PLACE TYPES (select to limit)
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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.
Registered users can
upload place datasets into a private workspace
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.