After three years of development, we are pleased to announce the launch of Version 1 of the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), at whgazetteer.org. Version 1 follows six beta releases over the past year or so. The WHG presently indexes 1.8 million modern place references and approximately 60,000 temporally scoped records.
In addition to filtered search and API access to data, we have developed a suite of tools that allow you to upload place datasets into a private workspace, augment them by reconciling them against the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names and Wikidata, publish them as Linked Open Data, and contribute them for accessioning to the WHG index.
We have a long list of planned improvements and a queue of in-progress data contributions. More data is very welcome of course, and your feedback is essential! You can use the site contact form, create an issue on GitHub, or simply write to us at whg@pitt.edu.
We have completed a Site Guide that describes the purposes, functionality, and data of the present system. The Tutorials and About sections of the site provide additional information. We will continue keeping our nearly 500 Twitter followers current with news of new data, new features, and bug fixes. We also plan to keep our blog updated with relevant announcements and discussion of the project’s future course..
We are pleased to announce this major step in our project and we look forward to your
The World Historical Gazetteer Team
Ruth Mostern, Karl Grossner, and Susan Grunewald