Construction and linkage of historical place-name data of Japan (2021)
Place-names are necessary tools to specify a geographic position. As geographic information systems (GIS) have become popular in recent years, geocoding that links a place-name with its latitude and longitude is essential. In Japan, some research organizations and companies have provided geocoding services (e.g., Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo). Overseas, GeoNames is a remarkable service that provides information about place-names around the world. However, these services provide only contemporary place-names and are not applicable to place-names in historical documents. To solve this issue, we have constructed a historical gazetteer data of Japan.