Add Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names (TGN) to catalog

[EnnoMeijers]

A request from Marco Streefkerk to add TGN (https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/) to the catalog. I would suggest to start with Dutch and Flemish items to avoid too much noise (like we do with Wikidata places and are planning for geonames).

[AnneFrankStichting]

I understand the national focus of NDE. However for organisations like us dealing with an international (European) collections and audience this would complicate using het Termennetwerk. Alternatively we could opt for the option to ask our vendors (Axiell and Picturae) to make a connection to the TGN directly. Hopefully national service providers like NDE can work together with similar organisations in other countries and/or European ones (Europeana?) to reach global coverage.

[EnnoMeijers]

The only reason for limiting the scope is to make it easier for the user to select the right URI for their context. In general I would like to start restrictive and add countries when an need for them is expressed. Even then it might help user to offer multiple TGN sources with different scopes: one for NL & BE, one for worldwide searches. I am currently more concerned about the quality of the TGN. It looks like their is too little information to make clear distinctions between different entities. Take for example the search on 'Koudekerke' in the Netherlands see TGN results. It results with two places within Zeeland, which is correct but further information is lacking to determine which is which. Additional information on the level of gemeente is neccessary to disambiguate but is not there! Shouldn't we consider using Geonames instead of TGN? I expect we can add Geonames to the Network of Terms within a couple of weeks.

[AnneFrankStichting]

We'll consider the use of Geonames as alternative. In principle I think it is also a choice between wisdom of the crowd (Geonames) and information with the authority of traceable colleagues in the sector (Getty).