Posted by David Michelson on Friday, September 19, 2014 in Conference, eXist-DB, public presentations, Syriac Gazetteer, TEI XML.

In September, Anthony Davis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and a Syriaca.org research assistant, introduced Syriaca.org to state Geographic Information Officers from around the country in his presentation, “Geographic Texts: Using Machine Reading to Markup Geographic References in Texts” at the National States Geographic Information Council 2014 Annual Conference in Charleston, SC. Davis discussed the Syriac Gazetteer in detail highlighting the fact that the gazetteer’s data files reside in the open-source eXist XML DB and is encoded following the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) standards. Davis demonstrated how this open data architecture allows one to use the Syriac Gazetteer as an “Authority File” to programmatically – via the XML query language known as xQuery – find geographic references in text documents. While this method is of great interest to those in academic settings, Davis concluded the presentation with a scenario where federal, state and local governments can use the same eXist architecture to geocode their own agency’s government documents, such as Laws and Statutes. Slides from Davis’ presentation are available at: http://www.nsgic.org/public_resources/2014_09_16_10_Texts-Davis.pdf