Our database consists of places, variants and attestations:

• Each entry (“place”) in this database consists of an ID, preferred forms of toponym (both in Hebrew script and in its English normalized form) which are primarily based on the “MAZAL”, the national authority files database. We are continuously adding to the place records geographic coordinates and links to external authorities.
• Alternate names (“variants”) for these places are different spellings (טבריא, טבריה) or different name forms (לביב, למברג) referring to these places.
• Attestations are references to dated sources in which place name variants appear. The preliminary data for the attestations was contributed by the National Library of Israel, The Academy for the Hebrew Language, and Shebanq. Additional attestations were added by dr. Zef Segal in the framework of the historical newspapers project at OMILab.

Our data is made available in various formats and venues: on this website, through an API, in the annotation environment Recogito and through the DiJeSt triplestore.

Website

Use this website to search for places, their variant names and their attestations: Enter a string (e.g “שאלוניק” in the search box on the Home page enables entering a string, and getting one or more places to which it may refer:

If there is more then one place, click the one you are interested in.

You will find yourself at the “place page” where you can see place details, followed below by a list of variant names, and a graph on the right, showing the distribution of these variants as attested in our data. In the following graph, for example, you can see how the form סאלוניקו took over שאלוניקי and became the dominant name over the second half of the 19th century:

API

The Application Programming Interface allows developers to build software that interacts with our database. Our swagger interface documents and demonstrates the types of queries which you can integrate in your application.

RECOGITO

Recogito by Pelagios is an annotation, linking and mapping environment, which enables manual annotation and/or automatic detection of place names mentioned in texts and tabular data. With the Kima Gazetteer integrated in Recogito, and a plugin development by Dimid Duchovny and Dr. Rainer Simon, Recogito’s Developer, you can now upload your hebrew texts or tables and link the place names in them in order to export the extracted data in various formats, create a network or a map, as seen below:

Click here for a short tutorial on how to use Recogito.

DiJeSt

The places of the Kima gazetteer are also integrated in the DiJeSt knowledge graph for Jewish Studies, where they are linked to information about people’s birth and death places and publication places of books. See for example the interactive map created using Kima and DiJeSt data for the history of Hebrew print. More information on DiJeSt data here.