Pekka Latvala
Research Scientist
Finnish Geodetic Institute
Finland

Biography
Pekka Latvala is a Research Scientist working at the department of Geoinformatics and Cartography
at Finnish Geodetic Institute. His area of expertise is interoperability and geospatial web services.

Abstract
The Provision of Functionalities Related to Place Names as a Web Service in a Multi-Provider Environment

Co-Authors:
Lassi Lehto, D.Sc. (Tech.), Finnish Geodetic Institute
Jaakko Kähkönen, M.Sc., Finnish Geodetic Institute

The ELF GeoLocator service is a gazetteer type of web service that is currently being developed in the project 'European Location Framework' (ELF). The service is based on the earlier EuroGeoNames gazetteer service that has been developed further in the ELF project. The implementation of the ELF GeoLocator service follows the Web Feature Service Gazetteer Application Profile and it contains custom functionalities for executing administrative unit-limited geocoding, reverse geocoding, administrative unit-limited reverse geocoding and fuzzy name search. The added functionalities are provided as custom WFS interface operations: GetFeatureInAu, FuzzyNameSearch and ReverseGeocode. The GetFeatureInAu operation can be used for limiting the geocoding operations inside a specific administrative unit instance. The FuzzyNameSearch operation can be used for searching features from a slightly misspelled input and it is useful in situations when there are typing errors in the queried name or when the queried name contains diacritics or other special characters that might not be easily available on user's keyboard. The ReverseGeocode operation contains two modes: (1) normal mode, where the service returns the feature that is nearest to the given coordinate pair. (2) Administrative unit limited mode, where the service returns the administrative unit-based feature at the most detailed administrative unit level that contains the given coordinate pair. The ELF GeoLocator service contains spatial data from the INSPIRE themes Addresses, Administrative Units and Geographical Names that are provided by several European national mapping and cadastral agencies. In addition, the service includes the contents of a separate exonym database that consists of multilingual variant names of many European locations.