Dutch Historical Toponyms in the Semantic Web

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.