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The SHANTI Place Dictionary provides information about all varieties of places in the world, in past and present times, from a variety of perspectives. Such places include cities, towns, and other human population centers; features of the natural environment such as mountains, rivers, and lakes; religious institutions such as churches, temples, and monasteries; cultural institutions such as schools, hospitals, and TV stations; and many more. Some of the available perspectives through which to view places include contemporary national administrative units, with features such as nations, provinces, counties, townships, and so forth; historical polities, with features such as kingdoms, vassal states, tribal areas, villages, and so forth; cultural regions, with individual cultural regions and the relationships that obtain between them; the environment, with features like mountain ranges and individual mountains, and their relationship, or streams and their relationship as tributaries for rivers, and so forth; and religion, with features such as a monastery and its relationship to a sacred mountain, or a church and its relationship to a pilgrimage route.

A place can have an unlimited set of information describing its various aspects, such as founding, population, and type of architecture, and also an unlimited number of relationships to other places. Each place can also have one or more essays describing it as well as associated multimedia resources such as images.

In addition, the SHANTI Place Dictionary is structured to allow individual region-focused presentations. Tibet and the Himalayas is an example of such a presentation.

To get an idea of the possibilities, press this link to a featured place: