Introduction

This blog accompanies our work on the Unlock services at EDINA. These are JISC-supported services designed to unlock the hidden potential in resources with a textual component.

The services currently have a location focus – a gazetteer and place service service, Unlock places, and a “geoparser” which extracts placenames from text and finds likely locations – Unlock text.

We also offer postcode location encoding for academic use only. Two gazetteer databases are supported; one is built from many Ordnance Survey data products and available for UK academic use through Digimap Collections; the other is based on open data sourced from Geonames.org

Things we plan to leave on this blog: notes about interesting use cases for the gazetteer and geoparser services; reports from relevant workshops attended; related work being done by others; new functions of the services. Please get in touch through unlock@ed.ac.uk if you have any feedback, or leave comments here.