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Open-File Report 2014-1040


Polygons of Global Undersea Features for Geographic Searches


Background

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Two groups are actively approving and compiling standardized names for undersea features: the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) Advisory Committee on Undersea Features (ACUF), and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) Sub-Committee on Undersea Feature Names (SCUFN). Cherkis and Palmer (2008) provide a brief overview of the histories, purposes, procedures, and products of these two groups. ACUF and SCUFN both maintain online gazetteers of undersea features but—despite ongoing attempts at reconciliation—sometimes disagree on the names to be included in their respective gazetteers. These disagreements partly reflect the different goals of the two groups.

The BGN was created by Executive Order in 1890 and formally established by Congress in 1947. ACUF, established as a BGN committee in 1963, has members from several Federal agencies and is responsible for standardizing undersea feature names used in publications and maps of the United States government (United States Board on Geographic Names, 2005). The ACUF gazetteer of undersea features was initially released in a series of print editions (for example, United States Board on Geographic Names, 1971) but is now available online in several formats through GNS (http://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/). The current ACUF gazetteer includes about 10,250 entries (about 5,200 features, excluding name variants), all of which are defined geographically by a single point (a latitude and longitude coordinate pair).

GEBCO and its many subcommittees and working groups operate under the joint auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC). SCUFN, established as a GEBCO subcommittee in 1975, has members from several countries including the United States, along with observers from ACUF and IOC. SCUFN is responsible for standardizing undersea feature names used in GEBCO charts, digital atlases, and data products (International Hydrographic Organization and Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, 2013). The current GEBCO gazetteer of undersea feature names, available for viewing or download from a website hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly National Geophysical Data Center; https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/gazetteer/), includes over 4,000 features, most of which are defined geographically by a single point. About 24 percent of the features are defined by a linestring connecting two or more points; about 6 percent of the features are defined by a simple polygon connecting several points.

The current USGS project was conceived precisely because the ACUF and GEBCO gazetteers do not provide suitable spatial extents for undersea features—nor do secondary compilations such as the VLIZ (Flanders Marine Institute) Marine Gazetteer, now incorporated into the Marine Regions website (http://www.marineregions.org). The primary reason for developing the USGS project was to improve information retrieval, but in discussions with a NOAA representative to SCUFN, we learned that our work would also benefit the developers of undersea gazetteers (see also Weatherall and Cramer, 2008, discussed in more detail in “Data Sources”). This judgment was reinforced in subsequent discussions with the secretary of ACUF, from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Although it is anticipated that our spatial extents will serve the needs of both SCUFN and ACUF, we have necessarily adhered to the conventions of ACUF because USGS is a Federal agency.

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