The Temporal Gazetteer (TGAZ) is a search engine and machine-readable API for historical placenames. Built upon toponymic databases of historical placenames from the China Historical GIS, the Toponimika - Historical Gazetteer of Russia, and the Gazetteer of Historical Monasteries in Greater Tibet, the TGAZ system architecture provides a method for integrating historical place names with other Linked Open Data systems, such as Pelagios / Recogito and MARKUS.
This interface accepts queries for placenames in UTF-8 encoded strings or glyphs (for example, Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic script, and Tibetan Script, as well as Romanized transcriptions). Each placename recorded in the database is referred to as a spelling. A brief look at the project in diagrams (PDF).
Funding was provided by the NSF IUCRC Spatio-Temporal Thinking Innovation Center.
Investigator: Merrick Lex Berman
Programmer: Bill Hays
