Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS, Part 2: A Geo-Spatial Ontology of Administrative Units

Abstract

Mainstream geographical information systems techniques and packaged geographical information systems software are often inappropriate in historical contexts because they use geographical coordinates as a framework around which all other information is organized as “attribute data,” whereas in history locations are often the least certain part of our knowledge. A new and general architecture for documenting administrative units and organizing historical statistics is detailed, which prioritizes named entities and explicit semantic relationships such as “IsPartOf,” while holding coordinate data where available. This architecture is easily aligned with the recent development of geo-semantics by information scientists, meeting the formal requirements for a geo-spatial ontology, but was originally developed to enable the systematic computerization of traditional historical reference works, notably Frederick Youngs’ Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England.

Keywords:

• historical GIS
• gazetteer
• geo-semantics
• ontology
• administrative units
• boundaries
• England and Wales

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alexander von Lünen for the UML diagram in Figure 3, to Paula Aucott for Figure 4, to Vojtech Kupca of the University of Umeå for the ontology visualizations presented in Figures 5 and 6, to Linda Hill of UC Santa Barbara, to Göran Kristiansson of the Swedish National Archives for inspiration, and to the staff who stayed with the project in 2002 for loyalty.