Gazetteer

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A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place-names (see: toponomy), used in conjunction with an atlas. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup of a country, region, or continent as well as the social statistics and physical features, such as mountains, waterways, or roads. Examples of information you would find include the location of places, dimensions of physical features, population, GDP, literacy rate, etc.

Gazetteers are often categorized by the type, and scope, of the information presented. World gazetteers usually consist of an alphabetical listing of countries, with pertinent statistics for each one, with some gazetteers listing information on individual cities, towns, villages, and other settlements of varying sizes. Short-form gazetteers, often used in conjunction with computer mapping and GIS systems, may simply contain a list of place-names together with their locations in latitude and longitude or other spatial referencing systems (eg. British National Grid reference). Short-form gazetteers appear as a place-name index in the rear of major published atlases. Descriptive gazetteers may include lengthy textual descriptions of the places they contain, including explanation of industries, government, geography, together with historical perspectives, maps and / or photographs. Thematic gazetteers list places or geographical features by theme; for example fishing ports, nuclear power stations, or historic buildings. Their common element is that the geographical location is an important attribute of the features listed.

Gazetteer editors gather facts and other information from official government reports, the census, chambers of commerce, together with numerous other sources, and organise these in digest form.

Contents

Gazetteers became popular in Britain in the 19th Century, with publishers such as Fullarton, Mackenzie, Chambers and W & A.K. Johnston, many of whom were Scottish, meeting public demand for information on an expanding Empire. This British tradition continues in the electronic age with innovations such as the National Land and Property Gazetteer, the text-based Gazetteer for Scotland, and The Definitive National Address Gazetteer for Scotland known as DNA-Scotland (DNAS).

Gazetteers can be found in reference sections of most libraries as well as on the Web.

Examples of electronic world gazetteers can be found at:

  • NGA GEOnet Names Server
    • the GEOnet Names Server (GNS) provides access to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names' (US BGN) database of foreign geographic feature names.
  • The World Gazetteer
    • for a given city it gives the country, province, population, coordinates, population rank among all towns within the country
    • for each country it gives a map and table of provinces with area and population, a map of cities, an alphabetical table of cities, and a table of top cities - tables can be sorted by a column of choice
    • for each province it gives an alphabetical table of cities.
  • Falling Rain Global Gazetteer
    • Contains 2,900,000 towns outside the US. For a given country and town it gives coordinates, altitude, weather forecast, and a map showing the position of the town with respect to topography and borders and bodies of water (not with respect to other towns); it also lists towns which are very nearby, within 3 km, with direction.
  • EarthSearch
    • http://www.earthsearch.net/
    • Similar to the previous two, dictionary search, returns coordinates, satellite image and CIA World factbook country map.
  • The Fuzzy Gazetteer (European Commission/JRC Digital Map Archive)
  • The CIA World Factbook
    • https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
    • Compiled by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, this reference includes country-level data on all countries recognized by the United States. The World Fact Book gives information for each country on geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues. Cross check with other references as this work contains numerous errors.

  • Karnataka Gazetteer
  • East Himalayan Gazetteer
    • Compiled by Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, UK. An online gazetteer of 5,000 plant collecting localities in East Nepal, Sikkim, Darjeeling District, Bhutan and the Chumbi Valley (Tibet).

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