This is the typology of buildings adopted in the Virtual Shangai Project. The basic model contains 8 levels on top of the general category of manmade feature. We developed this typology from the Alexandria Gazetteer. We followed the same hierarchical type scheme for geographic features, but for buildings the type scheme was not detailed enough to meet our needs for categorizing the different types of buildings in Shanghai. We enriched the typology with sublevels that provided more precise features on the nature of the buildings.

The ADL Gazetteer and its API fell offline due to lack of maintenance sometime in the early- to mid-2000's.  In 2013, the Library and the Geography Department's STKO Lab entered into a partnership to revive the Gazetteer as a Semantic Web vocabulary. It is now in the care of the library of UC Santa Barbara.