Simple Gazetteer & Georesolver

A simple gazetteer server & API for use with Linked Places gazetteers.

To get you started, a Linked Places dumpfile of 1.6 million notable places (= places with Wikipedia or Wikidata correspondences) from GeoNames is included here.

Server & API

The gazetteer server is based on ElasticSearch, behind a simple JSON API built with Node.js/Express. A Docker configuration for quick setup is included.

$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up

After initial installation, you need to index the gazetteer dataset:

$ cd backend/bootstrap
$ python init_backend.py

Bulk-Georesolution Utility

The project includes a browser-based utility for batch-georesolution of CSV data. (Setup instructions to follow!)

The utility runs requests against the gazetteer server for each distinct placename in the CSV. The result is shown on the map, and an extended CSV (origina + additional columns with GeoNames information) is made available for export.

Wrong matches or places that could not be resolved can be fixed manually. In this case, the interface queries the GeoNames API directly (because it sometimes returns different matches than the ElasticSearch backend).