A Gazetteer and Georeferencing for Historical English Documents

We report on a newly available gazetteer of historical English place-names and de-scribe how it was created from a re-cent digitisation of the Survey of En-glish Place-Names, published by the En-glish Place-Name Society (EPNS). The gazetteer resource is accessible via a num-ber 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 histor-ical gazetteer and the Unlock1 and GeoN-ames2 gazetteer services have been es-tablished 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 georefer-ence historical texts.