Configuring a Custom Gazetteer

Voyager uses Gazetteers for Geotagging and Placefinding (Geotagging extension required). There are two types of gazetteers, Custom and Standard. 

  • Custom Gazetteer - A custom gazetteer is based on specific data in the index that you use as a source of location information for other data. 

  • Standard Gazetteer - This is a pre-built gazetteer stored in a separate index (gazetteer), in local or remote Voyager instances.

This article generally describes how to define and use a Custom Gazetteer. To begin, you need to add a unique Voyager location content type that contains location and geometry information. Please first follow the article Tutorial - Building and Using a Custom Gazetteer for a step by step tutorial on how to build a custom gazetteer from a Shapefile.

Adding the Location to use for Geotagging

  1. Add a location that contains records with location names or asset IDs, for example, along with a geometry.

  2. For that location, identify the index field that has place data that the placefinder will match against. This is commonly meta_NAME or meta_ID. For the sake of clarity, we will refer to this as meta_NAME.

  3. Go to the Document Transformers page and set up a Copy Field transformation that copies meta_NAME to a field prefixed with fst_tag_. For example fst_tag_NAME.

  4. Build (or rebuild) the index for the gazetteer source.

Geotagging by Location vs. Tagging by default

You can configure a Custom Gazetteer to use as a default, or you can configure one for a specific location. 

Configuring Default Geotagging Settings

To use a Custom Gazetteer for all locations:

  • Go to Manage Voyager > Discovery > Discovery Configuration 

  • Select Geotag from a Custom Gazetteer on the Geotag tab. 

Configuring Geotagging for a Specific Location

  • Go to Manage Voyager > Discovery > Locations and click the Edit icon button to the location you want to geotag. 

  • Select Geotag from a Custom Gazetteer on the Geotag tab.

Configuring Custom Geotagging Parameters

The configuration steps are the same for both of the options above. Enter the following information:

  • Enter the URL for a Voyager Location or Query ParameterThis is the URL for location information, and can be copied directly from the address bar of a Voyager search results page.

  • Select the Field Containing Location InformationThis is a field created using Voyager’s Document Transformer geotagging step.

  • Select the Fields to Copy from the GazetteerAdditional fields to be copied from the gazetteer to the target documents. For placefinding, it is important to copy the bbox and/or geo fields

  • Select the Text Field to GeotagAny text field in a document can be geotagged. Most commonly this is the text field.

  • Check Geotag Documents to enable tagging documents with bounding box  (bbox) or geometry (geo) fields.

Click Save to save your changes.

Geotagging Records 

To apply tagging with the Gazetter, you need to rebuild either the entire index or just the specific location, as appropriate.

To rebuild the index for a location:

  1. Go to Discovery > Locations and click the Manage icon next to that location

  2. Select Rebuild from the list of Actions

To rebuild the entire index:

  1. Go to Manage Voyager > Discovery > Status 

  2. Click Scan All Locations

Viewing Tagged Data

To view tagging information once the index has been rebuilt:

  1. Return to the search results that include the location

  2. Click Show Detail Page for an individual record

  3. The geotags are displayed under the Locations section of the details page. On Navigo the Locations are found by clicking the Relationships button on the search result details page.

  4. Look for location information, for example bbox values, in the list of metadata

See Also:

Using Voyager's Standard Gazetteer