The proliferation of digital humanities and spatial history methods in Ottoman and Middle East studies is currently impeded by the absence of a digital gazetteer for the Ottoman world. Such a resource would include historically-attested variations of a toponym, trace its administrative dependency in time, its geographic coordinates (which may also vary in time), alongside a wide variety of relevant information. Such a resource would not only be be the backbone of any digital humanities project, but would also standardize and integrate existing regional digital gazetteers that are built for the purposes of individual digital humanities projects. The paper focuses on the methodological and technical challenges of trying to build such an essential infrastructure for digital humanities scholars. It will describe the previous efforts taken towards that end, and will then focus on the methodology developed in the context of the ‘Ottoman Recogito’ project that was awarded a Pelagios Commons Resource Development Grant in 2018. Engaging a group of graduate and undergraduate students along the lines of what may be called ‘pedagogical mini crowd-sourcing’, the project used the Recogito semantic annotation tool (https://recogito.pelagios.org/) in order to extract toponymic data from volume 12 of the “Important Affairs Registers” (Mühimme defterleri). The first step was to identify Ottoman toponyms that are currently available in large online gazetteers (GeoNames, Pleiades, etc.), and some 1,000 place names were identified in the source processed here. The second stage of the project entails identifying Ottoman toponyms that are not found in existing gazetteers and will require further research in order to find their geographic coordinates as well as other relevant data. These two pools will be the basis and the foundation of an Ottoman Gazetteer that will have Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs) and will be freely available to the online community.