Personal tools
You are here: Home → Documents → Pleiades Partners → Google Ancient Places (GAP)

Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Google Ancient Places (GAP)

Creators: Tom Elliott
Contributors: Leif Isaksen
Copyright © The Contributors. Sharing and remixing permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by).
Last modified Apr 29, 2013 06:00 PM
GAP is a Google-funded Digital Humanities project that is exploring the possibilities for automatically identifying and visualizing place references in online corpora. The first phase of the project used the Edinburgh Geoparser and Pleiades gazetteer to geo-tag and identify place references in primary and secondary literature about antiquity from the Google books Corpus. The results are visualized and made available online using the GapVis interface: http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#index


Visit GAP on the web at: http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/

How GAP is using Pleiades data:

Pleiades+ is a toponym extension to Pleiades, based on GeoNames. Pleiades+ attempts to match Pleiades and GeoNames identifiers together based on both location and toponym. When such matches are found, the additional toponyms from GeoNames are associated with the Pleiades URI.

The GAP dataset, which is available for download and reuse, expresses machine-identified relationships between tokens in texts and place resources in Pleiades in the form of Resource Description Framework triples in the N3 format, following the PELAGIOS system of annotations.

GAPVis is an online interface for reading and visualizing GAP texts and their machine-identified relationships with Pleiades. You can read more about it in blog posts here, here and here.

The current phase of the project is abstracting principles developed by GAP into the Geographic Annotation Platform – a toolkit that will allow anyone to geoparse their own texts and make them available online. The Geographic Annotation Platform is Open Source and will be available from summer 2013.