Remapping the Livonian Coast: A Multilingual Gazetteer of the Settlements of Northern Kurzeme

Remapping the Livonian Coast: A Multilingual Gazetteer of the Settlements of Northern Kurzeme Antal, Daniel 1 Mester, Anna Márta Pigozne, Ieva We began by constructing a multilingual geographic reconciliation layer—a gazetteer—to align historical and modern place names (e.g., Mazirbe, Irē, Мазирбе) under canonical identifiers. While this resembles standard geocoding, our approach integrates multi-script, multi-ethnic, and historical variants. The gazetteer draws from public sources such as GeoNames, national databases, and historical atlases, and is manually verified in collaboration with Finno-Ugric scholars to ensure cultural nuance. We selected the Livonian coast as a prototype due to its manageable scale—roughly a dozen villages where Livonian was still spoken in the late 19th century. Using the Livonian Place Name Catalogue (Ernštreits 2020) as a starting point for Livonian and Latvian names, we compiled historical and contemporary names across languages: Livonian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, and Baltic German. This cross-linguistic layering increases the chance of surfacing relevant materials in collections that use inconsistent or outdated place names. Even within this small region, the variation is significant. For example, Mazirbe (Livonian: Irē) and Lielirbe (Īra) appear in metadata as Irben, Gross-Irben, Klein-Irben, Suuri-Irben (Finnish-German hybrid), or Irē. Diacritical and orthographic shifts—like Īra (Latvian) vs. Íra (Hungarian)—complicate exact matching. Sovietera sources followed standardized Latvian forms, while imperial Russian materials preserved German exonyms. These linguistic, political, and orthographic layers show why rigid top-down normalization is impractical. Our work draws on and extends existing approaches. Wikibase has proven effective for multilingual authority control (Bianchini, Bargioni, and Pellizzari di San Girolamo 2021; Fagerving 2023). The AvoinGLAM initiative, for example, imported Sámi toponyms into Wikidata, showing how Wikibase can support culturally grounded reconciliation. We generalize and expand these models for Finno-Ugric contexts. We used this Gazetteer for the creation of (Pigozne, Antal, and Mester 2025). 1. Why a Gazetteer for the Livonian Coast? A gazetteer is a structured list or database of place names — often enriched with geographic coordinates, historical context, and multilingual labels. In the digital humanities, gazetteers serve as foundational reference tools for mapping, text annotation, archival description, and linked data integration. For the Livonian coast, creating such a gazetteer was especially necessary because: • This narrow coastal region is home to the Livonian minority, a nearly extinct Finno-Ugric people with a rich but under-documented toponymy. • Many historical settlements — even some still recognized today — have multiple names in Livonian, Latvian, Russian, German, and Finnish, depending on the period and source. • Over the 19th and 20th centuries, administrative boundaries changed frequently, often obscuring or erasing older names from modern records. • Place names appear in textile provenance, ethnographic studies, and oral histories, but lack a reliable, linked reference model for digital use. This gazetteer offers a structured, multilingual, and semantically linked dataset that allows scholars, heritage professionals, and digital tools to refer unambiguously to places on the Livonian coast — past and present. Heritage metadata is often treated as fixed: accession-era knowledge published as RDF and rarely revisited, and this leads to search difficulties: Aladár Bán’s Estonian collection items in the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest can be found in “Russia”, in itself, an ambigous term that means both the historical Russian Empire and the current Russian Federation, even if the provenance lies in modern Estonia. A.O. Heikels collection artefacts from the Livonian Coast in the Finno-Ugric Collection of the National Museum of Finland may be attributed to Suur-Irben (and Russia, again), a name variation of Lielirbe that is certainly not to be found on any 1 Daniel Antal’s and Anna Márta