1. Towards Semi-Automatic Annotation of
Toponyms on Old Maps
Rainer Simon, Peter Pilgerstorfer
Austrian Institute of Technology
Leif Isaksen
University of Southampton
Elton Barker
The Open University
September 19-20 2013 | 8th International Workshop on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Rome, Italy

2. Map Digitization

3. But:
Search & discovery limited
by available catalog metadata!

4. Spatial Search?

5. (Caistor St. Edmund)
„Venta“
Toponyms?

6. (Whitchurch)
„Mediolanum“
Toponyms?

7. (Lincoln)
„Lindum“
Toponyms?

8. Transcription? OCR?
Remains a huge challenge.
We envision a semi-automatic process in which a
human expert is assisted in “annotation grunt work”

9. Goal:
detect toponyms on old maps
with open source tools.

10. Approach:
determine location, extent and orientation
using image processing and
connected component analysis

11. 3 Step Process:
Background/Foreground Separation
Feature Detection
Feature Linking

12. Step 1: Background/Foreground
Note: our steps still include manual tuning/intervention.

13. Step 2: Feature Detection

14. Step 3: Feature Linking

16. Some preliminary results:

17. Experiment #1
Ptolemaic Map of the British Isles, ca. 1480
© The British Library Board. Harley MS 7182 ff.. 60v-61.

18. Experiment #2
Josephinische Landesaufnahme: Gebiet von Moos-
kirchen bis Grazer Feld, Österreich, 1764-1787.

19. Experiment #3
Salvator Oliva, Mediterranean.
Portolan Atlas, Marseilles,
1619.
• 333 toponyms counted
• 532 detections
• ~50% recall
• ~31% precision

20. http://rsimon.github.com/toponym_identification
Full-resolution views at

21. Future work – Pelagios 3:
• Provide an index of toponyms in early
geospatial documents
• Create assistive annotation tools to enhance
the index
• Develop an “analysis workbench” to conduct
visual & statistical comparions between
different collections and documents

22. Thank you for your attention
http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk
rainer.simon@ait.ac.at
@aboutgeo