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.

Development has been supported by the Institute for Spatial History Innovation (ISHI) at the University of Pittsburgh.

Experimental

PLATO is developed in the open. It is experimental, published for discussion and review, and not yet fully tested or stable: its terms, its JSON schemas and its spreadsheet tables may change, or break, between releases.

A term or JSON key that is renamed or withdrawn is not removed at once. It is kept, marked as deprecated and pointing to its replacement, for at least one release before it is removed. The changelog states this policy and records every change, release by release.

Each release is archived on Zenodo with its own DOI (see Citing PLATO), so data organised against one release can always name the exact version it follows.

PLATO tools, which checks and converts data in PLATO’s shape, is developed separately and carries its own badge.

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.