Linking Spaces with Places: Examples from thePastPlace Project

Great Britain Historical GIS Project:

A Vision of Britain though Time

Linking Spaces with Places:Examples from the

PastPlace Project

Humphrey Southall

& Paula Aucott

(University of Portsmouth/

Great Britain Historical GIS)



Structure of Presentation:

• Limitations of mainstream geospatial systems

– When applied to historical contexts and textual content

• Alternative more textual – geosemantic – methods

– Most people find out about places by searching using

placenames, not coordinates, and these days they use

search engines, so where do they end up?

– Looking online for information about ―Tallinn‖

– Exploring the Linked Data web, and Vision of Britain

• Introducing Pelagios and PastPlace

– Pelagios 3 is new project linking my team with the Pleiades

gazetteer of the ancient world, based at New York

University, and the China Historical GIS at Harvard

– PastPlace is a rebranding and extension of Vision of Britain

19th September 2013



Mainstream geospatial systems

• ―Geographical Information Systems‖

– Raster GIS

• E.g. IDRISI, ERDAS Imagine

• Mainly for satellite data, etc,

so not discussed further

– Vector GIS

• E.g. ArcGIS, MapInfo

• Separate spatial data and attribute data

• Spatial data = points, lines and polygons

• Geospatial Database Management Systems

– Implemented as extensions to (object-)relational database

systems

• E.g. Oracle and Oracle Spatial, Postgres and PostGIS

• Geospatial databases can organise data as spatial+attributes,

but permit other approaches

19th September 2013



Limitations of ArcGIS, etc

• Everything else exists as

attributes of points, lines or

polygons, so hard to work with

information about unknown or

uncertain locations

• Toponyms treated as ―labels‖,

and fiddly having more than

one per geospatial object

• ArcGIS data model works in

terms of layers or coverages,

which is fine for different kinds

of feature but a very bad way

of representing time

19th September 2013



Gazetteer data standards

• ISO 19112, ‗Geographic information — Spatial

referencing by geographic identifiers‘

– Very general; e.g. does not require coordinates

• Open Geospatial Consortium: Web Feature Server

Gazetteer Service Profile (WFS(G))

– Is this still being actively developed?

– OGC now discussing a different approach, OpenPOI

• Alexandria Digital Library:

– Gazetteer Service Protocol

– Gazetteer Content Standard

www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer/ContentStandard/version3.2/GCS3.2-

guide.htm

– Gazetteer Feature Type Thesaurus:

www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/FeatureTypes/ver070302/index.htm

19th September 2013



ADL Gazetteer Content Standard

• Standard allows for many optional elements, but four

compulsory elements:

• A unique identifier

– Usually a number

• A name

– May well be duplicated elsewhere

– Standard optionally allows for many additional variant names

• A footprint

– A point, line or polygon

• A feature type

– To achieve interoperability with other gazetteers via the

Gazetteer Service Protocol, the feature type must be taken

from the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus

19th September 2013



Issues with “geographical features”

• Most major digital gazetteers are

derived from GIS systems constructed

by national mapping agencies

– i.e. databases of points, lines and polygons

• BUT:

– Very hard to agree on a single standard

classification of geographical features

• Most existing thesaurii heavily influenced by

symbologies of US Geological Survey

– Real people don‘t care about features

• Problem for crowd-sourcing gazeteers, e.g.

in Geonames

– Over historical time, individual features are

ephemeral while ―places‖ endure

• They have built a bridge in Oxford!

19th September 2013

Part of the

ADL

Feature

Type

Thesaurus



Feature typing may be “standard” but it is

not natural:

• CLUN, a river, a small town, a parish, a

sub-district, a district, and a hundred in

Salop. The river rises near the boundary with

Wales; and runs 11 miles eastward, and 7

southward, to the Teme, near Leintwardine. The town

stands on the river, 3 miles W of Offa's dyke, 5½

SSW of Bishops-Castle, and 6½ N by E of Knighton

r. station; is a polling-place, and a nominal borough,

…. (from Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales,

1872)

• So how do we work with ―place information‖ in the

real world?19th September 2013


A Vision of Britain though TimeGoogling for Tallinn – how most people find out about places

19th September 2013



Wikipedia for Tallinn: English language

19th September 2013



Wikipedia for Tallinn: Estonian language

19th September 2013



Wikipedia for Tallinn: Estonian language

19th September 2013

How do we know the two

Tallinn articles are about

the same place?



