INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

This is something that came up in my GIS (Geographic Information Systems) class – perhaps not a great breakthrough, but as a technique for controlling vocabularies, I thought it was pretty neat.

One common way to develop a GIS database is to take little GPS handhelds out in the field, go up to the features you want to map, record their locations, and input the attributes you care about (for example, locate a tree and input its height and species). As it turns out, there are a couple important interface issues here – one is that you have to input complex data with the limited interface of a handheld device, and the other is that you often want to use a complex controlled vocabulary for the data you input (e.g. a list of tree species, delineated categories of tree heights, etc).

As it turns out, some of these handhelds have an integrated barcode reader. So you define your vocabularies, then print them out into a paper catalog of terms, each with a barcode, and when you’re standing next to your tree all you need to do is look up the terms in your paper catalog and scan them with your barcode reader. I thought this was a pretty elegant solution to the problem, and it addresses what I often see as the most important part of producing structured data – find ways to make it easier for content creators to produce clean data than not.