A leading map specialist has launched a comprehensive worldwide gazetteer with immeasurable potential for search and reference applications. Multi-award winning Europa Technologies is aiming its Global 360 product at any business that needs to search, reference and geocode locations worldwide. With a range of entries from countries down to localised places of interest, Global 360 can be used for spatially enabling web applications such as store, dealer and service locators, office messaging, asset tracking, social networking and geographic ‘check-in’ services.
Country and major city names are available in local and foreign language forms (“exonyms”). Languages supported include English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, standard Arabic and simplified Chinese. Support for Russian and Hebrew is in development.
As well as a latitude and longitude (WGS-84) coordinate, Global 360 uniquely features a ‘range indicator’ for each location, giving its geographic extent.
Global 360 is the first gazetteer of its kind to adopt the Geo URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) Internet standard for geographic locations. Geo URIs support the vCard file format specification, used for electronic business cards, and the GeoSMS standard for the tagging of locations in SMS text messages.
The Geo URI scheme was defined in June 2010 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an international open standards organisation that develops and promotes Internet protocols.
Global 360 is supplied in popular GIS data formats such as ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB. It can also come as a text file or in Access format for easy loading into an enterprise-grade relational database.
