Digital Gazetteer as a Knowledgebase for Open Data Science

Abstract

Digital gazetteers are essential knowledge sources for the humanities in order to allow the association of heterogeneous data sets in the context of geographical proximity. There are some free gazetteer databases about Japanese place names but they contain only contemporary information. The Humanities’ GIS Research Group (H-GIS) and the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU) have collaborated in creating “The Digital Gazetteer for Historical Japanese Place Names (DGHJ)” that is a free gazetteer database of Japanese historical place names. After more than ten years of work, H-GIS and NIHU finally succeeded in downloading the DGHJ data sets. This paper will describe sources, data compiling methods, organization of data structure, and current achievements of the DGHJ.