Geographic Feature Information

The documents available at this Web site have been encoded with geographic information taken from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) databases in order to provide additional information upon which more powerful searching capabilities may be based. Currently, this additional information, or metadata, may be used to search for a particular geographic feature type within the documents, even if the feature type does not occur within the name of the feature. For example, references to “Pamlico Sound” will match a query for bays in North Carolina even though a document may not specifically mention the terms “bay” or “North Carolina.”

A listing of the types of features included within the GNIS databases, complete with definitions of each feature type, may be found at the U.S. Geological Survey’s GNIS Feature Class Definitions page. Additional information on the GNIS databases, as well as on-line access for searching the databases can be found on the Geographic Names Information System home page.