Developing an Urban Gazetteer: A Semantic Web Database for Humanities Data

Abstract

This talk discusses the development of a spatiotemporal data model for an urban gazetteer. The function of gazetteers is to obtain descriptions uniquely identifying places referred to in discourse. Often, they are lists of places containing place name, feature type and geographical extent. Contemporary digital gazetteers (e.g. World Historical Gazetteer and Pleiades) are valuable tools for geographical knowledge of the past and the structuring of humanities data. However, scholars and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) specialists often require information about entities on an intra-city scale. This presentation explores the model and implementation of an urban gazetteer using CIDOC CRM as a top-level ontology. The model will closely follow international gazetteer standards (i.e. Linked Places Format) in order to ensure interoperability with other gazetteer datasets. To move towards a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) approach, humanities data from the urban gazetteer will be published as Linked Open Data (LOD) and searchable via (Geo)SPARQL.