On December 9, 2025, members of the ISHI and World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) teams led a session at Linked Pasts Symposium 11: “Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration.” The Linked Pasts Symposium is a goal-oriented forum focused on building, planning, and learning about the application of linked open data (LOD) to historical texts, events, and datasets.
During the event, Ruth Mostern, ISHI Director and WHG Project Director, introduced ISHI and its new role in the Pelagios Place Activity (formerly the Gazetteer Alignment Activity). Stephen Gadd, WHG Technical Director, presented recent updates to the World Historical Gazetteer, including ORCID-based authentication, new Entity and Reconciliation Service APIs, and improved reconciliation with Wikidata. Ali Straub and Palak Vashist then discussed new and improved contributor documentation, including a more user-friendly LP-TSV template and a Submission Readiness Checklist that outlines the steps and criteria required to successfully publish a dataset on the WHG.
After the presentations, an open discussion addressed challenges in modeling historical places from uncertain data, WHG’s plans for a graph data model in its next version, its curation strategy and current content gaps, and opportunities for partnerships and capacity building. Participants also expressed strong interest in developing a centralized portal or clearinghouse for syllabi, courses, and training materials related to spatial history and gazetteers.
View the session agenda and discussion summary here.