Abstract
The standardisation of historical, geographical names or toponyms facilitates both the comparison and combination of datasets that have a spatial dimension. In a digital infrastructure, online web services can be provided that not only standardise the historical, geographic names in these datasets to a canonical name, but also enrich the dataset with geographical coordinates through a process of geocoding. Finally, these online web services can be used to create cartographic visualisations of the datasets. Since there were no convenient web services available for the standardisation of historical, geographic names in the Netherlands, the websites gemeentegeschiedenis.nl and histopo.nl were launched in 2013. Gemeentegeschiedenis.nl presents a uniquely identifiable web page (using a so-called “Uniform Resource Identifier” or URI) for every municipality in the Netherlands since 1812. The web pages provide relations between former and current municipalities and present maps of all the boundary changes over time. The website histopo.nl was launched to provide a disambiguation service for toponyms of settlements and their historical spelling variants. Both gemeentegeschiedenis.nl en histopo.nl present the information as web sites for regular visitors and as web services for computers to be incorporated in an online information system. The aims of the introduction of gemeentegeschiedenis.nl and histopo.nl are to demonstrate the advantages of a standardisation service for historical, geographic names on the one hand and building up our own expertise and experience on the other hand. In this chapter we present a description and evaluation of the information and centralised services presented on these websites and a description of potential services to create a more useful tool.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
The API is documented on http://api.histopo.nl/docs/
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
References
URLs checked March 20, 2015.
Berners-Lee, T., et al. (1998). Uniform resource identifiers (URI): Generic syntax, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt.
Boonstra, O. (1992). NLKAART. A dynamic map of the Netherlands, 1830–1980. In H. J. Smets (ed.), Histoire et Informatique V. Montpellier (pp. 315–324). The shape files of this research are deposited at DANS: https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/ui/datasets/id/easy-dataset:43063.
Butler, H., et al. (2008). The GeoJSON format specification, http://geojson.org/geojson-spec.html.
Huijsmans, D. P. (2013). IISG-LINKS Data-set Historische Nederlandse Toponiemen Spatio-Temporeel 1812-2012, Release 2013.2 http://www.iisg.nl/hsn/data/place-names.html.
Kloeke, G. G. (1926). De totstandkoming van de “kaart van het Nederlandsche taalgebied ten behoeve van het dialectgeografisch onderzoek” In Grootaers, L., & G. G. Kloeke, Handleiding bij het Noord- en Zuid-Nederlandsch Dialectonderzoek, (pp. 57-65) Den Haag : Martinus Nijhoff http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/projecten/mand/LITkloeketotstandkoming.html.
Levenshtein, V. I. (1966). Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady, 10, 707–710.
Meer, A. v.d., & Boonstra, O. (2011). Repertorium van Nederlandse gemeenten vanaf 1812. Den Haag : DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) http://www.dans.knaw.nl/nl/over/organisatie-beleid/publicaties/DANSrepertoriumnederlandsegemeenten2011.pdf.
Meroño-Peñuela, A., Guéret, C., Ashkpour, A., & Scharnhorst, A. (2013). Publishing, harmonizing and consuming census data: The CEDAR project. Open data on the web workshop, world wide web consortium, Open Data Institute, Open Knowledge Foundation, 23–24 April 2013, Google Campus, Shoreditch.
OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). (2009). Web map service implementation specification—Version 1.3.0 http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=14416.
OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). (2014). Web feature service 2.0 interface standard—Version 2.0.2 http://docs.opengeospatial.org/is/09-025r2/09-025r2.html.
Southall, H., Mostern, R., & Berman, M. L. (2011). On historical gazetteers. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 5(2), 127–145.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Onno Boonstra (Radboud University Nijmegen) who applied for financial support in a “Klein Data Project” (Small Data Project) at DANS-KNAW for further development of some of the web services described.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zandhuis, I., den Engelse, M., Mac Gillavry, E. (2015). Dutch Historical Toponyms in the Semantic Web. In: Bloothooft, G., Christen, P., Mandemakers, K., Schraagen, M. (eds) Population Reconstruction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19883-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19884-2
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)