Why should I use a gazetteer?

Gazetteers are important information resources. People use gazetteers primarily to search for data:

• To find a place given all or part of its name (Where is Gananoque);
• To find all places in a given region (In the Laurentian area); and
• To find places that have some kind of a relationship to a known place (identify schools in a given city).

Gazetteers are invaluable to researchers in many fields because they make sense out of complex and changing geographies. Many geographic names, for instance, have a number of different forms. There are many incompatibilities between different geographies where various boundaries do not align. Geographic names have also changed over time, and will continue to change; gazetteers assist information retrieval and data browsing by standardizing geographic names, and by providing a controlled vocabulary of current names within a defined classification system.

Standards in action

Mario is an ambulance dispatcher. Every time he answers a telephone call for emergency services, he relies on a gazetteer to retrieve precise geographic information about the location of the emergency. Combined with other GIS services, the gazetteer makes it possible for Mario to visualize the location on a map, determine the best route to that location, and provide place names for the ambulance paramedics. Time is of the essence when responding to emergencies, and gazetteers help reduce the response time.