Place Identifiers: Describing Position, Location, and Virtual World References

The concept of place is fundamental to our understanding of the world around us, but what constitutes place to one person might be quite different to someone else. Humans can easily differentiate between similar place identifiers, but it's difficult for machines to correctly distinguish these relationships. This impedes their discovery and retrieval of information. Two projects that focus on the representation of place information are introduced in this column. First, the Place Identifier Project, a conceptual project that defines a reference model and encoding method, together referred to as the Place Identifier (PI) Architecture. The second project described is an XML encoding grammar referred to as Schema for the Description of Place Information (PlaceXML). This technology specifies a structure to spatially organize descriptions and links to files containing various kinds of digital data.