PastPlace – the global gazetteer from the people who brought you 'A Vision of Britain through Time'

This poster differs very substantially from the similarly titled poster prepared for the same meeting in 2013, as that concerned a new "gazetteer service" or API (Applications Programming Interface) by which part of the content of our existing Vision of Britain system could be accessed. This new poster instead covers a new body of actual content, the PastPlace global historical gazetteer. The poster covers the derivation of a central "spinal gazetteer" from the Wikidata project; linking in the full text of the "Gazetteer of the World or dictionary of Geographical Knowledge (Edinburgh: Fullarton, 1856); adding place names gathered by the Pelagios project from pre-1492 maps and "geospatial documents"; constructing a global historical base map server, based mainly on sheets from the International Map of the World; the API, which has been modified to access PastPlace rather than Vision of Britain; a new web app which provides PastPlace with a public face, accessing the gazetteer via the API and designed to work as well on tablets and phones as on PCs; and future plans to extend the gazetteer through the crowd-sourced extraction of place names from historical maps. The project is part-funded by the University of Portsmouth's Higher Education Initiatives Fund.