What is different about the Unlock gazetteer?
The Unlock gazetteer is different from a traditional gazetteer in a number of ways: • places will be classified into types, for example, city, river, lake; • places will be recorded with their geographic ‘footprint’, for example, settlements represented as areas, rivers as lines (this differs from traditional gazetteers which represent places as points, even though they may cover quite large areas or may be linear features such as rivers); • the database will not only be comprised of places but also other types of ‘geographies’, including postcode areas, parishes and electoral districts; • the current focus of the gazetteer is ‘near contemporary’ data, but the longer-term aim is to also include historical information.
