I'm currently working on improving the interaction between EADitor and
existing controlled vocabulary services, specifically geonames.org,
for geographic names. Each geographic place has a URI (example,
http://sws.geonames.org/4250542/) and an rdf representation
(http://sws.geonames.org/4250542/about.rdf). It's important to
capture the URI of the place name, especially when indexing the
finding aid, because it will allow the capture of geographic
coordinates and georeferencing of items within the collection.
I could be wrong, but I don't think a URL will validate as a NMTOKEN
or ID, so I don't think any existing attributes for <geogname> will
suffice. I have been contemplating using extptr, which is one of the
few elements that can occur within geogname. Example:
<geogname>
<extptr href="http://sws.geonames.org/4250542/"/>
</geogname>
The name of the place, Springfield, IL, is unnecessary to capture
literally in the finding aid. It can be extracted at processing time
from the geonames rdf service.
Is anyone doing anything similar to this?
Ethan Gruber
American Numismatic Society
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