updated 4 July 2023; added 13 new Getty AAT place types to better support urban-scale places in WHG: well, tribal area, temple, synagogue, square, residential district, park, pagoda, neighborhood, mosque, church, castle, native peoples reservation
updated 3 November 2021; added "attestation_year" column and conditions for uses of "start", "end", and "attestation_year"
The following delimited place data format will be supported for contributions to the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) system as a simplified alternative to the more expressive default, Linked Places (LP) format. LP-Delimited is suitable for relatively simple place records, e.g. those without a) temporal scoping for names, geometries, types, or relations; and/or b) citations for name variants.
NOTE: These spreadsheet templates (.xlsx .ods) can be used to build a valid LP-Delimited file for upload. As of Jan 2021, any .csv, .tsv, .xlsx or .ods file with fields and formats adhering to the specification below is suppported for upload to WHG. Tab-delimited files (.tsv) should have no quotes enclosing fields.
- Determine mappings between source and template columns
- Copy/paste data accordingly
- Fill in any missing required values, and encouraged or optional as desired, e.g. sort by your type and add mapped aat_types identifiers
- Delete unused columns and extraneous notes
- Save
These spreadsheets or alternatively, any .csv or .tsv file with fields and formats adhering to the specification below, can be uploaded in WHG. All files must have UTF-8 encoding. Where multiple values are allowed within a field (indicated below), they are unquoted and delimited with semicolons.
The following fields will be parsed and converted to Linked Places format automatically upon upload to WHG.
NB Because place names are so often repeated globally, records consisting of only the required fields (id, title, title_source and start or title_source_year ) are exceedingly difficult to reconcile (i.e. match) with records in existing gazetteer data resources such as Getty TGN, Wikidata, DBpedia, and GeoNames. Additional context, e.g. variants and types, geometry (lon and lat or geowkt), and parent_name helps considerably.
id
Contributor's internal identifier. This must stay consistent throughout accessioning workflow, including subsequent updates
title
A single "preferred" place name, which acts as title for the record
title_source
Label or short citation for source of the title toponym, in any style; e.g. 'An Historical Atlas of Central Asia (Bregel, 2003)', 'The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (https://iisg.amsterdam/nl/hsn)'.
attestation_year and/or start
The start and end fields should be used specify a valid timespan for the place named by the title and variants, if they are known; otherwise they should be omitted. The attestation_year field is the publication year of the title_source.
Each row must have at least a attestation_year or a start, and may have start, end, and attestation_year. All of these must be written in ISO 8601 form (YYYY-MM-DD), omitting month and/or day where appropriate. BCE years must be written as a negative integer, e.g. -320 for 320 BCE.
NOTES
- Use start & end values in combination to indicate a valid period. A start value alone indicates "from", where end is unknown or is the present time. The start and end values correspond to a timespan within a "when" object at the record level in the full Linked Places JSON-LD format.
title_uri
Permalink URI for the source of the title toponym, if available: a text, a map, an inscription, a dataset, etc.; e.g. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/890934416 or https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AMPGMW or https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/em7n8q
ccodes
One or more [ISO Alpha-2 two-letter codes] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2) for modern countries that overlap or cover the place in question.
NOTES
- These are used to generate a constraining spatial extent for searches, and not interpreted as assertions of a relation between the entities. semicolon-delimited
- If omitted and geometry is provided (lon and lat or geowkt), these will be computed automatically upon upload.
matches
One or more URIs for matching record(s) in place name authority resources; interpreted as SKOS:closeMatch, which is "used to link two concepts that are sufficiently similar that they can be used interchangeably in some information retrieval applications" and is inclusive its sub-property SKOS:exactMatch. semicolon-delimited.
World Historical Gazetteer supports the name resources listed here; the aliases indicated (short URI prefixes) must be used in place of the URI base, e.g. wd:Q5684 for the Wikidata Babylon record.
{"bnf": Bibliothèque nationale de France, "https://data.bnf.fr/"}
{"cerl": Consortium of European Research Libraries, "https://data.cerl.org/thesaurus/"}
{"dbp": DBpedia, "http://dbpedia.org/resource/"}
{"gn": GeoNames, "http://www.geonames.org/"}
{"gnd": Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, "http://d-nb.info/gnd/"}
{"gov": The Geneaological Gazetteer, "http://gov.genealogy.net/" }
{"loc": Library of Congress, "http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/"}
{"pl": Pleiades, "https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/"}
{"tgn": Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, "http://vocab.getty.edu/page/tgn/"}
{"viaf": Virtual International Authority File, "http://viaf.org/viaf/"}
{"wd": Wikidata, "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/"}
{"wp": Wikipedia, "https://wikipedia.org/wiki/"}variants
One or more name and/or language variants; can be suffixed with language-script codes if available, per IETF best practices, BCP 47 using ISO639-1 2-letter codes for language and ISO15924 4-letter codes for script; e.g. {name}@lang-script. NB Omit script code if it is the default for a language. semicolon-delimited.
types
One or more terms for place type. This is the contributor's term, usually verbatim from the source, e.g. pueblo). semicolon-delimited
aat_types
One or more AAT integer IDs from WHG's subset list of 176 place type concepts (tsv; xlsx showing hierarchy. While not required, this mapping is encouraged because it will make records more discoverable in WHG interfaces. semicolon-delimited.
NOTES ON TYPES
- A row can have a types value with no corresponding aat_types value, but not the reverse; for every value in aat_types there must be a corresponding value in type, 1-to-1
- If there is no aat_type that corresponds to a type, leave its position empty. E.g. If there are 3 types for a record and only those in positions 2 and 3 have a corresponding aat_type, this field's value would be something like 1234567;2345678.
- Do not replicate the AAT hierarchy; e.g. if a type is 'city', the aat_type is 300008389 (city). Do not include its parent 300008347 (inhabited place).
parent_name
A containing administrative area or region, such as a province, state, country - alone or in some combination; e.g. Lombardy or Lombardia, Italia or Illyricum. For modern country alone, use ccodes (above). Provides useful context for alignment/reconciliation steps.
parent_id
URI for a web-published record of the parent_name above.
FUTURE: Pointer to another record in the same dataset file, consisting of a '#' character followed by the id of the parent record; e.g. #1234
lon
Longitude, in WGS84 decimal degrees (EPSG:4326); e.g. 85.3214 or -112.4536
lat
Latitude, in WGS84 decimal degrees (EPSG:4326); e.g. 59.3345 or -12.7658
geowkt
Any geometry in OGC WKT format.
NOTES
- polygons should ideally be simplified to aid rendering performance, using e.g. a GIS function or MapShaper
- geowkt will supercede lon/lat pair if both are present; used typically for non-point geometry
geo_source
Label for source of the geometry, e.g. GeoNames or digitized title_source map
geo_id
URI identifier for the source of the geometry, e.g. http://www.geonames.org/2950159
end
Latest relevant date, as above
description
A short text description of the place
@kgeographer; 2020-12-25