GeoNames Forum

It appears there are over 6000 place names in the database which include the word "(historical)" in the name. For example,

Edo (historical)

is given as one of the alternate names for Tokyo.

However, surely the "name" field isn't the right place to mark somewhere as being historical. "historical" isn't part of the name, it's rather an attribute which applies to the place. So is there any way the word "(historical)" could be removed from the name field for those places, and mark those places as historical in some other way?

Also, is there any possibility the "isFormerName" field could be opened up for editing? The current situation is a little unsatisfactory as there's no way of telling which place names are current or not. At least if the "isFormerName" field was open for editing, we would have a way to start marking place names as former names as we come across them. Then it shouldn't take long before the most well-known historical places have been correctly tagged.

Best wishes,
Chris

Hi Chris

There are two new flags in the alternate name edit tool:
isColloquial for slang and colloquial names
isHistoric for names of the past that are no longer used.

Last week I was at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers. The topic was how GeoNames could/should be extended to improve support for the timeline. Some more attributes that were discussed:
- fromPeriod (date, year or period of usage)
- toPeriod
- source (book or map where the name is used), publication date of the source
- notes

The discussions for the other fields are still ongoing and any feedback is welcome.
The two new flags isColloquial and isHistoric are not yet included in the daily extract as we will probably add some more attributes and don't want to change the extract files too often. We will extract the records with the two new flags in separate files as a temporary workaround till everything is stable.

Best Regards

Marc

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the update. That's a very positive development.

Kind regards,
Chris

Hi Marc

My opinion about the flags > Toponyms, alternate names and flags must be searchable. The old name for Tokyo “Edo (historical)” is searchable… for “Edo” and for “(historical)”…
This is not a specialized historian’s database. The general user who did not even hear about flags should see the facts in the toponym name. Everybody knows that Tokyo is the present name for the city - but what about an obscure town behind the yellow mountains…

isColloquial > that’s OK

isHistoric > OK for A and P feature classes, but even there, without a timeline, it is not more explicit than the (historical) in the toponym.
For all other feature classes I see no advantage for this. The toponym must tell what it is, e.g. “Abandoned Airfield WWI”, “Assault Beach WW2” or “Former Coconut Grove Washed Away”.

from/toPeriod > History is a science; precision is often relative to the state of the art at a given time. Who will arbitrate a war between historians?

source > Meaningful in a dissertation… but everybody can ask Google…and the war above will be here too > this guy is not a reference...

notes > Interesting, sometimes I don’t like to let the reader guess about the meaning of a forcefully concentrated toponym text.

Best regards

Urs

Hi,

As this thread has been stale for over a year, I'd like to bump it and ask for the current status.

I am in the situation that I have to like to no-longer existing countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or West and East Germany.

Did someone come up with a solution for this in the past 17 months?

Cheers,
K

…or in the following 58 months?

For genealogy-related projects, I am in need of a canonical placename source with timeline. This thread is the only lead I've found at all.

I am also interested on any updates on historical place names. The ishistoric flag seems sufficient for place names that have changed over time, but is is problematic for other cases -- especially without any ability to add a date.

I am also finding the ishistoric flag to be problematic since some entries seem to require a higher user level to add the flag. (I tried to mark Verdun-sur-Meuse as historic, but was given a "you are not allowed to update this alt name" error.

Also, I am noticing in earlier posts to this thread and the geonames user manual that fr_1793 was an accepted pseudo language code, but it is no longer listed in the pseudo language code list that appears when viewing or editing a record. Has this been removed?

Hi

The alternate names table has two brand new columns 'from' and 'to'. They are used to specify the period from-to when the name was used.
I have marked Verdun-sur-Meuse as historic with the to field '1970' and Verdun with from '1970'.

The new columns are exported in the new file alternatenamesV2.

The user level concept helps to protect some features agains undesired updates. We can increase your userlevel.

The pseudo language code fr_1793 still exists.

Best Regards

Marc

I have seen that the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names contains some recorded names of spots. Would that be a sensible strategy to populate is Former Name