Date:Thu, 1 Sep 2005 11:05:55 -0400
Reply-To:Subject Coordinates Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Sender:Subject Coordinates Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
From:Archie Warnock <[log in to unmask]>
Organization:A/WWW Enterprises
Subject:Re: coordinates entry in catalog records
Comments:To: [log in to unmask]In-Reply-To:<[log in to unmask]>
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Mary Larsgaard wrote:
> **yes indeedy. I remember a couple years back, a friend of mine who
> was cataloging photographs of portions of a city was going to enter
> coordinates into each record, unwisely mentioned that to someone at
> one of the utilities, who told her no-no, can't enter coordinates for
> non-cart.mtls. one experiment we'd like to do here at UCSB is
> download all of the non-cartmtl records in the library's online
> catalog, pull out all the ones that have geographic-area subject
> headings (which MARC21 makes very do-able), and then add coordinates
> to each record (that's the tricky part), and load records into
> Alexandria Digital Library catalog.
Somewhere around here I had some code that I'd glommed to compute the
minimum bounding rectangle (MBR) from a polygonal footprint. That
simplifies the job to the point where it's relatively easy to do spatial
searching.
For some time, I've maintained the search engine (Isearch) used on FGDC
metadata records and it does spatial searches (overlaps only, but
relevance ranked) on bounding rectangles, although it doesn't currently
compute the MBR from more complex polygons. It's not real MARC-aware
either, but that could be fixed.
I'm curious where the coordinates might come from because obviously this
is a job that ought to be automated. Are there any easily-available
online gazetteers that will provide coordinates from place names which
would allow batch-insertion of geographic coordinates?
--
Archie
-- Archie Warnock [log in to unmask]
-- A/WWW Enterprises www.awcubed.com
-- As a matter of fact, I _do_ speak for my employer.
