e-Perimetron 

About: e-Perimetron is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Digital mapping & Digitization. It has an ISSN identifier of 1790-3769. Over the lifetime, 36 publications have been published receiving 184 citations.

Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

Abstract: Summary: Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore, the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages.

Old Maps Online: Enabling global access to historical mapping

Abstract: Summary : Over the last thirty years, map libraries worldwide have scanned some hun-dreds of thousands of historical maps from their collections, and most are viewable online via the world-wide web. However, maps remain difficult to access because they are indi-vidually hard to find: a user needing a map of a given location needs to know which li-brary or libraries to search, and library search interfaces generally require knowledge of map titles: there has been no “Google for old maps”. We review previous attempts to cre-ate such a federated search portal and then explain how our new portal at www.oldmapsonline.org differs. One feature of our approach is that we prioritize rapidly achieving critical masses of content and usage over long-term sustainability. This means that we are assembling metadata from map collections essentially manually, maximizing the number of libraries who can participate. One longer term aim is to encourage use of sustainable web addresses for historical maps, Universal Resource Identifiers rather than URLs, which do not contain references to particular pieces of software, or reflect particu-lar transitory arrangements of library web sites. A second long term aim is not to create a specialized automated metadata harvesting system for maps, but to ensure that the systems which major libraries are anyway putting in place for their overall collections do include the spatial coordinates needed to make content geographically discoverable.

Modeling historical evidence in digital maps: A preliminary sketch

Abstract: The history of cartography has a long tradition in the study of the truth of maps. In 1968 two fundamental articles in Imago Mundi appeared that discussed the historical evidence of maps not only from a technical, but also from a functional/contextual point of view: Koeman’s: “Levels of historical evidence in early maps” and Harley’s: “Evaluation of Early Maps. Towards a Methodology”. In this paper we take the herein proposed division of “evidence on, about and of maps” as point of departure for a conceptual model which allows us to examine to which extent existing methodologies concerning the historical evidence of maps can be used in the analysis and design of digital town plans and virtual reconstructions of cities. The model contains parameters of historical evidence based on form, function, (re-)use and transformations of paper and virtual maps and on interpretations of users. Finally the process will be described to allow mapmakers and users to annotate digital maps with information on historical evidence. The proposed paper is embedded in the research programme of the Virtual Knowledge Studio (Amsterdam) and of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands): Paper and Virtual Cities. New methodologies for the use of historical sources in virtual urban cartography, http://odur.let.rug.nl:8080/pvc/template/EN/index.xml financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)

Identifying surviving landmarks on historical maps

Abstract: Summary Historical maps can provide valuable information for different disciplines. In this way maps are used more and more as data sources to detect spatial and temporal changes. But maps do have their limitations mostly because older land-surveying and map-making techniques were different from what we use nowadays. We should consider this when dealing with maps as data sources. Are the sources reliable enough to be taken as bases to determine changes over time? Or, are they merely pictorial representations without geographical or spatial foundation? The reliability of historical maps is studied in the research "Measuring the historical city" as part of the NWO research program Paper and virtual cities. By studying the education of mapmakers and land surveyors and by comparing various maps we try to understand how maps were made and to assess their reliability. We approach the reliability of the spatial context by measuring the accuracy of the maps by comparing historical maps with modern data. To enable such comparisons we consider differences between sources that are the results of real temporal changes and differences due to the techniques used to produce maps. This must result in a method that objectively describes how to interpret and compare features on historical maps with the same (and sometimes no longer existing) elements on reliable modern maps. On the basis of a case study of the Dutch town Zwolle we try to visualize difficulties and constraints resulting from these comparisons. We explore in detail aspects such as 3D effects and the correspon- dence between features from map-to-map by looking at the differences in: depiction of features, con- tent of the map, and stages of the mapmaking process. Our hypothesis is that a correct interpretation of features depicted on historical maps in the end will reduce the number of errors we might make in processing and therefore lead to a more reliable use of digital maps.

Navigating on the past, as a bird flight, at the territorial scale of historical topographic maps. WMS on the "Corografie delle Province del Regno Lombardo-Veneto”, for accessing cadastral map catalogue

Abstract: Summary: The research presented here has developed within the project “Atl@s of historical cadastral and topographic maps of Lombardy (2009-2011)” funded by ‘Fondazione Cariplo’, involving ‘Politecnico di Milano - BEST Dept.’ (project leader), ‘Archivio di Stato di Milano’, ‘Agenzia del Territorio’, ‘Centro Studi PIM’, ‘Regione Lombardia’, ‘Comune di Gorgonzola’ (partners). The first release of the geo-portal (www.atlantestoricolombardia.it), has been presented to the public on 19 th January 2010 after a year’s work. Conceived in the form of a modern Atl@s, it has been designed with a double level access to the historical cadastral series available by ASMi (‘Catasto Teresiano’, ‘Lombardo Veneto’, ‘Cessato Catasto’), together with samples of ‘Impianto in conservazione’ by AdT (Italian Cadastral Administration): besides a catalogue approach level based on classical research keys (the application, Divenire©, has been inherited by ASMi from the Archive of Venice), an open geographic level has been implemented by the research group of Politecnico, with ongoing functionalities, based on a territorial regional basis, obtained experimenting and georeferencing small scale topographic maps, principally here focused on the historical chorographic maps. The methodologies, the reliability and feasibility of the georeferenced output, and the overall potentiality to use them as a gate to access the local scale represented by the spread diffusion of the cadastral series, are the topics discussed. Due to the high number of historical cadastral sheets, the generation of a systematic GeoDB on the local cadastral series - with a rigorous georeferencing method, already documented within the research – shall be faced by government policies and by algorithm automation, to become sustainable in the next years, in terms of time and costs. Thus, in the mean time, few functionalities are being tested to allow an agile user access, based on a geographic approach to the non georeferenced sheets, straightening the immediate content of the geographic language to a large public demand, respect to the simple key queries, through Web Mapping Services (WMS) developed on the small scale map: ASMi is going to share - over this project through the portal - more than 28.000 sheet units, that can find a challenge in the geographic fruition. Flying the territory of the past with the small scale synthesis, its political assets and physical elements, such as the hydrographic network, can offer interesting thematic cultural opportunities to knowledge dissemination of ‘our territory’ and its preservation.