Nov. 4, 2011
Contact
Public Affairs Office
601-634-3188
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - ERDC Topographic Engineering Center's (TEC) Douglas Caldwell was recently elected vice-chairman of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN).
The BGN is a federal entity charged with maintaining uniform geographic name usage throughout the federal government. The board promulgates official geographic feature names and develops the principles, policies, and procedures governing the use of domestic, foreign, Antarctic, and undersea feature names.
In addition, Caldwell recently delivered the presentation "Matching names from the National Inventory of Dams (NID) with the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)" at the 35th Geographic Names Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Caldwell's talk compared dam information in both federal databases, identifying inconsistencies in dam names, and offered a potential solution for synchronizing the content. The conference brought together geographic names authorities from federal and state agencies, as well as experts on indigenous place names.