Abstract The workshop on The Cultural Heritage of Historic European Cities and Public Participatory GIS aims at outlining the challenges to develop a ppGIS which can integrate data from different ages, authorities, and formats. This data ranges from archival catalogs, maps, photographs, film, aural archives over archaeological data to interpretative studies. With respect to spatial resolution, data should be available down to the level of single streets or even specific properties. Instead of a static approach, users should also be able to contribute new data to the system. This raises a couple of questions which are also relevant in a broader context, namely the ontological representation of and reasoning about geographic places. This paper introduces the challenges of modeling places in such a heterogeneous setting, outlines steps towards a three layered solution on how to represent, reference, and reason about geographic places, and finally sketches how to deal with inconsistent and contradictory knowledge.

Janowicz, K. (2009): The Role of Place for the Spatial Referencing of Heritage Data. The Cultural Heritage of Historic European Cities and Public Participatory GIS Workshop. The University of York, UK 17-18 September 2009