I’ve been thinking about “cyberinfrastructure” and “madskiier’s” posts discussing the difficulties of incorporating an appropriate “gazetteer” function with geolibraries and how this function might need to change rapidly online. However, I think we are also facing a much greater challenge that harkens back to our lecture on ontologies. A huge question that I have about this idea of a geolibrary stems from the various definitions different cultures might have for differing types of geographic features such as mountains. How we define such features and their boundaries will be an essential question going forward for any researchers looking into how to create a comprehensive geolibrary that can cross cultural, political and physical boundaries.
Michael F. Goodchild hints at this in Chapter 5 when he poses a number of possible research questions. In particular, I’m interested in his questions about how much and what kinds of metadata are needed to support a geolibrary (Question 5, Page 8 ) and what are the cognitive problems associated with using geolibraries (Question 7, Page 8). One of the keys to making a geolibrary useful and operable across the boundaries I mention above may be figuring out how to set standards for the data, and in supplying lots of useful information about the data. Metadata could serve this purpose, but, as Goodchild notes, the question may more be one of what system do we use to organize this data so that it maintains it’s usefulness and interoperability. Here, of course, you get deeper down the rabbit hole and have to begin thinking about who is going to host the geolibrary, what kind of infrastructure it requires, and, then, what kinds of systems it can support and where the data will come from.
This seems like a much broader question than just how do we search by place names or incorporate functionalities and parameters into such searches that can help diverse sets of users. Rather, I think we are beginning to ask fundamental questions of how do we define different parts of a geolibraries platform, it’s data types and the ways in which we interact with these data types. Questions of ontology and organization. Interestingly, there is PhD student at Xavier University who has been thinking about these questions in terms of digital libraries too – and he writes that “[Digital libraries] also pose technical and organizational interoperability challenges that must be resolved.” Find more from him here.
–ClimateNYC