Pleiades — gazetteer place-name linking
The Pleiades plugin links a record to a toponym in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places. Search-as-you-type against the live Pleiades API, pick a result, and the record is filled with the place's id and official name. If the place has coordinates, a point marker is added to GeoFace automatically.
Enabling the plugin for a table
Go to Config → Tables, select the table, scroll to the System plugins section and toggle Pleiades (place-name gazetteer) on. The system adds four columns to the table and confirms with a toast message. No other configuration is required.
To disable, toggle the switch off. The columns — and any data already entered — are preserved; the panel simply disappears from RecordView. Toggle it back on at any time to restore the panel without data loss.
Linking a place
In RecordView (edit mode), open the Pleiades panel and start typing a place name. After the third character, a debounced search runs against the Pleiades API and shows up to as many suggestions as Pleiades itself returns for that query (no additional limit is applied) — each with its title, Pleiades id, and a short snippet.
Click a suggestion to select it. This fetches the place's full record from Pleiades and fills:
- Pleiades id and official toponym — read-only, taken from Pleiades
- Alternative place name — a free-text field you can fill independently, e.g. for a local or historical name that differs from the Pleiades title
Save the record. If the selected place has a representative point (reprPoint), a marker for it is attached to GeoFace for this record.
Removing a link
Click Remove in the Pleiades panel and save. This clears the id, the official toponym and the alternative name, and removes the GeoFace marker that was added for it — a manually-drawn geometry on the same record (if any) is never touched. Deleting the whole record does the same cleanup automatically.
Read mode
Displays the linked toponym as a link to its Pleiades page, its id, and the alternative name if set:
Vigna Cartoni cistern
#492046782Vigna Cartoni (local name)
Data model
Four columns are added to the core table when the plugin is activated:
| Column | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
pleiades_id | INTEGER | Pleiades place numeric id |
pleiades_label | VARCHAR(200) | Official Pleiades toponym, filled on selection |
pleiades_alt_label | VARCHAR(200) | Free-text alternative name, independent of the above |
pleiades_geo_id | INTEGER | Internal bookkeeping — the id of the GeoFace geometry this plugin created for the record, not shown in the UI |
pleiades_geo_id exists because a record can already carry a manually-drawn GeoFace geometry: without tracking which geometry belongs to the Pleiades link specifically, removing the link could not tell it apart from an unrelated one on the same record.
Integration with other plugins
| Plugin | Integration |
|---|---|
| GeoFace | A linked place with coordinates shows up as a marker on the map like any other geometry, with no plugin-specific behaviour on the GeoFace side — it reuses the same geometry storage as manually-drawn features. |
Only one Pleiades toponym can be linked per record. If a record needs to reference more than one ancient place, use a manual link or a custom lookup table instead.