Mester’s work was partly connected to the Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101095295. Remapping the Livonian Coast 2 map created in the last 100 years. (See for example: liiviläinen morsian; [Livonian bride (SUK15:85)] (Heikel 1902)) Our aim with the gazeteer to help researchers connecting digital surrogates, secondary sources, and data across databases that do not use normalised geographical names. We also hope that this is a first step to provide semantic feedback for data curators and collection managers in museums, archives and libraries. The world’s perhaps greatest humanities researcher, https://whgazetteer.org/ does not contain much information about Mazirbe (Grossner, Grunewald, and Mostern 2022), showing the importance of mapping local knowledge. 2. How to use the Gazetter? Try out the Gazetteer on the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Item:Q4202 Each place entry in our gazetteer is published as a structured document in the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space. These documents are managed using a Wikibase system, the same open-source software that powers Wikidata. Every entry has its own persistent web address and is readable in two main ways: 1. As a human-friendly web page. For example, the settlement of Miķeļtornis (Livonian: Pizā) is available at: https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Item:Q4429 2. As a machine-readable RDF document in standard formats. The same entry can be accessed in: o Turtle format: https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Special:EntityData/Q4429.ttl o RDF/XML format: https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Special:EntityData/Q4429.rdf These structured entries contain multilingual labels and aliases. For example, the entry for Lielirbe includes: wd:Q4429 rdfs:label "Lielirbe"@en ; rdfs:label "Īra"@liv ; skos:prefLabel "Īra"@liv . This tells us that the modern name in English is Lielirbe (also the official Latvian name), while the Livonian name is Īra. In some cases, we also include historical or unusual names as aliases: wd:Q4429 skos:altLabel "Suur-Irben"@fi . This Finnish name was found in a museum record and illustrates how rare historical variants are captured and preserved. These records enable both humans and digital tools to reliably work across languages, scripts, and time periods when referring to places on the Livonian coast (Lībiešu krasts/Līvõd rānda.) Remapping the Livonian Coast 3 Latvian Livonian Russian German HTML TTL Lībiešu krasts Līvõd rānda Ливский берег Livländische Küste fuds:Q4389 fuds:Q4389.ttl Jaunciems Ūžkilā Яунциемс fuds:Q4428 fuds:Q4428.ttl Kolka Kūolka Колка Kolken fuds:Q4390 fuds:Q4390.ttl Košrags Kuoštrõg fuds:Q4417 fuds:Q4417.ttl Lielirbe Īra Лиелирбе Irben|GrossIrben fuds:Q4429 fuds:Q4429.ttl Lūžņa Lūžkilā Лужня fuds:Q4424 fuds:Q4424.ttl Mazirbe Irē Мазирбе Klein-Irben fuds:Q4427 fuds:Q4427.ttl Miķeļtornis Pizā Микельторни с Pissen fuds:Q4430 fuds:Q4430.ttl Saunags Sǟnag Саунагс fuds:Q4419 fuds:Q4419.ttl Sīkrags Sīkrõg Сикрагс Zikraggen fuds:Q4418 fuds:Q4418.ttl Ūši Mägkilā fuds:Q4427 fuds:Q4427.ttl Vaide Vaid Вайде fuds:Q4393 fuds:Q4393.ttl Ventspils Vǟnta Вентспилс Windau fuds:Q4392 fuds:Q4392.ttl We also added alternative names, for example, Lūžņa kylä (Finnish: Lūžņa village) when this form was used in Liiviläiset kuuntelevat gramofonille tallennettua kieltään. [Livonians listen to their language recorded on a gramophone (SUK139:7)] (Kettunen, Lauri 1920) Lauri Kettunen: Liiviläiset kuuntelevat gramofonille tallennettua kieltään. [Livonians listen to their language recorded on a gramophone (SUK139:7)] 2.1. Interoperability To support interoperability across heritage platforms, we link each settlement entry in the gazetteer to globally recognized authority services. These identifiers are persistent, resolvable web addresses that connect our local documentation to broader networks of geographic and bibliographic knowledge. Remapping the Livonian Coast 4 2.1.1. GeoNames Where available, we include a GeoNames identifier — a widely used geographical reference system. For example, the village of Lielirbe is linked to: https://www.geonames.org/458007/lielirbe.html In RDF, this appears as: wd:Q4429 owl:sameAs <https://sws.geonames.org/458007/> . This allows researchers and software to recognize that Lielirbe in our dataset corresponds to the same location used in global GIS tools, library catalogs, and historical maps. GeoNames also contains alternative names; it also has information about the current administrative territorial unit, geocoordinates, population, elevation, and other geographical information that can help identifying unambigously Lielirbe. 