1.1.1.1. Getting Started

v4.0-beta

Note

Part of the Draft v4 User Guide: under review during beta testing.

The World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) brings together what many sources say about places in the past. Its index holds roughly 47 million place records drawn from:

  • global reference gazetteers, such as GeoNames, Wikidata, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, OpenStreetMap and OpenHistoricalMap;

  • specialist historical gazetteers, such as Pleiades and the Vision of Britain and Ireland;

  • data contributed by researchers.

Each record keeps its source, its dates and its licence.

WHG v4 is organised around four things you can do.

You want to…

Use

Guide

Explore places on a map, through time, across sources

Atlas

Atlas

Match your own list or table of places to WHG

Map your Data

Map your Data

Build a collection, an itinerary or a group of gazetteers, alone or as a team

Collaborative Workbench

Collaborative Collections

Improve a published record

Suggest a correction

Suggesting corrections

1.1.1.1.1. Do I need an account?

  • No, to search, explore Atlas, read place records, and download openly licensed data.

  • Yes, to save work, collaborate, contribute data, or suggest a correction.

WHG accounts use ORCiD to sign in. If you do not have an ORCiD iD, you can create one free at orcid.org as part of signing in.

1.1.1.1.2. One place, many sources

The same place is usually described by several sources, each in its own way: different spellings, scripts, coordinates, dates and categories. WHG does not merge these into one master record. Each source’s statement is kept as a separate, attributed claim (an attestation), and WHG shows you where they agree.

  • In Atlas, records that appear to describe the same place are grouped as you explore. You control how cautious that grouping is.

  • In Map your Data, the same evidence (spelling and sound, location, type and country) is used to suggest matches for your rows, with a confidence you can review.

Two features help with names written differently:

  • Sounds-alike matching finds names that are spelled or scripted differently but sound alike. See Sounds-alike search.

  • Standardised place types from the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus let you filter by the kind of place, whichever source a record came from.

1.1.1.1.3. Where next