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1. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Old Maps Online:
Enabling global access
to historical mapping
Humphrey Southall and Petr Přidal
(University of Portsmouth
and Klokan Technologies GmbH)
2. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Funded via JISC:
• Joint Information Systems Committee
– Of Higher Education Funding Councils for
England, Scotland and Wales, plus Department
for Education of Northern Ireland
• Digital Content Programme 2011-1 3 has three strands:
A.Digitisation and Open Educ. Resources
B.Mass Digitisation
C.Clustering Digital Content (HEFCE-only):
• ENGrich: visual teaching and learning resources in engineering (Liverp’l)
• Integrated Broadside Ballads Archive (Oxford)
• Linking Parliamentary Records through Metadata (Kings Coll London)
• Manuscripts Online: Written Culture from 1000 to 1500 (Sheffield)
• Old Maps Online (Portsmouth)
• Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum (Royal Veterinary College)
• Stepping into Time: WWII bombing maps (Portsmouth)
19th April 2012 2
3. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
About the Old Maps Online Project
• 15 months, Nov 2011-Jan 2013
KLOKAN TECHNOLOGIES - Museo 300
• Four partners:
KLOKAN TECHNOLOGIES - Museo 500
– University of Portsmouth
KLOKAN TECHNOLOGIES - Museo 700
– Klokan Technologies GmbH
– British Library
– National Library of Scotland
• Main deliverables:
– Building global search portal for geo-referenced maps
– Helping UK map libraries geo-reference existing scans
– Developing best practices for referencing maps
• Discussed at LIBER but not today
19th April 2012 3
4. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
About the Old Maps Online Portal
• Based on close partnership:
• University of Portsmouth
– Run OMO server -- basic hosting funded until 2018
– Control publication rights for metadata
• i.e. libraries license metadata to UK not-for-profit
– Assemble metadata (except first version!)
• Klokan Technologies Gmbh
– Develop software and free license to Portsmouth until 2018
– Own oldmapsoline.org domain
• UoP own oldmapsonline.org.uk but this is not promoted
– Set certain limitations to use of software
• Impossible to narrow search by collection
• Maps in portal must be open access: no payment or passwords
– Payments for downloads and other value added services OK
19th April 2012 4
6. Project goals
The gateway to high-resolution online
maps in libraries around the world
Intuitive search by location
Indexing maps from several institutions
One click to view the zoomable map
Free to access and open for contributions
Audience: general public, genealogists,
historians, researchers, experts
7. How? We want to...
Bring online visitors to the websites of
participating institutions to view the maps
Promote the map libraries and their content
Do proper crediting: logo and links back
Store only minimal metadata & thumbnails
Make it easier to discover the scanned maps
Boost the number of online visits of maps
Allow users to find maps from “deep web”
10. Funding
Project actively developed with the support
from JISC (UK) until January 2013
Basic maintenance covered until 2018
Google Ads to help cover the hosting costs
Participation on a future research projects
for improvements of the technology and
optimizations of the map management
11. Technology
Based on the MapRank Search technology
http://www.mapranksearch.com/
Released in 2010 by Klokan Technologies
for Swiss project Kartenportal.ch, improved
for Czech libraries and for David Rumsey
Applicable on other large metadata
catalogs + geospatial repositories.
Details in the article published in D-Lib:
doi:10.1045/september2011-oehrli
12. We need your help...
Use the system & submit ideas for
improvement and report bugs
Share: blog, twitter, facebook, google+
We are calling for institutions who would
like to include their maps. It is for free.
Institutions retain all the rights.
Submission of maps from individuals at
later point (technically more problematic)
13. Requirements for inclusion
High resolution (300dpi+ or 2 Megapixel+)
maps with a zoomable viewer online
Permanent URL with direct access - no
password or payment required
Metadata with DublinCore elements
supplied in a spreadsheet (XLS). Later OAI-
PMH harvesting.
Bounding box (MARC 034, DCMI BOX, ...)
http://project.oldmapsonline.org/contribute
16. BoundingBox Tool
BoundingBox Tool: Cataloguing while
holding the physical maps - manual
selection of an area
(used by Swiss libraries, David Rumsey, ...)
Geoparser: Semi-automatic rapid process -
with suggestion of the area by analyzing
existing textual metadata.
18. Georeferencer Tool
Turns the scanned maps into geodata/GIS
Supports true collaborative editing in a
web browser
3D visualization (GE) + analysis + overlays
Uses volunteers for metadata enrichment
Successful pilots in several institutions
19.
20.
21. Georeferencer
Support for crowdsourcing:
Motivation, competition, rewarding, progress
indicators, graphs - live widgets to include in
the websites of the library
Runs as a service, no new software in-house
The scans are displayed from the original
institution repository or websites*
Integration with the image gallery
* (Zoomify, MrSID, Djatoka, IIPImage JPEG2000, ContentDM, DigiTool, Luna, etc.)
22. Georeferencer
Target: open platform for personal online
research with maps
Development started and continues in
collaboration with R&D department of
Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic
Shared development costs with all
participating institutions
Future: Annotations (LinkedData), detection
of duplicates, support of map series, etc.
