Gazetteer data and services
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What are gazetteers?
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 * Datasets that identify (stably) and describe (in both structured and unstructured terms) entities of interest to users of the gazetteer and users of other datasets
 
 * Combine characteristics of encyclopedias and controlled vocabularies
 
 * Datasets that, though not designed for it, can be used or refactored to be used, in this manner
 
 * Entity examples: geographic places, persons, objects


Core use cases
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 * Dataset alignment (existing local strings or IDs augmented by identifying and acquiring gazetteer IDs for the entities of interest)
 * Text parsing (named entity recognition)
 * Text annotation (string "Alabama" means place:15354)
 * Discovery that exploits dataset alignment: e.g., find all records in photo databases for object:coin from place:Atlantis
 * Data preservation and normalization
   * E.g. special-purpose or static gazetteers and datasets migrated to larger or more general systems still active (active curation as opposed to putting datasets "on ice")
 * Visualize texts, corpora, datasets, arbitrary collections of records from single or multiple datasets, e.g.:
 	* Geographic gazetteer: map it (where, density heat map, etc.)
 	* Prosopographic gazetteer: social graph
 	* Temporal gazetteer: timeline
 	* Multiple gazetteers: dynamic map over time
 * Gazetteer alignment (My "foo" is the same as your "bar")
 * Gazetteer aggregation (your uniqueness will be joined to our collective)


 "Special" problems in humanities gazetteers
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  * Incomplete data
  * Uncertainty
  * Citation
  * Attribution

Example ancient history gazetteers
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 * PeriodO
 * Pleiades
 * SNAP:DRAGN