The Information Commons Gazetteer A Public Resource of Populated Places and Worldwide Administrative Divisions

Advances in location aware computing and the convergence of geographic and textual information systems will require a comprehensive, extensible, information rich framework called the Information Commons Gazetteer, that can be freely disseminated to small devices in a modular fashion. This paper describes the infrastructure and datasets used to create such a resource. The Gazetteer makes use of MAYA Design's Universal Database Architecture; a peer-to-peer system based upon bundles of attribute-value pairs with universally unique identity, and sophisticated indexing and data fusion tools. The Gazetteer primarily constitutes publicly available geographic information from various agencies that is organized into a well-defined hierarchy of worldwide administrative divisions and populated places. The data from various sources are imported into the Commons incrementally and are fused with existing data in an iterative process allowing for rich information to evolve over time. Such a flexible and distributed public resource of the geographic places and place names allows for both researchers and practitioners to realize location aware computing in an efficient and useful way in the near future by eliminating redundant time consuming fusion of disparate sources.