Most fundamentally we
use the term ‘place’ as it is defined by Trismegistos Geo: this
means taking ‘place’ in its broadest sense, to refer not only to
towns and villages, but also to regions, districts and all kinds of
micro-toponyms. All toponyms referring to a single place are listed
on their individual cards, each of which has a unique TM Geo_ID number. The number itself contains no information, but creates a
numerical order. If two places are identified and their cards
joined, the Geo_ID number of the old card is preserved but
henceforward contains only a reference to the new card.
For example,
Trismegistos Geo lists two kinds of places: ancient places attested
in both literary and documentary sources, and modern places insofar
an ancient document has been found there. Sometimes in fact no
information about the ancient toponym is available and the findspot
of an ancient text has to be recorded with its modern findspot. With
regard to ancient places, it is not always clear what is a real
toponym and what is a common noun that refers to a geographical item
(also called appellatives in linguistic studies). In this matter,
Trismegistos follows the practical rule that any toponym listed in
the geographical index of a publication is also listed in the
geographical database. Trismegistos Geo is also adding to PLEIADES id for some location, in order to facilitate the recognition
of geographical entries in other databases. In addition, the cards
store all names and variants; among them a standard name is chosen
both for the ancient and the modern name. Moreover, every place is
ascribed to a modern country, an ancient region and a Roman
provincia, each item in a separate field. The standard name for the
modern country is the one used in English, and the correspondences
between each modern country or region and the ancient provinces are
those in use at the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg.
Aligning the
inscriptions in Trismegistos will mean that the “annotated thing”
not only will represent the most up-to-date unique entry for that
text but also will in turn link to multiple independent editions of
the same text where they exist and indeed to all quality curated editions from the EAGLE BPN. In this way we will help minimize the possibility of
duplicating records for the same place.
In the long term, we
look forward to aligning both Trismegistos and Pleiades to Wikidata, in
order to bring together the richness of both of these gazetteers. As
we see it, establishing a network of gazetteers—one of the aims of
Pelagios 3—is a highly valuable step towards harmonizing practice
and making content reusable and extendable. We look forward to
working with the Pelagios team to take linked ancient world data one
step further in terms of data networking and interoperability, and
together help facilitate research in all disciplines of the field,
digital or otherwise.
