Characteristics of the geographical namespaces. Criticism existing systems
Ungváry Rudolf
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Országos Széchényi Könyvtár
Importance of the geographical names has been increasing, paralell to the development of the state administration systems. Good governance and economical interest highly appreciate the exact identification of the geographical places. By the help of the internet the geographical names can be linked with the virtual maps, too. End users can get a direct line on geographical places and their environment.
Inside of the national name spaces geographical names has gained significant role. Inside of the national name spaces first geographical names spaces are formed. The reason of this is that their collections are transparent, can be structured quite simply, and contain remarkable amount of data which are useful, and has public utility (population, postal code, height above mean sea level (AMSL), government classification administration, coordinates, etc.)
Related to the geographical names, the name spaces of personal and corporate names has been developing more slowly.
Collections of these proper names are extremely big. In the existing, extremely big personal name files retrospective identification is time consuming work. In the case of the corporate names it makes the situation more complicated that the same corporate has a wide variety of forms of the names.
Spaces of common names was developed early. Their simple forms were named Thesauri from the early 50-ies. The using of them was necessary for the information retrieval, so their utilizing module was developed soon int he data base systems. Independent programmes of construction an maintenance of thesauri were born as well.
Gazetteer of Hungary was prepared in printed form, divided to counties and populated places, in the 70-ies. Despite of the limited content it was a name space of significant size, and its utilization was constrained by the simple system, which was divided to booklets, the lack of a unified index, inaccurate handling of synonyms and homonyms forms of names. Present institutions of the development of the Hungarian gazetteer are the National Library, the Institute of the Geodesy, other important cartography institutes, gross books of linguistical name bases, and the editing of the journals of onomastics, Hungarian university departments, and last, but not least the spaces which were created based on the work of the interdepartmental Commitee of Geographical Names.
For the sake of the supporting of the develpment of the elctronically handled gazetteer of Hungary which is at present under the preparation, we identify the specific requirements, which can be utilized to the editing work of the geograpyhical name space. We have formulated these requirements from the point of views information retrieval, the user friendy handling of the names. It is obvious, that these descriptions has to be supplemented with several additional points, based on the points of views of the cartography.