • like the spatial, time is a dimension along with placename disambiguation needs to occur

  • NG's "de-facto" cartographic policy
    • map the world as it is to the extent that this is possible, as opposed to mapping the world as someone wishes it would be
    • but this is actually difficult
  • NGA does capture and track lineage and analysis and decision-making in placename research
    • data model takes this into account
    • also temporality
    • not currently exposed - on a case by case basis this information is available