A Gazetteer Metadata Service is a special type of Metadata Service that lets you associate place names with geographic locations. Searching a Gazetteer Metadata Service by place name or by your area of interest returns the gazetteer places matching your criteria. Each gazetteer place found will have a long description and a bounding rectangle indicating which places you have found and where they are.
ArcIMS comes with a Gazetteer Data disk. It has a world gazetteer dataset that contains approximately 350,000 place names and geographic features from around the world. It contains a complete listing of all countries, large- and medium-sized cities, major water bodies, mountain ranges, and so on. This dataset contains more detailed places within the U.S. such as small cities, zip codes, some historical places, parks, and more. The global scope of this data lets you use it with any Metadata Service.
A subset of the world gazetteer data is also available, containing only the U.S. places and features. This dataset contains approximately 250,000 place names. The U.S.-only gazetteer does not include any U.S. places that are not present in the world gazetteer.
The scope of places in your Gazetteer Metadata Service should be appropriate for the context in which you plan to use the service. For example, if your metadata catalog contains information from around the world you will want to use world-wide gazetteer data. If your Metadata Service collects information within a state or province, the Gazetteer Metadata Service to use with it should focus on features within that same area.
The Gazetteer Data disk provides data in two formats. There is a set of ArcSDE export files that can be used to set up a pre-loaded Gazetteer Metadata Service in your ArcSDE database; this is the fastest way to get started. The gazetteer data is also provided in shapefile format; you can use a subset of this data as the basis of a custom gazetteer.
If you already have a Gazetteer Metadata Service or know of one you can use, you can search it in ArcCatalog. Right-click the service, then click Search. You can define your area of interest on the Geography tab in the Search dialog box. Or, click the Advanced tab, and type the place name you want to find into the Value text box and click Add to list to search the service.
The Metadata Explorer application, provided with the ArcIMS Web ADF for the Java Platform, is integrates a Gazetteer Metadata Service to help define your area of interest. If the application is configured to use a Gazetteer Metadata Service, you can define your spatial search criteria either by drawing your area of interest on a map, or by searching a Gazetteer Metadata Service and selecting a place name; selecting a gazetteer place sets the extent of the search map to the bounding rectangle associated with that place name.
If you have your own controlled vocabulary or taxonomy of place names, those places can be incorporated into a Gazetteer Metadata Service. Once the places are availabe through a service, any application can use this list of places. While the Metadata Explorer uses the Gazetteer Metdata Service to help with searching, a custom metadata editor could also use a Gazetteer Metadata Service to help you add place name keywords and define the extent of non-spatial GIS resources.