Welcome to this EnvO+GAZ integration demo.

This is a prototype tool exploring methods for automated linking between the EnvO and GAZ projects.

It makes use of the Terminizer to find the occurrences of terms from the Environment Ontology in the definition of terms in GAZ, the open source gazetteer.

The Terminizer uses a rich text matching algorithm which has several advantages over conventional text searches. For example, consider the GAZ term "Stirling Range" (GAZ:00087887) which has the following definition:

"A range of mountains and hills in the Great Southern region of Western Australia, 337 km south-east of Perth. It is over 60 km wide from west to east, stretching from the highway between Mount Barker and Cranbrook eastward past Gnowangerup." [url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Range_National_Park]

When the Terminizer is asked to find terms from EnvO in this text, it will correctly spot "mountain range" even though the words are in the wrong order in this definition.

As the above example shows, GAZ definitions sometimes contain links to Wikipedia entries. If the browsing tool spots such a link, it will retrieve the page from Wikipedia and search it for a latitude,longitude pair. If one is found, a Google Map will be generated.

There are well over 180,000 entries in GAZ, not all of which have full definitions or pointers to Wikipedia entries yet. If you just want to quickly see examples of the linking process in action, the

button (above) will repeatedly search until it finds an entry with at least one EnvO term match whereas the

button (above) will search for a term for which map coordinates can be retrieved.

This tool also perform simple searching of the definitions of GAZ terms. The

button (above) displays a list of all of the terms in EnvO - clicking on any of those terms will lead to a list of all of the GAZ entries whose definitions contain that text. Some interesting examples are "impact crater" and "glacial lake".