The New Trends for Librarians in Management of Geographic Information

Ionian UniversityDepartment of Archive and Library Sciences

Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing

The New Trends for Librarians in Management of Geographic Information

Ifigenia Vardakosta Sarantos Kapidakis

{ifigenia,sarantos}@ionio.gr

2nd IC-ININFOBudapest, 30 Aug. – 2 Sept., 2012

2nd IC-ININFO Budapest, 30 Aug - 2 Sept.,2012

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Session Overview

• Purpose of the presentation• Geographic Information (GI)• Geographical Collections (GC)• How Librarians Manage GI• Libraries and Geographical Metadata• Most used tools• What’s new?


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This presentation aims…

• To highlight the importance of GI and its proper management

• To overview the tools most commonly used for GI management and,

• Demonstrate the latest changes and developments in this area according the international literature.


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Geographic Information (GI)

“Information about objects or phenomena that are associated with a location relative to the surface of the Earth”

(Association of Geography Information)

Why GI is important?• Almost all human activities contain a geographic element • The GI processing involves complex and difficult choices

which are to a large extent unique (Longley e.a., 2010)


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The main characteristics of GI

• there is no uniform data model,• geospatial data vary widely in the amount of

information they show,• these data are being stored in relational

geodatabases requiring sophisticated storage and archiving schemes,

• geospatial imagery datasets are often quite large and metadata may be voluminous as well,

• geospatial data may be produced over time,• are subject to versioning because of updated

information being made available or to correct past errors in the data

(Janee, 2009 ; Erwin & Sweetkind-Singer, 2010)


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Geographic Collection (GC)

A Geographic Collection consists materials such as books, serials, maps, atlases, aerial photos, remote sense images, geospatial data, software etc which dealing with the study of the impact of people upon the earth. The Geographic Collection is designed to support instruction, recreational needs, and research in the organization that library serves.


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Our research so far indicates that…

Academic Libraries worldwide:

• Collect geographical data in a variety of type, format and subject

• Sustain Geographic Collections• Develop GIS services for dealing with their users needs

(Vardakosta and Kapidakis, 2011, 2012a,2012b, 2012c)


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The main role of a GIS Librarian…

• Acquire data• Extract geographic information• Extract semantic and ontological information• Present in a form that allows easy exploration by

users(Turton, e.a., 2007)


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How librarians manage GI

1) By contributing in the development of interactive geo-services in their libraries, and

2) By using the proper descriptive standards


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1. Interactive Geo-Services in Libraries

Information services for the public usually for a specific subject e.g. health, environment, archaeology etc.

Some of them allow user to enter postcode, place name or address details to retrieve information and a map displays specific to their locations

(Mathys and Kamel Boulos, 2011)


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1. a. A vision of Britain through timehttp://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/


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1. b. Harvard Geospatial Libraryhttp://calvert.hul.harvard.edu:8080/opengeoportal/


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2. Geographical Metadata

Metadata are data that describe the content, data definition and structural representation, extent (both geographic and temporal), spatial reference, quality, availability, status and administration of a geographic dataset.

(IFLA)Geographical Metadata’s role:

•the management of nested collections of resources, •the interoperability between metadata schemas, and •the integration of information retrieval techniques to the discovery services of geographic data catalogs (contributing in this way to avoid metadata content heterogeneity)

(Nogueras-Iso, e.a., 2005)


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Digital Communication Standards

• GML (Geography Markup Language). Is an open industry standard that uses XML encoding for the transport and storage of GI including both the geometry and properties of geographic features, such as feature, geometry, coordinate reference system time, dynamic feature, coverage (including geographic images) unit of measure, and map presentation style (Hanson & Heron, 2008,p.133)

• Z39.50 is an open, well-established communications protocol for information sharing on wide area networks

(ESRI, 2002)


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Metadata Content Standards (1)

1) (FGDC-CSDGM) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata, officially known as FGDC-STD-001-1998 (USA)

• with over 334 different elements, 119 of which exist only to contain other elements

2) ISO 9115 (2003)• has more than 350 elements

3) Australia New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC)Project 4) Dublin Core (DC) Since 2003 has been adopted as ISO standard (ISO 15836)

5) INSPIRE Directive (2009)


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Gazetteers (1)

Digital gazetteers are directories containing triples of Place names (N), geographic footprints (F), and feature types (T) for named geographic places (Hill, 2000)

• Some gazetteers provide information about places and features • Some lists of geographic names are available as hierarchical term sets

(thesauri) designed for information retreival

Examples: GeoRef Thesaurus (American Geological Institute)

Thesaurus of Geographic Names (Getty Museum)Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) Geographic Names Processing System (GNPS)

Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer


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Gazetteers (2)

(Keßler e.a., 2009)

Gazetteers so far are unable to:respond to complex queries spanning across different gazetteers and typing schemas, andthey lack the functionality to handle evolving data of differing quality, e.g., user generated content


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AACR2r – RDA - FRBR

• AACR2r : facilitates data sharing among disparate systems and frees the cataloger from having to reinvent the rules for each dataset

• RDA : has the ability to better describe and embed FGDC data elements and description into the bibliographic and authority records (Hanson & Heron, 2008, p.91)

• FRBR : a conceptual model for creating bibliographic records


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Linked Data

• Proposed 2006 by Berners-Lee: “data (its web representation) can contains links to data located elsewhere on the Web”.

• "Linked Data" refers to data published in accordance with principles designed to facilitate linkages among datasets, element sets, and value vocabularies. Linked Data uses Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as globally unique identifiers for any kind of resource. In Linked Data, URIs may be Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) – Web addresses that use the extended set of natural-language scripts supported by Unicode. Linked Data is expressed using standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) which specifies relationships between things -- relationships that can be used for navigating between, or integrating, information from multiple sources.

• Linked Data is sharable, extensible, and easily re-usable. (Stanford Linked Data Workshop, 2011)


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Conclusions The Digital Environment’s Challenges

• Technological advances and software engineering • Reuse of bibliographic records by multiple agents in the

www• Information retrieval from different heterogeneity sources• Proliferation of volunteered geographic information • Semantics-based retrieval and navigation • The time and cost factors for anonymising, tranforming and

delivering data remains as a major obstacle for most data providers.

• Changes in data policies and revisions to standards also impose additional concerns on data developers

• Issues regarding privacy and security (Keßler,e.a., 2009; Mathys and Kamel Boulos, 2011)


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The main target

the efficient use of geospatial information

So, librarians should follow:

• Good data management, and • Sharing practices

Thank [email protected]

Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing

Department of Archive and Library Sciences

Ionian University

mailto:[email protected]


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BIBLIOGRAPHY (1)• Crampton, J. (2001). Maps as social constructions: Power, communication and

visualization. Progress in Human Geography 25(2), 235-252• Erwin, T. and Sweetkind-Singer, J. (2010).The National Geospatial Archive: a

collaborative project to archive geospatial data. Journal of Map And Geography Libraries 6(1), pp. 6-25.

• Hill, e.a. (1999). Geographic Names :The Implementation of a Gazetteer in a Georeferenced Digital Library, D-Lib Magazine 5(1)

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/hill/01hill.html• Hill, L. (2000) Core elements of digital gazetteers: Placenames,categories, and

footprints. In J. Borbinha and T. Baker, ed. Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (4th European Conference, ECDL 2000 Lisbon, Portugal, September 18-20, p.280-290).

• Magda El-Sherbini (2001). Metadata and the future of cataloging. Library Review 50 ( 1), pp.16 - 27


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BIBLIOGRAPHY (2)• Keßler,M. e.a. (2009). An Agenda for the Next Generation Gazetteer: Geographic

Information Contribution and Retrieval. in ACM GIS 2009, pp. 91-100.• Mathys, T. and Kamel Boulos, M. N. (2011). Geospatial resources for supporting data

standards, guidance and best practice in health informatics. BMC Research Notes, vol. 4, p. 19.

• Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop, 27 June – 1 July 2011 http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub152/reports/pub152/Stanford%20Linked%20Data%20Workshop%20Report%20FINAL%20111024.htm

• Turton,e.a.(2007) Geographic Information Retrieval from Disparate Data Sources http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vaccine/assets/pdfs/publications/pdf/ Geographic%20Information%20Retrieval.pdf• Vardakosta, I.and Kapidakis, S. (2011).Geospatial collection development policies in

academic libraries: a worldwide research. In 17th European Colloquium on Quantitative and Theoretical Geography (ECQTG2011), Athens (GR),September 2-5.

• Vardakosta, I. and Kapidakis, S. (2012a) GIS services in Academic Librariesin 7th Panhellenic Conference of HellasGIS, Athens, May 17-18

• Vardakosta, I.and Kapidakis, S. (2012b) Geospatial Data in Library Collections. In 5th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA),Hersonissos, Crete (GR),June 6-8.

• Vardakosta, I.and Kapidakis, S. (2012c) Geospatial data collection development policies’ characteristics. In 41st Annual LIBER Conference,Tartu (EE),June 27-30.

http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub152/reports/pub152/Stanford%20Linked%25



http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vaccine/assets/pdfs/publications/pdf/