2.1.2. VIAF For culturally or historically significant settlements that appear in catalog records, we also link to VIAF (Virtual International Authority File). VIAF integrates national library data to support name disambiguation and discovery. For example, Mazirbe has the VIAF ID: https://viaf.org/viaf/153822754 Which we reference as: wd:Q4428 owl:sameAs <http://viaf.org/viaf/153822754> . This helps users discover books, ethnographies, and archival material related to that settlement, even across different cataloging systems and languages. Remapping the Livonian Coast 5 In the VIAF system we often find slightly different preferred names for Mazirbe in various national library systems. 2.1.3. Wikidata We also connect entries to Wikidata, the central hub of linked data maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. For places that already existed in Wikidata, we added their QID. If no entry existed — as in the case of smaller or abandoned settlements like Ūši — we created a new Wikidata item to ensure inclusion. Example: wd:Q4429 owl:sameAs wd:Q13277032 . These links position the Livonian gazetteer within the broader semantic web, making it easier to query, visualize, and cross-reference in digital humanities and cultural heritage workflows. Wikidata connects many knowledge sources and information services, and often refers to the encyclopedic description about Mazirbe or provides images of Mazirbe. 3. Administrative Entities Remapping the Livonian Coast 6 Wherever possible, we have linked each settlement to its current administrative territorial entity using the standard property wdt:P131. This helps users situate the place within today’s Latvian municipal structure. For example, the historical, now largely abandoned village of Lielirbe is currently within Ventspils Municipality, and is represented in RDF as: wd:Q4429 wdt:P131 wd:Q217434 . This allows the gazetteer to support queries and filters by present-day jurisdictions. However, we caution users that administrative boundaries along the Livonian coast have changed repeatedly over the last two centuries. These changes span: • The Russian Imperial period • Latvia’s first independence (1918–1940) • The Nazi German and Soviet occupations • Post-Soviet municipal reforms after 1991 Even at the parish level, names and boundaries were redrawn multiple times, often with language-specific variants (e.g., German, Russian, Latvian, Livonian) appearing in parallel. For example, a single parish may appear as Mazirbes pagasts, Irben, or Irbenhof depending on the source and time period. To address this, we plan to extend the gazetteer with: • Historical administrative layers • Start and end dates for each jurisdiction • Multilingual aliases for parish and municipality names This future enhancement will allow researchers to trace both the spatial and temporal context of a settlement more precisely, especially when working with historical maps, land records, or ethnographic sources. 4. 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Heikel, Axel Olai. 1902. liiviläinen morsian; [Livonian bride (SUK15:85)]: Part of the Finno-Ugric Collections (National Museum of Finland) and the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space (Q4664). https://www.finna.fi/Record/museovirasto.21e4b5ec-b9b8-4064-96e7-dba43e075b64. Kettunen, Lauri. 1920. Liiviläiset kuuntelevat gramofonille tallennettua kieltään. [Livonians listen to their language recorded on a gramophone (SUK139:7)]: Part of the Finno-Ugric Collection of the National Museum of Finland and the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space. https://reprexbase.eu/fu/Item:Q4667. Pigozne, Ieva, Daniel Antal, and Anna Márta Mester. 2025. “Linked Open Datasets on Traditional Livonian Clothing.” TextileBase. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15668562.