Hi all, At UC Berkeley, as part of our IMLS work on deployments, we have been modeling a Place Authority schema that will work for cultural heritage and natural history collections. A page with links to the schema, data examples, and notes is currently on the deployment wiki at: https://wiki.collectionspace.org:8444/display/deploy/Place+Authority+requirements+for+UCB+collections My thanks go to John Deck and Jan Eklund who lead this effort, and we had input from several other people on the team. The Place Authority requirements at http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Place+Authority+Requirements still drive the shape of the schema with the additional requirement to: - Allow users to capture and manage information about coordinates including information from georeferencing activities (whether by person or computer) used by mapping applications We definitely see this as something that would be contributed back to the core since we know all customers need a Place Authority. The resulting schema though large represents a common set of fields that can be used across a wide range of collection types. We anticipate that many deploying institutions will hide fields that are not useful to them. The examples in the Excel file (available at the first URL above) should give a good sense of how this will work, but I am happy to talk with you and others about how we see this working for different data sets. Later on, we'll also be funding work to integrate this authority with mapping applications (e.g., BerkeleyMapper) and georeferencing services (e.g., Biogeomancer/Geomancer). This will also be made available to the core if it passes requirements. We welcome your feedback on the draft schema and data examples. Thanks, Chris