Suggested process for finding place name gazetteer records to link to

[rybesh]

Given a period without a gazetteer link, look at the textual spatial coverage description (or possibly the name of the period if the textual spatial coverage description is missing).

1. Is there a close approximation in the existing PeriodO gazetteers? These are described at https://github.com/periodo/periodo-places. You can download all of them as JSON at https://data.perio.do/graphs/places.json. An easy way to search over them is to use the [Filter periods > By place] widget described at https://perio.do/guide/#select-periods.

2. If there isn’t, could the missing place be found in Wikidata and added to an existing PeriodO gazetteer? This can be determined by looking for a suitable place in Wikidata, and seeing if it is an instance (not necessarily a direct instance) of one of the types around which the existing PeriodO gazetteers are organized:

   • Continents
     instances of Q5107 continent

   • Subcontinental regions, geographic regions, other regions
     instances of Q82794 geographic region

   • Countries
     (see periodo-places repo for how these are determined)

   • World cities
     instances of Q486972 human settlement

   • Historical places
     instances of Q3024240 historical country, Q28171280 ancient civilization, or Q839954 archaeological site

   The remaining gazetteers (US states, English counties, Italian regions, Spanish autonomous communities) shouldn’t need to have any entities added to them, unless we’ve overlooked something.

3. If none of the existing gazetteers can be augmented, could we create a new gazetteer from Wikidata entities? For example, a French regions gazetteer including things like “Burgundy”.

4. Finally, only if nothing suitable seems to exist in Wikidata, we can consider using other gazetteers. However, even in this case we might end up mapping the other gazetteer to Wikidata, creating new Wikidata records if necessary. (This is roughly what we're doing with the DAI gazetteer.)