The Construction of the Chinese Gazetteer Information System:The Integration Application of Authority Control, Gazetteer and GIS

Abstract

Discussions of administrative place names in China involve spatial-temporal transitions through the past dynasties. These place names are mirrors of specific political, economical, and social attributes of each time. As time passes by and the environment changes, an understanding of administrative place names is helpful in contextualizing historical knowledge. Therefore, to reflect the reality of historical records, history researchers demand an integrated information system of temporal axis and spatial axis.For a long time, major developments of geographic information in Library Information Science have been in gazetteer, geographical headings and authority control. Scholars mainly focus on the temporal sequence, and the description of properties and attributes of place names. But the spatial concepts and spatial-temporal definition are often disregarded. The recent tendency of Geographic Information Science is toward the development of GIS techniques, which focuses on presenting the spatial concept of a specific period, as the temporal sequence and analysis of place names' characteristics and attributes are still omitted.This paper, from the perspectives of these three disciplines, intends to integrate the demands, disposal and application of the Chinese gazetteer information system. First of all, to utilize from the metadata of the place names, we would like to discuss the practicable model, which acts to organize and systemize the four-dimension variable structure (4D structure) of the administrative place names in China. At the same time, the application of GIS techniques can provide users with integration mechanism of gazetteer and thesaurus. With the combination of real images, type-drawings and orientation, we can establish a plural Gazetteer Information System. The Second key subject of this paper focuses on the development of the Gazetteer Information System, such as the catalog system of place names, the metadata of maps, and the map-text integrated searching system. And the last, We think further about these three disciplines intergrations.