1.1.1.11. Identifiers and Citation

v4.0-beta

Note

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

1.1.1.11.1. Every place record has a persistent identifier

In WHG’s data model a place, or any entity whose identity is bound up with space, is a SpatialEntity (see the Data Model). Each place record in WHG has an identifier you can cite and link to. The identifier resolves through w3id.org, a community-run permanent-identifier service, so it does not depend on WHG’s own web address staying the same.

A place: identifier names a gazetteer record, that is, one source’s account of a place, not the place itself: two sources describing the same city have two records, and two identifiers. To see what other records have been stated to describe the same place, open the record’s Concordance; to cite a group of similar records, use a locus.

Identifiers take the form

https://w3id.org/whg/id/place:<source>:<id>

where <source> is the short name of the gazetteer the record comes from. For example, a GeoNames record:

https://w3id.org/whg/id/place:gn:2988507

1.1.1.11.2. One address, two answers

The same identifier gives people and software what each needs:

  • In a web browser, it takes you to the record’s page on WHG.

  • For software, what it returns depends on what the software asks for, and that will change at the v4 launch (see RDF Representation):

    • Today, a request for JSON or JSON-LD, or for any type (*/*), returns the record as JSON-LD in Linked Places Format (LPF). Turtle is not served (404).

    • At the v4 launch, WHG will return the record as PLATO JSON-LD, or as Turtle (text/turtle), and will go on offering LPF for existing clients.

In linked data, the identifier itself is the place’s IRI (its @id). The address the data is fetched from, https://whgazetteer.org/entity/place:<source>:<id>/api, is only where it is served. Today’s LPF answer still gives that API address as its @id; this will be corrected so that it gives the w3id identifier.

A small number of source gazetteers are held under terms that do not allow WHG to redistribute their records. For those, the identifier still resolves, but the data request is refused with an explanation of the terms, rather than a misleading “not found”.

1.1.1.11.3. Citing WHG

  • Cite a place by its identifier, together with the source gazetteer it came from. Each gazetteer’s page in Atlas says how its creators ask to be cited.

  • Cite a dataset or collection by the citation on its page, which includes its DOI. WHG mints a DataCite DOI for each published dataset (a Gazetteer, in v4) and each collection when it is published, and hides the DOI if it is unpublished. There is one DOI per Gazetteer, not one per version: to cite a Gazetteer as it stood at a particular time, give its DOI together with its version.

  • Cite the WHG platform itself by its software DOI (see the site footer).