Understanding historical places involves more information than just a place name: the spatiotemporal and cultural context is needed, too. This paper introduces a solution to the problem of providing historical place names with context in a user interface, by using an ontology service that serves historical place names on modern and historical maps, with additional contextual linked data attached. The solution is being implemented in the use case of creating and managing a national level gazetteer and map service HIPLA, hosting over 800 000 historical and contemporary places in Finland.