This page describes a
DAML+OIL (March 2001)
representation of information provided by the
GEONet Names Server (GNS)
from the
U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).
GNS includes information on about 3.84 million features and 5.28 million names worldwide,
exluding the United States and Antarctica.
Example
Approach
We downloaded the tab-delimited
names files
for each country.
We initially tried to generate a static .daml file for each
feature and country,
but the data volume proved prohibitive.
We now load the data into a
mySQL
and dynamically generate DAML content dynamically.
Based on the
names file format
we manually created
We used a custom program
gendaml.java
to generate
featureTypes.daml
from the
GNS Feature Designation Cross Reference.
We developed a CGI program
geonames.java
to access the database and produce DAML for each
country, feature, or name on demand.
Notable features include:
- properties are added to existing
FIPS country instances
rather than creating new objects
- we generate DAML Classes to represent
Feature Classes and Feature Designations
Possible Future Directions
- load data for all countries
- process remaining fields (administrative divisions, etc.)
- improve the handling of international character data
- ...
Author
Mike Dean
$Id: index.xml,v 1.3 2002/04/23 00:24:13 mdean Exp $
