This study explores how semantic annotation can be used to investigate the strategic use of named references in the Naturalis Historia. Specifically, it examines the distribution of named individuals and their geographical, cultural, and occupational roles. The corpus consists of books 2-6 of the Latin encyclopedia, with corrected OCR-related errors and linguistically and semantically annotated text. By exploiting the established links with external knowledge bases, namely Wikidata and the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, it was possible to extract information about the persons occurring in the text. Data on the type, role, language and geography of the entities are used to explore Pliny’s preferences and attitudes towards different individuals and sources in the text.