Graduate Student Jordan Hastings was selected for this year’s Dangermond Award, receiving a generous stipend. Jack Dangermond is the founder of ESRI (1969), a GIS and mapping software company, and is considered one of the most influential people in GIS, worldwide. He and his wife, Laura, have funded the annual award for deserving undergraduate and graduate students of GIS.
Jordan’s research concerns digital gazetteers and the geospatial databases that support them. A digital gazetteer is software for looking up and mapping geographic placenames. Essentially it is an electronic replacement for the placename index that is found in the back of printed atlases. Such gazetteers provide the basis for many webmapping and navigation services (for example, Expedia and MapQuest) and also facilitate georeferencing of text documents to real-world places (namely, to further improve search engines like Google).
Jordan’s research concerns digital gazetteers and the geospatial databases that support them. A digital gazetteer is software for looking up and mapping geographic placenames. Essentially it is an electronic replacement for the placename index that is found in the back of printed atlases. Such gazetteers provide the basis for many webmapping and navigation services (for example, Expedia and MapQuest) and also facilitate georeferencing of text documents to real-world places (namely, to further improve search engines like Google).
