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Notes on the Global Gazetteer
The
Global Gazetteer
from Falling Rain Genomics, Inc., is used on the TowerBells Website
to make available to visitors some additional information
about places where tower bell instruments outside North America are located.
This page presents the rationale for and history of that usage,
describes various problems that have been encountered,
and provides some helpful hints for those who might wish
to use the Global Gazetteer for other purposes.
Background
In 2005, when the original version of the data section of this Website
(then an attachment to the GCNA Website) was being extended beyond North America,
the Global Gazetteer was discovered, and was judged to be a useful resource
for providing some locator information in regions of the world where existing
mapping services did not have adequate coverage.
(For details of the turmoil in the arena of online mapping in that era,
see our page on
map service history.)
In July of that year, the first Weblinks to the Global Gazetteer were added
to site data pages in Central and South America.
Thereafter, such a link was provided regularly as described below.
This continued even after online mapping services began providing adequate detail
for areas outside North America, because adding a link is simple and the
information available may be interesting to our visitors.
The Global Gazetteer seems to have begun in 1996,
as that is the earliest date in the copyright statement
at the bottom of every page there.
When we first found it, and for several years thereafter,
the home page of the domain (www.fallingrain.com)
presented basic contact information for the provider
(Falling Rain Genomics, Inc.), though there was no eddress (email address).
Since then, the provider has released newer versions from time to time,
with V2.3 apparently being installed in February 2015.
One of those releases changed the URL style; fortunately for us,
redirects were provided so that links to the old-style URLs don't break.
(We're working on finding and updating those anyway.)
In a subsequent release, the home page of the domain
no longer had separate content.
Instead, it redirected immediately to the Global Gazetteer.
As of 2020, there are again home pages
(now requiring two clicks to get into the Global Gazetteer),
but the database version is still V2.3.
Current usage
Clearly the provider of the Global Gazetteer intends that it be widely used,
because at the bottom of each city page one finds this statement:
"If this page is useful to you, please link to it."
Accordingly, we have done so, in almost every site data page
for locations outside of North America.
The exceptions are those few cases where the place is unknown or indeterminate,
i.e., a country has two or more towns of the same name,
and it is not yet known which one contains a particular instrument.
In some of those cases, we have provided a link to each of the possible town pages,
since no site locator map is yet possible.
Helpful hints
The provider of the Global Gazetteer has never included any help,
apparently on the presumption that the user interface is intuitively obvious.
While that is indeed true, it may nevertheless be helpful to point out
a few facts about how that Website is organized
and then to identify some problems we have encountered there.
There are two kinds of pages - index pages and place pages.
Index pages are subdivided into three types -
the main page, country pages and letter pages.
Each type of index can have a list, a table of places, or both;
some have more, as described below.
Place pages are subdivided into three types -
cities (including towns), airports and waypoints.
On both kinds of pages, names are primarily in Roman script
(the same as this page you are reading).
However, letter indexes and alternate place names
can be in any script supported by Unicode.
Page layouts are as follows:
- Index pages
- Main page - titled
"Directory of Cities and Towns in the World"
+ Small map of the world
+ Country list (in Roman script only); each entry shows the two-letter
abbreviation used by the Gazetteer plus the customary English name,
and links to a country index page.
+ First-letter list (independent of country; at least two dozen scripts);
each entry links to a letter index page for cities (and towns),
airports and waypoints, using not only familiar names but also
postal codes, names in other scripts, etc.
+ Table of places without names (ERROR!)
- Country pages - titled
"Directory of Cities, Towns and Regions in [country]"
+ Small map of the country and its surroundings (unlabelled)
+ List of regions (states, provinces, departments, etc.) in the country;
each entry links to a letter index page.
+ "Alphabetical Listing of Places in [country]" - a first-letter list;
each entry links to a letter index page.
+ "Airports in [country]" -
link to an airport index/table page for that country
+ "Aviation Waypoints in [country]" -
link to a waypoint index/table page for that country.
(This link may be missing, and even if it is present
there may be no waypoints in the destination page.)
- Letter pages are connected in trees.
The starting point of each tree is a page for a group of place names
that all have the same first letter (or the same first character
in a non-alphabetic script).
The ending point of each branch of the tree is a page with a
table of place names, all of which begin with the same
string of characters.
Each intermediate point along a branch is based on the addition of
one more character to the previous point, and has a list of links
for the various possible additional letters; each of those links
could be to either an ending point or yet another intermediate point,
depending on how many place names begin with the current sequence
of letters.
Thus there is no fixed length for branches, and no fixed size for
trees; it all depends on what place names exist in the area being
indexed, and what similarities there are among those names in terms
of their starting sequence of characters.
Tables on any of the index pages have a column for the place names
being indexed, plus a few columns for additional information
(always including latitude and longitude).
The place names are in alphabetic order (for alphabetic scripts),
and are links to the respective place pages
(whether city or airport, or presumably waypoint).
- Place pages
- City pages -
titled "Maps, Weather and Airports for [preferred name of the city,
country]
+ List of alternate names (if any) for the city; this page can be
reached through the indexes by using any of those names.
In the USA, this include Zipcodes.
+ Three locator maps, at local, regional and continental scales
+ Weather charts - temperature, cloud cover and precipitation
for the next 2 weeks
+ Nearby cities and towns, organized by cardinal direction, with distances
+ Table of nearby airports
+ List of nearby references in Wikipedia (if available), with distances
- Airport pages - titled "Airport [NAME]"
+ Table of key facts
+ Locator map (city scale)
+ Airline service to airports within 1500 nm, with descriptive map
at sub-continental scale, and table of those airports
+ Nearby airports (map and table)
+ Nearby cities and towns, organized by cardinal direction, with distances
+ Graphs of temperature, cloud cover and precipitation for the next 2 weeks
- Waypoint pages - titled "Waypoint [NAME] Country [CODE]"
+ Locator map (regional scale)
+ Map and table of nearby airports
+ Map and list of nearby waypoints
All pages with airport or waypoint information are clearly marked
"not valid for navigation."
Problems encountered
There are almost 7200 starting characters on the main page, in more than two dozen
different scripts, at least some of which are most likely not supported by your
computer software.
This is likely to make the main page and some country index pages slow to load.
The two-letter country abbreviations do not always match the "ISO 3166-1 alpha-2"
standard, which TowerBells.org follows closely.
We have not yet determined whether those abbreviations follow some other standard.
The letter lists on the various index pages are spaced too tightly,
so that line wraps occur in the midle of entries rather than between entries,
making some of them difficult to read.
In the latest release, the intermediate letter index pages no longer include the words
"beginning with ..." in the page heading, only in the page title.
Geographical organization is not always what one might expect.
For example, the United States (US) section includes American Samoa,
Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marshall Islands, Northern Mariana Islands,
Puerto Rico, Palau, U.S. Minor Outlying Islands, and United States Virgin Islands.
There is no country or city page for the Vatican, though it has a country code of VT
on the main page and "Vatican City Heliport" is listed on the "Vati..." index page.
The page for that heliport is likewise unavailable.
Jerusalem is not listed under Israel; the closest equivalent that can be found
is the district Mehoz Yerushalayim, within which are numerous cities and towns.
The main page lists "BUGPLEASFIXME" as a country for codes DX, OS, UC, UF,
but following those links produces the common "not found" error.
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This page was created 2015/05/01 and last revised 2023/12/30.
Please send comments or questions about this page to
csz_stl@swbell.net.