by Richard Light
The AUO is the Administrative Units Ontology: a resource describing historical administrative units in Britain (England, Wales and Scotland). It contains information about the relationships between these units and about their history: when they were created, when dissolved, etc. For example, this is Cuckfield RD: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10173085. This resource currently underpins the Vision of Britain site (http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/), but it could be used much more widely.
This project aims to enable that wider use, by publishing the AUO as Linked Data in the format suggested by Pelagios: the Pelagios Gazetteer Interconnection Format (hence ‘PGIF’): https://github.com/pelagios/pelagios-cookbook/wiki/Pelagios-Gazetteer-Interconnection-Format. The existing AUO data is a good fit for the PGIF, since it contains both dating information (which is as accurate as possible) and sources for all assertions. We plan to make it available both as a dump file, and via an API, under a Creative Commons licence.
Free UK Genealogy (https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/) proposed this project as it already has a lively interest in the AUO. Each of our three main projects uses a different type of administrative unit (e.g. Registration Districts; parishes). Our searches are date-specific (e.g. entries the 1881 Census). Therefore we see the AUO, which includes date information as well as coordinates, as a means of harmonizing these different types of unit. This will allow us to offer our users improved place-based search.
We hope that other GB-focused projects will also find this resource useful. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested, and let me know what types of queries you would want to put to this resource. This will help me decide what features need to be offered in the API.