Wikidata for Tallinn: web view

19th September 2013

• Created partly to just link the different language versions



Wikidata for

Tallinn: RDF view

19th September 2013

• Created partly to just link

the different language

versions



Geonames for Tallinn

19th September 2013



Geonames for Tallinn

19th September 2013



Geonames for Tallinn: RDF

19th September 2013



19th September 2013

Geonames for

Tallinn: RDF



Vision of Europe for Tallinn

19th September 2013



Vision of Europe for Harjumaa

19th September 2013



Vision of Europe for Harjumaa

19th September 2013

Scrolling down the

same page …



Modelling the history of Estonia

19th September 2013



Part of the AUO Typology

Thanks to Vojtech Kupca (Umea U.)

for these visualisations of the ontology

19th September 2013



Part of the AUO Typology

Thanks to Vojtech Kupca (Umea U.)

for these visualisations of the ontology

19th September 2013

But why does a UK

researcher have all

this information about

Estonia?



GBH GIS / Vision of Britain / QVIZ / PastPlace

• Original GB Historical GIS project: 1994-2000

– Built conventional ArcGIS-based system (OSGB coordinates)

• Vision of Britain Mark 1: 2001-4

– Funded by UK National Lottery; New architecture

– Support from UK archives crucial – needed authority list

• QVIZ project: 2006-8

– EU FP6; led by Umea; incl Estonian & Swedish Nat. Archives

• Vision of Britain Mark 2: 2007-

– Funded by JISC but used QVIZ infrastructure

– So covers all of Europe (ETRS-89), in varying detail

• PastPlace/Pelagios: 2013-

– Re-branding, global (WGS-84 coordinates)

– Major focus on exposing our information as Open Linked Data

19th September 2013



19th September 2013

Original Inspiration:

F. Youngs’ Local

Administrative Units

of England (Royal

Historical Society,

1979 and 1991)

