For the last six months or so I have been working on a project called HALOGEN, this was a venture to bring together various different geospatial data sets into one unified database. By doing this we can start to ask cross data-set queries – something that you certainly couldn’t do when one source is in an Excel file at one university and the other in an Access database at another!

One of the advantages of this approach is that we can then stick a web front end on the database and let the general public look at the data. It is this bit that we launched yesterday. If you head on over to halogen.le.ac.uk and do a query then you should be able to find the derivation of your favourite English place name, or where your ancestors lived during 1881, or even what and where treasure has been found!