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Ruvane, M. B. & Dobbs, G. R. (2005). Interdisciplinary collaboration and database modeling for historical GIS: structured annotation for land grant research. Association of American Geographers, 101st Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, April 5-9, 2005.

Abstract:
This paper describes the collaboration between an information scientist and a geographer in building a database to collect and manage information from 18th century land documents. The purpose of the database was to facilitate the geographer’s HGIS work involving the Indian Trading Path and its relationship to European settlement patterns in the North Carolina Piedmont. The database needed to be able to support a quick flow of data input, query and sort on several variables, handle ambiguity and multiple spellings of place and people names, convert dates and distance units, and export survey dimensions and attributes to a GIS application. The geographer’s lack of expertise in database design significantly limited her efforts toward these objectives and made an interdisciplinary collaboration highly desirable, even necessary in order to meet the research project goals. This paper discusses the advantages of a well-designed relational database as a research tool and explores how specific challenges inherent in the research data were handled in the database design. It also illustrates how the different disciplinary thinking of two collaborators led to the occasional snafu but ultimately resulted in a stronger design that should be easily adaptable to other research scenarios.

Keywords:
historical GIS, interdisciplinary collaboration, database modeling--relational

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