The team behind the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus were in Nicosia last week, presenting a near-final form of the project to an audience of experts in Cypriot history and archaeology. The resource the project has been tasked by the A. G. Leventis Foundation to produce is very nearly complete, and will be launched to the world in January 2015.

The HGC has always been about the names of places, and how these names change over time. As I have blogged about previously, and as we outlined in our presentation to the International Cartographic Association’s Digital Approaches workshop in Budapest in September, this name-driven approach, which is based on three layers of data – modern toponyms, ‘Historical Units’ and ‘Archaeological Entities’ represents the limits of the current project. However what it cannot do raises important intellectual questions about how digital representations of place are organized and presented online. The…