Places of Ancient Arabia. Epigraphic data in the MAPARABIA gazetteer

The Arabian Peninsula is still poorly represented in maps and digital reference tools on the geography of the ancient world. To respond to this need, a Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia has been conceived in the frame of the recently funded ANR-project MAPARABIA. The Gazetteer is synchronised with DASI, the "Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions" [http://dasi.cnr.it/], from which it currently draws thousands of names of entities related to the territory, which are encoded in the Southern Arabian inscriptions, and hundreds of records of archaeological sites and monuments. As a thesaurus of ancient "places", the gazetteer identifies, disambiguates, and describes them, and represents their environmental and semantic relations, as well as their changes over time. It will be released in linked data format and under open license (LOD), in order to enhance interoperability with other repositories.