A Gazetteer and Georeferencing for Historical English Documents

We report on a newly available gazetteer of historical English place-names and describe how it was created from a recent digitisation of the Survey of English
Place-Names, published by the English Place-Name Society (EPNS). The gazetteer resource is accessible via a number of routes, not currently as linked data but in formats that do provide connections between a number of different datasets. In
particular, connections between the historical gazetteer and the Unlock1 and GeoNames2 gazetteer services have been established along with links to the Key
to English Place-Names database3. The gazetteer is available via the Unlock API
and in the final part of the paper we describe how the Edinburgh Geoparser, which forms the basis of Unlock Text, has been adapted to allow users to georeference historical texts.