Geo-enabling repositories - techniques, tools, and challenges

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track Papers and Panels

It is widely recognised that resources have an important spatial as well as temporal component that assist in both discovery and use. This has led to an increasing appreciation of the importance of ensuring that resources are geotagged, geo-referenced or otherwise spatially tagged in a manner that allows not just trivial visualization using conventional map based metaphors but also allows deeper interrogation of the relationships in and across space. The 'hidden' power that a geographical dimension can bring to discovery, whilst recognized by large search engine optimisation (SEO) companies, has been slow to be harnessed by the emergent repository community. In part this is due to a lack of awareness and in part due to a lack of common tooling that can be embedded within standard repository work-flows. This paper introduces a number of foundation tools developed as middle-ware within a UK tertiary education (?) context that can be used to assist in improving the 'geo-exploitation' of the spatial component of repository resources.