We did not ―computerise‖ the pages

Instead, we used information from Youngs, etc, to build a new database

But how? One of most complex books ever



19th September 2013 27

Administrative Unit Ontology E-R Diagram

g_unit

PK g_unit

g_hint

FK1 g_unit_type

g_centroid

g_place

g_duration

im_auth

im_note

ul_auth

ul_note

created_by

notes

g_name

PK g_seq

FK1 g_unit

g_name

FK2 g_name_status

g_language

g_duration

im_auth

im_note

ul_auth

ul_note

created_by

notes

g_status

PK g_seq

FK1 g_unit

g_status

g_duration

im_auth

im_note

ul_auth

ul_note

created_by

notes

g_rel

PK g_seq

FK1 g_unit

g_rel_to

FK2 g_rel_type

g_part

g_part_area

g_part_area_measure

c_date_1

c_pop_1

c_hous_1

c_date_2

c_pop_2

c_hous_2

g_duration

im_auth

im_note

ul_auth

ul_note

created_by

notes

FK3 g_unit_type

g_foot

PK g_seq

FK1 g_unit

g_foot

g_duration

im_auth

im_note

ul_auth

ul_note

use_for_search

use_for_stat_map

use_for_bound_map

g_place

PK g_place

g_seed

g_name

g_container

g_centroid

created_by

g_authority

PK g_authority

FK1 g_auth_type

g_auth_title

g_auth_creator

g_auth_creator_forename

g_auth_publisher

g_auth_pub_place

g_auth_date

g_auth_identifier

url_works

g_auth_rights

g_auth_rights_string

g_auth_description

notes

g_auth_type

PK g_auth_type

notes

g_auth_type_level

PK,FK1 g_auth_type

PK,FK2 g_language

g_label

g_unit_type

PK g_unit_type

FK1 g_type_level

FK2 g_jurisdiction

g_type_period

g_duration

g_foot

stat_only

n_language

n_label

n_label_plural

n_description

n_full_description

n_label

n_label_plural

n_description

n_full_description

n_short_label

g_label

g_label_plural

g_description

g_full_description

g_short_label

notes

created_by

FK3 g_type_function

g_type_level

PK g_type_level

g_adl_ft

g_type_level_label

PK,FK1 g_type_level

FK2 g_language

g_label

g_description

g_full_description

g_name_status

PK g_name_status

im_auth

sort_order

g_name_status_label

PK,FK1 g_name_status

FK2 g_language

g_label

g_language

PK g_language

g_label

FK1 g_authority

g_language_iso

notes

FK2 g_jurisdiction

g_status_type

PK g_status

FK1 g_unit_type

n_language

n_label

n_short_label

n_description

n_full_description

g_label

g_short_label

g_description

g_full_description

notes

created_by

g_rel_type

PK g_rel_type

notes

created_by

g_rel_type_label

PK,FK1 g_rel_type

PK,FK2 g_language

g_label

rev_label

created_by

g_legal_rel

PK,FK1 g_unit_type

g_rel_type

g_rel_unit_type

notes

created_by

g_jurisdiction

PK g_jurisdiction

g_label

preferred_language

email_address

notes

postal_address

telephone_number

g_type_function

PK g_type_function

notes

g_type_function_label

PK,FK1 g_type_function

FK2 g_language

g_label

g_description

g_full_description



Frequency of different languages for place

names in Vision of Britain/PastPlace

0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000 160,000

Other

Turkish

Italian

French

Welsh

German

Estonian

Swedish

English

19th September 2013



“Places” and Units in the PastPlace data model

• Places are ―above‖

units because units

are named after

places

• There is only one

―names‖ table

• Currently 22,371

places versus 81,886

units; 26,520 units not

assigned to places,

but only 5,492 of these

in Britain, while 2,944

places have no units

19th September 2013



Place

names for

Chester-le-

Street

19th September 2013



Source of first ranked results from searching

google.co.uk for “history of <name>“ for all

Herefordshire ancient parishes

19th September 2013

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Wikipedia Vision of Britain Other noncommercial Commercial

No. of parishes (N=188)

• Domination of

placename search

results by

Wikipedia is not

inevitable!

• Surprising how

little interest most

academic and

heritage sector

projects have in

good results in

search engines

• FINDABILITY



Tallinn in PastPlace RDF

19th September 2013



19th September 2013

Open Linked

Data as a lingua

franca for the

(semantic) web

• Gazetteers

act as hubs:– Wikipedia

– Geonames

– Open

Street Map

– OS Linked

Data

• NB diagram

has not been

updated

since

September

2011 as

became too

big



Pelagios 3: Early Geospatial

Documents• 2 year project Sep 2013-Aug 2015

– funded by Mellon Foundation

• Principal Investigators:• Leif Isaksen (Southampton Univ, UK)

• Elton Barker (Open Univ, UK)

• Rainer Simon (Austrian Inst of Tech)

• Plus many partners:• British Library: Kimberly Kowal

• Drew Univ Shannon Bradshaw, Martin Foys

• Harvard Univ: Lex Merrick Berman

• Indep: Johan Åhlfeldt, Tony Campbell, Mia Ridge

• New York Univ: Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies

• Queen Mary, London Univ: Yossef Rapoport

• Edinburgh Univ: Kate Byrne

• Portsmouth Univ: Humphrey Southall

19th September 2013



Pelagios 3: Project and rationale

• Project will annotate, link and index place references

in digitized Early Geospatial Documents (EGDs)

• EGDs are documents that use written or visual

representation to describe geographic space prior to

the European discovery of the Americas in 1492

– This event both radically transformed beliefs about the

globe, and triggered the development of several

standardising global cartographic conventions, including the

Werner, Bonne and Mercator projections

• EGDs include ancient and medieval geographic

descriptions (geographiae and chorographiae and

itineraries) world maps (mappaemundi) and portolan

charts

19th September 2013



Pelagios Data Model for Annotations

• Linking related resources via Open Annotations

• Six items of information form an annotation:

1. Target. A segment of the text or image identified as a place

reference, expressed as a URI

• Target URIs will be additionally annotated with relevant document

metadata where known, including the author, date-range,

provenance, language.

2. Toponym: the string of characters used by the author to identify

a place

3. Place Identifier: linking the place to a URI based gazetteer

4. Source: of the identification between toponym and place

5. Annotator: The person who produced the annotation.

6. Confidence: a traffic light scheme: probable, possible, or

unknown

19th September 2013



Gazetteer Infrastructure

• Pelagios aims to create a ―Gazetteer ecosystem‖:

– URI-based gazetteers that are specific to a spatial, temporal

or cultural milieu and maintained and curated by their

respective research communities, but aligned through the

principles of Linked Data and a common, overarching

referencing framework

• Two key challenges in creating such an ecosystem:

– A common, generic gazetteer data model needs to be

identified which suits the needs of the different individual

stakeholders involved

• All gazetteers in this ecosystem will be primarily of ―places‖, not

geographical features

– Referencing frameworks need to be agreed, through which

different gazetteers can cross-link to each other

19th September 2013



Participating Gazetteers

• Project will re-use, and contribute to, three

existing gazetteer platforms:– Pleiades (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU)

– PastPlace/Vision of Britain (GBHGIS, University of Portsmouth)

– China Historical GIS (CGA, Harvard)

• All three gazetteers are more about ―places‖ than

geographical features

• Pleiades+CHGIS mature: few new places needed

• PastPlace ―will be significantly augmented with

contemporary and historic settlements extracted

from open gazetteer services‖, beyond UK– Decided last week this would be based on Wikidata

