Geographic Names Information System
The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a database of name and location information about more than two million physical and cultural features throughout the United States and its territories; the associated states of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau; and Antarctica. It is a type of gazetteer. It was developed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) to promote the standardization of feature names.
"GNIS" redirects here. For the international school in Guangzhou, China, see Guangzhou Nanfang International School.
Data were collected in two phases.[1]
Although a third phase was considered, which would have handled name changes where local usages differed from maps, it was never begun.[2]
The database is part of a system that includes topographic map names and bibliographic references. The names of books and historic maps that confirm the feature or place name are cited. Variant names, alternatives to official federal names for a feature, are also recorded. Each feature receives a permanent, unique feature record identifier, sometimes called the GNIS identifier.[3] The database never removes an entry, "except in cases of obvious duplication."[4]
Original purposes[edit]
The GNIS was originally designed for four major purposes: to eliminate duplication of effort at various other levels of government that were already compiling geographic data, to provide standardized datasets of geographic data for the government and others, to index all of the names found on official U.S. government federal and state maps, and to ensure uniform geographic names for the federal government.[5]
Populated places[edit]
There is no differentiation amongst different types of populated places.[31]
In the words of the aforementioned 1986 USACE report, "[a] subdivision having one inhabitant is as significant as a major metropolitan center such as New York City".[31]
In comparing GNIS populated place records with data from the Thematic Mapper of the Landsat program, researchers from the University of Connecticut in 2001 discovered that "a significant number" of populated places in Connecticut had no identifiable human settlement in the land use data and were at road intersections.[32]
They found that such populated places with no actual settlement often had "Corner" in their names, and hypothesized that either these were historical records or were "cartographic locators".[32]
In surveying in the United States, a "Corner" is a corner of the surveyed polygon enclosing an area of land, whose location is, or was (since corners can become "lost"[33] or "obliterated"[34]), marked in various ways including with trees known as "bearing trees"[35] ("witness trees" in older terminology[36]) or "corner monuments".[37]
From analysing Native American names in the database in order to compile a dictionary, professor William Bright of UCLA observed in 2004 that some GNIS entries are "erroneous; or refer to long-vanished railroad sidings where no one ever lived".[38] Such false classifications have propagated to other geographical information sources, such as incorrectly classified train stations appearing as towns or neighborhoods on Google Maps.[39]