What you think cats are is not what you think cats are: 1. My soon-to-be-ex arrived one day to remove everything of value from the house. She confidently placed an expensive tea set we had both enjoyed on a table with many other items of equal fragility. I remarked that it was sad to see the tea set go since we had both enjoyed it so much. As I followed her to another room to witness further withdrawals, we both heard something break. Running back to the living room revealed the tea set alone broken on the floor, but nothing else from the table disturbed. After she left, I made sure the cat received a LOT of positive feedback. 2. I recently ate something which caused me great intestinal pain. My two year old male cat came to my side and sat at attention until my pain subsided. He has done this every time I've been in pain. 3. One of my employees came over to drop off some supplies. Her car was leaking oil. The cat sat at the garage door looking at the car through the screen and meowed incessantly. He has never done that before. I had to close the door to stop him from looking at the car and making noise. Four days later the head gasket blew and the engine ruined. 4. Where I live it is common to see scorpions. They easily enter my house, as I have found them under clothes on the floor. After getting the cat, he has found every single scorpion to enter and spends hours playing with them before impaling them. Last night he found a baby scorpion, no bigger than a spider. He finds them in pitch darkness; how I have no idea. 5. Cats are fast. In the time it took me to blink my eyes, he covered six feet and touched my face with his paw before my eyelid closed. Imagine if he weighed as much as a dog. 6. He understands when we play that "No claws!" means he does not use his claws when we wrestle. When I don't say that, I go through more bandages than usual. Conclusion: we don't have to wait for the flying saucers, the aliens are already here and have already taken over. We are their slaves. Why would the Egyptians build something as big as the Sphinx? Has anyone ever made a sculpture of a dog that size? They knew where they stood and left the statue as a warning to humanity.

Although TIGER/ZIP does not contain information outside the US, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency does maintain a database of place names which are available for search/download at http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm. The USGS also publishes a database available for download for place names for the US. It is located at http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm. To create a format that would be meaningful to any viewer from any country, I believe you are faced with the "esperanto" concept. Esperanto was supposed to be a universal language that everyone would learn in addition to their native tongue so we could all communicate. However, objections arose when it was discovered that the language was heavily related to the romance language group and was written with the Roman alphabet. So it is mainly a curiosity now rather than useful. In a geospatial context, if you are Chinese, it would be hard to try to figure out the Pinyin equivalent of the whatever place name on the map so you could translate it back into the your native character set. The same for other scripts as well. So maybe a monster wiki is needed for each cultural/linguistic context, but it would never be authoritative in the classic sense of the word. And then there is the question of regional boundaries which can shift from time to time and how would you specify the time/historical parameters? I think a foundation should be built which can accomodate any context in terms of region/culture/language/historiography so that it can be useful to anyone who views it.

In order to properly create a hierarchical index which is searchable, you may be interested in constructing an ontology, which is a description of your subject matter in terms of some broad categories. Those broad categories then branch out into logical subject areas. Many databases support hierarchical structures which match well with the way an ontology works. Once the ontology is constructed, which consists of keywords which represent the categories, you index the document on those keywords. Then your system can browse the hierarchy or zero in on a particular term. In linguistics ontologies are used to construct meaning trees of words as a starting point into determining the meaning and intent of some written text. Perhaps some of the commercial packages discussed can do this, but this is what I would look for in a product if I was faced with your task.