Current Status Quo of LPF

[eslksw]

Hi, I am planning the development of a series of tools to use to analyze historical mobility patterns and, of course, the topic of historical toponymy comes up a lot. Hence, I have been looking into formats like LPF to see what the general landscape already offers in terms of standards and encodings. LPF seems to deliver everything I need, but I still wanted to ask: What is the current status quo of the project? Have there been any development recently? I am asking this because activity on here seems low, but maybe in other venues there have been developments. Thank you in advance!

[kgeographer]

Hello,
As a co-developer of LPF I can give you some response...

• The format was developed primarily as a gazetteer data interchange format, and for ingest to World Historical Gazetteer (WHG). It remains the core supported format for WHG.
• The format has been stable for a few years now, after some adjustments/extensions early on, so I think lack of action indicates stability when it comes to data standards
• Whether it is useful really depends on one's use case(s)...it is distinctive in its temporal scoping of several attributes of a place and holding all in a single record. The typical alternative when one has temporal scoping is multiple rows per place, which may be fine for some use cases and not others.
• A lot depends on what systems you imagine will manipulate your LPF records - whether it can parse the temporality and (possible) multiple geometries, etc.
• It is valid GeoJSON, but some systems that claim to support GeoJSON do not actully support it fully, e.g. GeometryCollections. The default in GIS world has been temporal snapshots and remains that way, so that is a factor.

This is what comes to mind - if you have further questions on specifics, happy to respond to those.

• kg

[eslksw]

Thank you for your reply! The LPF does fit our needs, as historical mobility analysis naturally requires gazetteer-like knowledge. I am still on the fence regarding a WHG integration (via its public API), since maybe it's too ambitious for our little project.

I guess I'll go on with the project and maybe report back :-)

I have a conceptual question regarding the actual LPF:

The when field can have both timespans and periods defined in some dedicated anthology. Technically, they are unrelated lists of intervals and period objects, respectively. I have added a step in my custom-built LPF validator to make sure that the time spans at least intersects with the periods (full containment was too strict given some "real world" data I pulled from WHG). Another approach would be taking the smallest interval between time spans and periods when it comes to precision. This gives rise to a more general question: How do you handle these potential discrepancies in tools processing LPF?

[eltonteb]

In case it's helpful, LPF is used for Peripleo, a browser-based tool for the mapping of things related to place:
https://github.com/britishlibrary/peripleo
Efforts to extend development of this software are on-going.
Generally, see: https://pelagios.org/lod/methods
Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in learning more: officers@pelagios.org

[eslksw]

Peripleo looks interesting, though personally I would also package it as a simple npm package to foster adoption in web applications without the need of IFrames. To go even a step further, maybe a React component or even a MapLibre "plugin" would be even better (based on what I can see in https://github.com/britishlibrary/peripleo-lanc). Is something like this on the roadmap? If you want I can contribute it, as I would like to embed it in some of our projects, albeit without IFrames.

[eltonteb]

That sounds interesting and we'd be v interested in facilitating your contribution. The two people who have worked most on Peripleo, Gethin (https://github.com/thegsi) and Rainer (https://github.com/rsimon) are both on holiday at the moment. Perhaps you can get back to us next week?

[rsimon]

More later, but for reference: https://github.com/peripleo/peripleo

[eslksw]

Ah, super, I see there already is something, I should have looked more thoroughly :-)

Still, we can chat next week, I'd be happy to.

[eltonteb]

hi there again, just to pick up on this thread with some news:

1. It's just been announced that we (including rsimon above) have been awarded funding for Peripleo from the Software Sustainability Institute (https://www.software.ac.uk/research-software-maintenance-fund/rsmf-round-2-projects), so this is now an "active" thread, as it were.
2. There's an "unconference" happening at the end of November in Porto (https://linkedpasts.hcommons.org/2026/06/23/linked-pasts-12-programme/). Do consider coming (or even submitting a proposal), if you can.
3. There's also this recent exchange on Linked Places Format: Two proposals from reconciliation output: certainty on links[], and one authoritative list of identifier prefixes #52 (comment).
   I hope some of this might be of interest. Do get back to us if you want to pursue anything or get us to do anything...