Gazetteer

A gazetteer is a database used to relate text labels to geospatial[?] or in some cases temporal information. For instance, if one types "California, USA", the database would return the location and possibly the actual footprint of the feature.

For some examples see:

• The Alexandria Digital Library at UCSB
  • http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/
  • http://fat-albert.alexandria.ucsb.edu:8827/gazetteer/

• The U.S. Gazetteer
  • http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer

• World Gazetteer
  • http://www.gazetteer.de/

• The Getty Thesaurus of Geographical names
  • http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn/

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This is not the main sense of "gazetteer," and clearly we will want an article about gazetteers in that main sense. Where should the above article live? "Electronic gazetteer"? "Database gazetteer"?