The ArcIMS Gazetteer Metadata Service Data disk contains data that can be used to create a Gazetteer Metadata Service. Gazetteer places are represented using bounding boxes that can be used to define the area of interest when searching a Metadata Service. Each place in the gazetteer consists of a shape, a descriptive name identifying the place, and a short name that will be indexed and used for searching. Gazetteer places are provided for the world. A subset of this data, containing only the places in the United States, is also provided.
The gazetteer data is provided in two formats. The original gazetteer data is provided in shapefile format. ArcSDE export files are also provided; these contain the same data as the shapefiles, pre-loaded into a Gazetteer Metadata Service. Scripts that load the export files into ArcSDE are provided with ArcIMS.
If you want to use the provided gazetteer data, it is much faster to load the ArcSDE export data. You can add custom gazetteer places afterwards. If you want to use a subset of the provided data such as the places in one country or state, open the map, select and export the appropriate places from the shapefiles, then load the output dataset into a Gazetteer Metadata Service using the Gazetteer Loader provided with ArcCatalog.
The map and the data are directly readable from the disk. If you prefer to use the data locally, you must copy the appropriate files to your hard drive. The scripts for importing the export files into ArcSDE must run on a machine that can execute ArcSDE administrative commands. You may want to copy the scripts and the export files to a machine with this capability. For example, create a folder named “ArcIMS_Gazetteer” and copy the data and scripts into that location.
The world gazetteer shapefile and ArcSDE export files will require approximately 210 MB and 131 MB of disk space, respectively. The U.S. gazetteer shapefile and ArcSDE export files will require approximately 175 MB and 108 MB of disk space, respectively.
For more information see the ArcIMS Help.