Linked places are one of the fundamental activities in the community of linked pasts. This tutorial introduces the Japanese version of linked places developed in the ROIS-DS Center for Open Data in the Humanities and the National Institute of Informatics. The platform comprises of several interconnected repositories and tools: GeoLOD, GeoNLP, Geoshape, Rekichime, and Rekichizu.

• GeoLOD is a gazetteer repository with the functionality to assign and manage place identifiers and associated metadata.
• GeoNLP uses the GeoLOD gazetteers to perform entity linking on natural language text.
• Geoshape manages the topology of a toponym, including the transition of polygons and their representative points.
• Rekichime is a project that creates a diachronic database of Japanese cities and towns, focusing on their geometries and using a seamless ID system from the Edo Period to the present.
• Rekichizu is a project to develop a historical map of the Edo Period in a modern style like Google Maps.

As an application of those platforms, we also introduce our historical big data project, which uses linked places and other “linked pasts” data to reconstruct the city and the period of Edo and extend the big data technology of the present to the past. We also introduce basic concepts and techniques to deal with old maps, such as georeferencing.