WHG v1.2

World Historical Gazetteer indexes place data drawn from historical sources, contributed by research projects and individuals studying the past from many disciplinary perspectives.

This is a work-in-progress. To date about 60,000 temporally scoped place records have been added to our index, supplying "temporal depth" to a core of approximately 1.8 million modern records.

You can preview coverage of some early contributions in progress, by selecting from the list below.

v2beta1

Registered users can

upload place datasets into a private workspace Share by Flatart from the Noun Project

publish them as Linked Open Data by flagging them as 'public'

augment them via reconciliation against Wikidata and/or Getty TGN

contribute them for accessioning to the WHG index

Details are available in the Site Guide

Current Counts

1,873,349 places

3,028,626 names

18 uploaded datasets

14 indexed datasets

Traces are an experimental feature of WHG, conceived in collaboration with the Pelagios project. A trace is any sort of historical phenomena, including people, events, archaeological and museum objects, texts, art works, and so on.

Trace data are web-accessible descriptions and depictions of traces, which may take the form of text, images, datasets, or video, published to the web with permanent URIs.

We have indexed several dozen exemplar trace annotations: i.e. datasets annotating such trace data web resources with identifiers for places referenced in a resource as relevant to the trace. See the Traces intro tutorial for more detail.