Place names are used in a lot of different types of literature, and it's useful to be able to find all of the references to a particular place. But there might be many places with the same name, and just searching for a place name can return a lot of false positives. Of course, when specifying a place name, we could always remove the ambiguity by saying exactly which one we're talking about (e.g., "Baltimore, Maryland, USA"), but nobody wants to do that. Yahoo! GeoPlanet provides unique identifiers for every place in the world (past and present), and QDL provides an interface for finding place names by navigating a hiearchy (i.e., country → region → city). The place names are links, with the unique identifiers hidden in the HTML tags. If you copy one of these links and paste it into your post, readers can click on the link to bring up a map of the place.

 

To do this:

1. Click the Select a Place button () in the toolbar to navigate this hierarchy, and
2. select a place name to copy-n-paste into your post.