World War 1 As Linked Open Data / quote 1 of 4
Problems with geo location of historical events
Regarding the locations of wartime events, a key point is that places are temporal instances, that is, they can change over time. Current geographical datasets such as GeoNames are thus not directly applicable to a historical case like WW1, as the documents and events often refer to the place names used at the time. Addi- tionally, for example the locations of battles often re- fer to geographical features such as ridges or rivers, as opposed to for instance villages or administrative units of the same name found more commonly in modern datasets.