Geography

Like other entities, Nomisma.org should be the preferred authority system when tagging places related to numismatic content. Its coverage of the ancient world Greco-Roman world is fairly thorough. Islamic mints have good coverage. But identifiers are lacking in other time periods and domains. However, Nomisma only contains identifiers for places that produced coinage. That means places mentioned in TEI about where coins were found or references to places where coinage had not been produced will not have Nomisma IDs. There are two online gazetteers that should provide good coverage for places outside of the domain of Nomisma.

Pleiades

Pleiades is a gazetteer of ancient places, derived from an atlas of Greco-Roman geography, but it is expanding into other areas of the ancient and medieval worlds. There is a keyword search on the home page. The URI pattern follows http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885. You may encounter multiple places known by the same name. Please let me know and I can help disambiguate. Pleiades should be favored over Geonames when tagging TEI ebooks about ancient coinage.

Geonames

Geonames is a geographic database of modern places. It is extremely expansive. The keyword search is on the home page.

Getting the URI

It is a little more annoying getting the URI for a Geonames place because you can't simply copy and paste the URL out of your browser. In the search results, on the left side, there will be a small colored icon. You will derive the URI from the link of this icon. A search for Rome yields a URL of http://www.geonames.org/3169070/rome.html as the first result. You will need to remove the *.html bit after the last forward slash. The URI should end with the numeric portion of the string:

http://www.geonames.org/3169070