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TEMPLAR Wales Dataset Links Welsh Place Names to Environment

Oktay Karaku\c{s}, Can Eyupoglu· August 28, 2026 View original

Key takeaways

  • TEMPLAR Wales is a georeferenced dataset linking Welsh place names to environmental data.
  • It contains 3,757 settlement records with lexical and environmental attributes.
  • The dataset supports research in toponymy, linguistic geography, and environmental studies.
  • It provides a robust, validated foundation for spatial data analysis.

Who benefits

Urban PlanningEnvironmental ConsultingHistorical ResearchGIS & MappingCultural Heritage

Summary

TEMPLAR Wales is a new georeferenced dataset of 3,757 Welsh settlements, linking place names to environmental attributes like elevation, river proximity, and land cover. It provides a reusable foundation for research in toponymy, linguistic geography, and environmental studies.

This paper introduces TEMPLAR Wales, a newly developed georeferenced dataset that meticulously links Welsh settlement names with their environmental characteristics. Comprising 3,757 settlement records across Wales, the resource provides a reproducible framework that connects mapped locations, lexical annotations, and environmental measurements through stable identifiers. It includes 1,350 lexical detections from 24 Welsh place-name elements, preserving exact and prefix token matches along with their origins. The dataset's environmental attributes detail river and coastal proximity, elevation, local terrain context at various scales, and land cover, including neighborhood woody cover. These terrain measurements are derived from independent elevation products, ensuring robustness. Distributed as four relational tables with a comprehensive data dictionary and provenance register, TEMPLAR Wales has undergone technical validation confirming its relational integrity, deterministic lexical reconstruction, and documented environmental coverage. This resource is intended to serve as a foundational tool for researchers in fields such as toponymy, linguistic geography, historical and environmental landscape studies, and GIS.

Why it matters

Professionals in urban planning, environmental management, and historical research can utilize this dataset for detailed spatial analysis, understanding the historical relationship between language, settlement, and landscape.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Access and integrate TEMPLAR Wales into GIS platforms for spatial analysis of Welsh settlements.
  2. 2Utilize the dataset to research historical land use patterns and environmental changes in Wales.
  3. 3Apply the lexical framework to analyze place-name origins and their correlation with geographical features.
  4. 4Develop predictive models for environmental attributes based on toponymic information.
  5. 5Collaborate with linguistic and historical experts to interpret the cultural significance of the data.

Original post by Oktay Karaku\c{s}, Can Eyupoglu

"arXiv:2608.26970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Place names provide persistent records of how landscapes have been described and organised, but their quantitative reuse requires explicit separation between mapped places, lexical annotations and environmental measurements. TEMPLAR…"

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