The Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer (ADL Gazetteer) was a project to build an online global placename dictionary.
A joint project of the UCSB Library, Geography and Computer Science Departments, the Gazetteer was built in the mid-1990's from two standard US Federal databases. The ADL Gazetteer and its API fell offline due to lack of maintenance sometime in the early- to mid-2000's. In 2013, the Library and the Geography Department's STKO Lab entered into a partnership to revive the Gazetteer as a Semantic Web vocabulary.
If you are interested in working on gazetteer research, please contact Geospatial Collection staff at geospatial@library.ucsb.edu.
Current Status
The ADL Gazetteer currently exists on a development server in the Geography Department as an RDF triple store. The vocabulary itself is constructed from the legacy ADL Gazetteer, with United States placenames updated in January of 2015 from the USGS's Geographic Names Information Service (GNIS). The international placenames came from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency's GeoNET Names Server (GNS) in 2004. Entries for countries (Admin Level 0) and states/provinces (Admin Level 1) were linked to Natural Earth Data's 1:10 million resolution geometries in early 2015.