19th September 2013



Pelagios 3 Content Work Packages

19th September 2013

No Name Example EGDs Gazetteer

1 Latin Tradition Antonine Itineraries, Ravenna Cosmography,

Bordeaux Itinerary, Natural History (Pliny)Pleiades

2 Greek

Tradition

Geography (Strabo), Armenian Geography, Suda,

Manual of Geography (Ptolemy)Pleiades

3 Early

Christian

Tradition

Gough Map; Description of the World (Marco

Polo), Fra Mauro Map, De Virga world map,

Vesconte World Map, approx. 320 sundry

EGDs from the British Library

PastPlace

4 Early Mari-

time Trad.

Le Liber (portolano), Lo Compasso

(portolano), c. 180 Portolan chartsPastPlace

5 Early Islamic

Tradition

Image of the Earth (Al Khwarizmi), al-Kashgari

World Map, Tabula Rogeriana (al- Idrisi) Book

of Curiosities, Maps of the Balkhi School

PastPlace

6 Early Chinese

Tradition

Yujitu (‗Map of the Tracks of Yu‘), Songhuiyao,

Chinese Buddhist Temple Gazetteers, ‗Record of

Buddhistic Kingdoms‘

CHGIS



Pelagios WP3: Early Christian Tradition

• Maps and geographic texts from

medieval ‗Christendom‘

• Mixture of maps and texts e.g.:

• Mappaemundi and T-O maps

• Gough Map

• Description of the World (Polo)

• Vesconte World Map

• Past Place gazetteer

• May work back from modern

translations using Edinburgh

geoparser using tools developed

by DM project and use toponym

detection

19th September 2013



Pelagios WP4:Early Maritime Tradition

• Portolanos (texts) and

portolan charts

• Approximately 180 maps

available from work of

Ramon Pujades (2007)

• Past Place gazetteer

• Use toponym detection and

gazetteer and identification

work and gazetteers of Tony

Campbell and Ramon

Pujades

19th September 2013



Pelagios WP5:Early IslamicTradition

• Maps, texts and gazetteers in

Arabic up to approx. 1492.

• Maps and texts e.g.

• Al-Khwarizmi

• Book of Curiosities

• Balkhi School

• Tabula Rogeriana

• Past Place gazetteer +

Pleiades

• Use toponym detection and

gazetteer and identification

work of Yossi Rapoport, Emily

Savage-Smith, Kennedy &

Kennedy and others

19th September 2013



Geo-semantic methods are inferior to Geo-spatial …

• You can derive that B is in A, or

C is near B, from the map, but you

cannot derive the map from the text

… except when

• We are working with the past

– Textual descriptions are often all we have

– Old maps are very inaccurate

• We are working with the web

– The web is a textual structure linked by explicit relationships

• We are working with people

– People think about geography through named places not

coordinates defining spaces

• NB Vision of Britain/PastPlace has plenty of geospatial functionality

19th September 2013



19th September 2013

Web sites, etc

• Vision of Britain:

www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk

• Great Britain Historical GIS:

www.gbhgis.org

www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis

• PastPlace (very preliminary site!):

http://www.pastplace.org

• Pelagios project

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk

• Contact us:

[email protected]

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/

http://www.gbhgis.org/

http://www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis

http://www.pastplace.org






19th September 2013



19th September 2013



19th September 2013



19th September 2013

Count of number of names per language

LANGUAGE NUMBER OF NAMES

ENGLISH 62603

SWEDISH 7507

ESTONIAN 11973

GERMAN 5032

WELSH 1069

FRENCH 61

GREEK 3

ITALIAN 3

RUSSIAN 2

TURKISH 2

OTHER LANGUAGES WITH 1 NAME EACH 26



19th September 2013

Unit relationships

• All held in single

table, allowing many-to-

many relationships

• Current system has

81,886 units but 260,602

relationships

• Have dates,

authorities, etc

g_unit

http://www.icpsr.

umich.edu/DDI/

g_name

g_status

http://www.icpsr.

umich.edu/DDI/

g_rel_type

http://www.icpsr.

umich.edu/DDI/

g_rel

http://www.icpsr.

umich.edu/DDI/

• IsPartOf

• SucceededBy (‗see also‘)

• AdministeredBy

• Boundary Changes

– ReducedToEnlarge

– ReducedToCreate

– AbolishedToEnlarge

– AbolishedToCreate

– BoundaryChange (other unit unknown)



19th September 2013

Example of unit with many names

• Newborough, Anglesey parish

Technology

Linking Spaces with Places: Examples from thePastPlace Project