Goodchild suggests in Fuzzy Spatial Queries in Digital Spatial Data Libraries that the lat/long coordinate systems should only be used for areas that are lacking place names and named features. (Firstly I would argue that there are very few nomads academically publishing works from the Sahara), but more importantly, the issue of ontologies and standardization of labels arises once again. An article written in, let’s say Japan about Italy will have a completely different label than one in Canada, written about Italy. An English person would reference his or her work as a topic in Italy, while a Japanese academic would write that their subject also occurs in ????. If Goodchild is planning on writing a program, or interface, I will suggest that he use a coordinate system, and have his program group and aggregate the location of topics or footprints based on these coordinates. How does Goodchild plan to deal with international, multi-lingual academic publications?
Goodchild also poses the idea of searching by area. He suggests that we should be able to search by more than just topic and author; we should search by place as well. I think that the user should be able to search by region of interest (of the topic), region of origin, or both. If both origin and subject are georeferenced I see the possibility to create something more dynamic than this simple query .What if, in a Google Earth-like interface, we could also offer a visualized network (as we can visualize the flight-paths of commercial airplanes) of who the author has cited in a specific paper, and in another search criteria visualize what other articles have cited the article in return. Instead of rifling through Bibliographies and Works Cited pages, one (or two) simple click(s), could potentially visualizes all related articles on a map. Research simplified!
Andrew
Tags: geolibraries