About PLATO

PLATO, the Place Attestation Ontology, is developed by the Pelagios Network’s Place Working Group, led by the Institute for Spatial History Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh, and formalises the data model of the World Historical Gazetteer.

It is an early draft, published for discussion and review, and not yet stable.

PLATO and Linked Places Format

Linked Places Format (LPF) is PLATO’s single-attestation profile: every LPF element corresponds to one attestation linking one place to one name, type, geometry or related place. Existing LPF files remain valid. PLATO does not replace LPF; the simple interchange format and the richer model are meant to coexist, and LPF’s development continues in its own repository.

Taking part

Questions, suggestions and problems are welcome as issues on the repository. The Working Group can be reached at gazetteers@pelagios.org.

Citing PLATO

Cite the concept DOI, which always resolves to the latest version: 10.5281/zenodo.21688313.

Licence

PLATO and this guide are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.