GeoCrossWalk

Title

GeoCrossWalk (Phase 5)

Acronym

GCW

Duration

May 2007 – June 2008

Website

GeoCrossWalk Website

Summary

The GeoCrossWalk project (has been running since 2000, funded through the JISC Shared Infrastructure Services Programme. It has developed from investigating the feasibility of developing and providing an online gazetteer service, which would play a crucial role in supporting geographic searching in the JISC IE (Phase 1) through to having a fully functional mature prototype with live users within the JISC IE (GoGeo!, ADS ArchSearch) (Phase 3). Phase 4 of the project has just been completed. The deliverables of this most recent phase were:

1. A GeoCrossWalk Business Plan
2. Quality assured GeoCrossWalk database and production-ready service
3. Showcase of geo-enhanced JISC service(s), where possible
4. Various marketing materials

The GeoCrossWalk Business Plan makes various recommendations for future development and includes details of current and potential users, barriers to use and business model options (including core service development, product development, revenue generation, marketing and promotion).

The work outlined in this proposal is aimed at addressing some of the issues raised in the Phase IV GeoCrossWalk Business Plan and ensuring GeoCrossWalk is ready to make the transition to service by December 2007.

The Web and the resources it provides access to are being ‘geo-enabled’ now (e.g. Google Map, Microsoft Virtual Earth, various geocoding APIs). Increasingly, users will expect to be able to search for, view, analyse, combine and share JISC resources via maps and critically by the use of common geographical referencing (i.e. place, postcode). GeoCrossWalk and the GeoParser (the GeoParser has been an integral part of the GeoCrossWalk project and endeavours, using Natural Language processing techniques, to identify placenames in documents (‘geoparsing’) which can subsequently be georeferenced using the GeoCrossWalk gazetteer) are key resources which will enable JISC and providers of JISC services to keep up with these significant changes, geo-referencing resources and enhancing resource discovery.

Project Deliverables

1. An open source GeoParser toolkit and associated APIs
2. Recommendations and options for supplementing and enhancing existing GeoCrossWalk content
3. A variegated marketing strategy exploiting the product heterogeneity of GeoCrossWalk
4. Ongoing software and data maintenance

EDINA Contact

James Reid, Project Manager

Funders

JISC

Partnerships

• Language Technology Group University of Edinburgh