The Government Information Locator Service: Discovering, identifying, and accessing spatial data

Moen, William E.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/417 Copy

Description

Title

The Government Information Locator Service: Discovering, identifying, and accessing spatial data

Author(s)

Moen, William E.

Issue Date

1996

Keyword(s)

• Government information
• Government Information Locator Service (GILS)

Abstract

The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) is a new federal initiative to assist the public in discovering, identifying, and locating government information. GILS may play a special role in helping the spatial data community to search and retrieve information about spatial information resources created, collected, or held by federal agencies. GILS is a decentralized standards-based approach to network discovery and retrieval. The basic components of GILS are structured records (i.e., the GILS Locator Records) with standardized data elements that describe and provide access information to federal information resources; agency-based information servers hosting the Locator Records; client software to initiate information retrieval transactions; and ANSI/NISO Z39.50 as the communications protocol between clients and servers. This paper provides an overview of GILS and discusses ANSI/NISO Z39.50, the American National Standard for information retrieval, and its use in GILS. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of GILS for the discovery and use of spatial data.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Series/Report Name or Number

Geographic information systems and libraries: patrons, maps, and spatial information [papers presented at the 1995 Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, April 10-12, 1995]

ISSN

0069-4789

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/417

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