HAVE you ever wondered who decides the names of our roads, rivers, mountains, hospitals and bridges? Ballarat woman Laura Kostanski works for Victoria’s Office of Geographic Names – the official authority that administers the Geographic Places act. Her expertise in all thing topographical has paid off, with Dr Kostanski recently being awarded a prestigious Churchill Fellowship for 2011. Awarded to 22 Victorians by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the fellowship gives talented Australians the opportunity to travel overseas to complete research and develop networks, before bringing their expertise home. Dr Kostanski will visit the UK, Canada, USA and Netherlands to study the recording of unofficial place names and how online data can be better managed by official authorities. “I will research how you can do that and make sure the information is reliable enough for governments to sign off on. “What I want to learn is how do we get some of those unofficial names into the official system,” she said. Dr Kostanski will learn about crowd sourcing, social networking and new techniques for data collection. As secretary for the Committee for Geographic Names Australasia, Dr Kostanski hopes to be able to spread the knowledge she gains across the region. She said receiving the news of her successful application in the mail was one of the most exciting days of her life. “The only downside is I will be away from my two-year-old son for six weeks,” she said. The 2011 Fellowship program has distributed $2.23 million and have been awarded to 107 individuals around Australia.
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