Glossary

How this glossary works

These are not general definitions. Each entry says what the term means on this atlas and, where it matters, what it deliberately does not mean. Where a term is a controlled value in the data, it is written in code.

Programme vocabularies stay distinct rather than being flattened into one list: the Dacia corpus, the Venetian network and the Hanseatic world each measure different things, and a shared word would hide that. Their own terms are in Dacia data fields, VMN data fields and Hanseatic data fields.

Time

valid_from / valid_to - the years between which a record was true. They belong to the feature, not the layer, so one harbour appears several times with different dates as its situation changed. An open-ended record compiles to valid_to = 9999.

Date precision - how firmly a date is known. A treaty has a day; a participation phase often has only a decade. Where a source gives a range, the record takes the range rather than picking its midpoint and looking more certain than it is.

Per-feature time - a property of a layer. When it is on, the year slider reveals and hides individual features; when off, the slider shows or hides the whole layer by its overall envelope. Most historical layers here are per-feature, which is why moving the year changes what is drawn rather than whether anything is.

Envelope - the outer temporal bounds of a whole layer, used to decide whether it is worth listing at a given year. A layer stays discoverable by its envelope even when no individual feature falls in the selected year.

Evidence

Evidence type - how directly a thing is attested, as opposed to how confident we are about it. A documented route and a generalised reconstruction can both be uncontroversial; they are not equally attested.

Source locator - the exact place in a source where a claim rests: a printed page, a folio, a named section. Locators are printed page numbers, never scan sequence numbers, and a record that cannot name one may not claim to be reviewed.

Reconstruction state - whether a shape or a reading was taken from a source or supplied by this project. See geometry_provenance below, which records the same distinction for geometry specifically.

Identity

Canonical ID - the stable identifier for a layer, place, source or record. It is the same string in the registry, the URL, the citation and the data file. IDs do not change once published; if a name needs to change, the display title changes and the ID does not.

Modern reference versus historical evidence - the most important distinction on this atlas. A modern reference layer shows the present day and is offered as a grid to find your bearings by. A historical layer is a reconstruction of a past state and can be cited as a claim about it. The schema enforces the difference: a context layer cannot be filed under a historical category.

Roles: what kind of claim a layer makes

context - framing geography that asserts nothing about the past. Coastlines, rivers, present-day borders. A context layer cannot carry a historical category; the schema refuses it.

historical - a reconstruction of a past state. The scholarly payload of the atlas, and the only kind of layer that can be cited as a claim about what was there.

evidence - what a source depicts or covers. A depicted extent is evidence about a map, not about the ground it draws.

map-overlay - a georeferenced historical map surface, shown as an image rather than as data.

Lifecycle: what state the scholarship is in

published - the editorial contract is settled. It does not mean the layer has data: a published layer can ship an empty asset while it waits for review, and asset availability is a separate question the release manifest answers.

in-review - the records exist and no human has cleared them. Material in this state may be looked at and argued with; it may not be cited as established evidence.

in-preparation, planned - declared but not compiled. These do not appear in the layer browser.

Confidence and provenance

direct - a source states the thing itself.

high / medium / low - decreasing degrees of inference from what a source states to what the record claims.

editorial_reconstruction - this project drew it. Nothing in the sources gives the geometry, and the line exists because the argument needed one.

geometry_provenance - where a shape came from, kept separate from how confident anyone is about the fact it represents. A well-attested fact can carry a drawn geometry, and the atlas says so rather than letting a confident fact lend its confidence to an invented line.

Reading the frontier layers

treaty_line - a boundary an instrument fixed.

proposal - a line somebody put forward that was not adopted. Kept, rather than discarded, because a rejected frontier is evidence about what was thought possible.

reconstruction - a later scholarly redrawing.

Where two sources give different lines for one moment, both are kept. Averaging them would produce a frontier nobody proposed.

Attestation and silence

attestation - a place where a source names a place.

Silence - a place where a source could have named a place and did not. Silences are recorded as data because absence in a source is a fact about that source.

review_state - whether a human has cleared a record. Machine-assisted work stops at normalized by construction; nothing reaches reviewed without a named reviewer and a real locator.