Linked Open Data Gazetteers of the Americas

This pilot serves both researchers and developers in CLARIAH to gain experience in the creation of Linked Open Data (LOD) gazetteers of Early Modern place names and testing PICCL/WP2-3 to pre-process source texts for this purpose.
Currently, our ability to identify such place names is limited, as existing digital gazetteers (e.g. GeoNames) are focussed on modern place names and only some LOD historical gazetteers are fully functional. For the study of global history, such lack of historical gazetteers is a substantial limitation.

At the same time, tremendous worldwide efforts have already been undertaken to create user-friendly platforms to build such LOD gazetteers. Pelagios Commons provides an infrastructure helping users to add geodata to texts and maps and save this in LOD.

This pilot, which focusses on two Early Modern gazetteers of the Americas, wants to bridge Pelagios and existing CLARIAH components and learn from the experience of bringing these together.