Beyond the space: The LoCloud historical place names micro-service

Historical geo-information is usually considered as the sets of historical place names which are fixed in historical sources. In heritage digitization activities it serves as a link between reality and virtuality and ensures more qualitative data inter-operability. The perception of the historical space is important not only for preservation of historical place names as a kind of intangible heritage, but also for the participative interpretation of cultural heritage, as well as for the creation of the European narrative. This paper presents the Historical Place Names (HPN) microservice. HPN microservice is a web service which has been developed during the LoCloud project (Local content in a Europeana cloud) in collaboration between Project partners. The HPN microservice has been developed on the basis of a thesaurus of historical geo-information. The HPN microservice performs the following functions: Crowdsourcing and enrichment of provider s and aggregator s historical geo-information, HPN geo-information visualization, and HPN interoperability provision.