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Fredric Gey, Michael
Buckland, Aitao Chen, Ray Larson This paper describes the use of geography and geographic resources as a search intermediary between numeric data about a place and text (in the form of book catalog items) about the place. Place names are inherently ambiguous, for example the search for the place "Visalia" in the Census Bureau's USA gazeteer http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazeteer yields records on two places, Visalia California (1990 population 75,636) and Visalia, Kentucky (1990 population 190), but their locations are uniquely specified by latitude and longitude coordinates. Thus geoposition can be used to disambiguate between polysemous geography. Gazeteers, which can be considered analogous to dictionaries for geography, hold both names and geographic coordinates. They hold the key for a new level of searching in library catalogs as well as between text and numeric statistics about a place. For example a search like "Find history books about all places within a 50 mile radius of Visalia" becomes possible, just like a traditional market research search to "Find highest median family income among all zipcodes within a 50 mile radius of Visalia" This paper describes a project to integrate gazeteers into the catalog and data search process in order to provide new search capabilities as a bridge between socio-economic-demographic data and writings about the places described by the data. University of California, Berkeley |