Georeferencing Historical Placenames and Tracking Changes Over Time

Georeferencing WorkshopHarvard University 21 March 2008

Lex Berman China Historical GIS Project

Non-Ambiguous Placenames in GNS [Volz, et al, 2007]

Non-Ambiguous Placenames in CHGIS Gazetteer

Percentages of Non-Ambiguous Placenames - Comparison

instance 1: St. Petersburg (Russia) Begin=1703 End=1913

instance 2: Petrograd (Russia) Begin=1914 End=1923

instance 3: Leningrad (Russia) Begin=1924 End=1990

instance 4: St.Petersburg (Russia) Begin=1991

instance 5: St. Petersburg (Florida, USA) Begin=1892

instance 1,4: St. Petersburg (Russia)

instance 5: St. Petersburg (Florida, USA)

before dissolve

after dissolve

Dissolving multiple historical instances of same spelling

Non-Ambiguous Placenames - Dissolving Temporal Instances

Comparison with Perseus Toponym Disambiguation

Feature Type Thesauri

Feature Type Crosswalks - Building a Concept Lattice

No Standard Method

Semantic Mapping Issues

Feature Type Crosswalk Based on Controlled Vocabulary

Semantic fragmentation = no feasible constraints on concepts

Crosswalk of named periods and chronologies is needed

HEML - Historical Event Markup Language

MIT Simile Project - Timeline

Temporal Fragmentation

Temporal fragmentation = feasible limits and ISO 8601 Standard

China Historical GIS Project

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis

Georeferencing

Temporal Referencing

Feature type

Toponym string

Time Period