Old Maps Online: Blog

The British Library: Georeferencer Pilot

2012-02-15T02:44:00.000-08:00

The British Library announced a pilot project where general public is asked to help to georeference some of the treasures of British mapping. With the help of the online visitors the maps are for the first time overlayed on top of 3D terrain in Google Earth.
The scanned maps become also searchable by their geographic location, because the metadata in a library catalog are enriched with the numerical coordinates (formatted as MARC 034 or DCMI Box) - after review by librarians.

Would you like to try this tool and help British Library to georeference some of the maps? The process is very simple and documented in this video:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://maps.bl.uk/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/249/876/249876226_200.jpg" border=0 alt="The British Library: Georeferencer Pilot"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

You can get assigned a random map by clicking on a button "Fix the location of a map" displayed at http://maps.bl.uk/ or you can choose a map of your own preference in the BL Online Gallery.

After one day almost 300 maps were georeferenced by the volunteers! It seems to be a successful example of crowdsourcing in libraries.

The pilot is powered by the Georeferencer technology, which can be easily applied on the online maps in other libraries and archives too.

The British Library is a partner in our project, and therefore these maps will be in a near future added to the OldMapsOnline.org federated map search engine allowing search by location and time.

Progress towards Old Maps Online launch - 2

2012-02-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

The past two weeks has seen work continue on testing the functionality of the MapRank Search software on the new server.We've also been working on supporting documentation for the launch. We have been discussing press releases with the marketing people and creating draft versions of our Terms of Use and Frequently Asked Questions to help site users once we go live. The design of the launch flyers was completed and these have returned from the printers, we are sending them out for conference delegate packs as I type.

We have now started to advertise all the events where we will launch/present the website. For ease of reference a synopsis of these is given below. Please see the relevant blog posting/event website for more details about individual events.

25/02/2012 New York, USA: Workshop "Working Digitally with Historical Maps"
29/02/2012 London, UK: The Gerald Alymer Seminar "Locating the Past"
21/03/2012 London, UK: Meeting "UK Archives Discovery Forum"
11-14/04/2012 Glasgow, UK: European Social Science History Conference
17-18/04/2012 Barcelona, Spain: LIBER Conference "Map libraries in a changing world"
19-20/04/2012 Barcelona, Spain: ICA Workshop "Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage"
2-4/05/2012 Ávila, Spain: ESF Workshop "Conceptualising European Landscapes across languages, cultures and Disciplines"
27-30/06/2012 Albuquerque, USA: World History Association Conference "Frontiers and Borders in World History"
16-22/07/2012 Hamburg, Germany: Digitial Humanities 2012 Conference

Workshop: Working Digitally with Historical Maps (New York Public Library, Feb 25th)

2012-02-09T02:18:00.000-08:00

This one day workshop includes the launch of our new Old Maps Online web site. It forms part of the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, but is being held in the South Court Auditorium of the Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Libraries — the building in Bryant Park most people think of as the New York Public Library. Attendees are not required to have conference badges, so if you happen to be near New York on the 25th …

WORKING DIGITALLY
WITH HISTORICAL MAPS

(1) BUILDING RICH RESOURCES (10:00 am – 11:40 am)

Max Edelson (Virginia): The “New Map of Empire” Project: Enhancing Cartography Scholarship with Dynamic Online Collections
Joseph Hurley (Georgia State): Visualizing Neighborhood Change: The Georgia State University Library Digital Map Collection, “Planning Atlanta: A New City in the Making, 1950s – 1980s”
Michael Page (Emory): Modeling the History of the City using Library Resources
Marcel A Fortin (Toronto) The Don Valley Historical Mapping Project
John Cloud (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration): Starting from Hassler’s Primary Triangle: The survey of the coast in “New York Bay and Harbor and the Environs” as the foundation for geo-spatial data for North America

(2) ENABLING ACCESS (12.40 – 2.20 pm)

Julie Sweetkind-Singer (Stanford): Digital Philanthropy: Increasing Access through Donor Collaboration
Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library): Open Historical Map
Bonnie Burns (Harvard) OpenGeoportal: A Collaborative Geographic Search Tool
Meredith Westington/Keith Bridge (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration): The Value of a Bounding Box: Moving Historical Charts beyond the Image Browser
Gregory J Allord (US Geological Survey): USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection: Converting and Integrating lithographic maps into The National Map

(3) EXTRACTING AND DEFINING FEATURES (2.40 – 4.20 pm)

James Burt (US Geological Survey): Efficient Geo-referencing of Small-scale Scanned Map Images
Richard Marciano (North Carolina): Connecting People, Past, and Place: exploring semi-automated extraction of text and polygons from common historic sources
Andrea White (University of New Orleans) Creating an Archaeological Sensitivity Model for New Orleans using Historic Maps and Historical GIS
Anne Leonard (New York City College of Technology) Using old maps and new methods to discover the early chemical and petroleum industries of Newtown Creek
Stuart Macdonald (University of Edinburgh) Addressing History – Crowdsourcing the Past

(4) DIGITAL GAZETTEERS (4.40 – 5.40 pm)

Merrick Berman (Harvard) Historical Gazetteer Development and Integration: CHGIS, Regnum Francorum, and GeoNames
Raj Singh (Open Geospatial Consortium) Establishing a Global Data Sharing Framework for Place Names
Ashley Holt (National Geospatial intelligence Agency) Gazetteer representation of place name usage

(5) KEYNOTE: FINDING AND REFERENCING OLD MAPS ONLINE (6 – 7 pm)

This joint presentation will demonstrate and launch a new global search portal for digitised historical maps: Old Maps Online

Presenters:
David Rumsey (Cartography Associates)
Humphrey Southall (Univ of Portsmouth – Great Britain Historical GIS)
Petr Pridal (Klokan Technologies)

Note that the New York Public Library building closes at 6pm. Those wishing to attend this session must arrive by 5:45pm to be admitted to the building. The keynote is followed by a reception for the speakers at the workshop and other invited guests.
Session Organizers:
Humphrey Southall (GB Historical GIS, University of Portsmouth)
Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library)
Lex Berman (Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University)

Sponsors:
New York Public Library
Cartography Associates
Old Maps Online

UK Archives Discovery Forum Meeting (21st March 2012)

2012-02-02T03:03:00.000-08:00

The National Archives will host a day for the United Kingdom Archives Discovery (UKAD) Forum in March again this year. This network is a collaborative group of archives and other information professionals who work towards opening up data in order to promote the use of archives through the sharing of ideas about online access to archives and their data.

At last year’s meeting Humphrey Southall presented about A Vision of Britain through Time. This year will see a presentation and demonstration of the new Old Maps Online website being launched on 29th February. There will also be a presentation by another member of the steering group for Old Maps Online, Kimberly Kowal of the British Library, who will speak about their map crowd-sourcing project.

Attendance is free but places are limited, see their website for details on how to book a place.

Progress towards Old Maps Online launch - 1

2012-01-27T04:32:00.000-08:00

To keep you up-to-date in the lead up to the launch of the new Old Maps Online portal at the end of February 2012 we will produce a series of mini progress reports on project activities.

This week we have applied the new design to the project website and this blog - we hope you like the new colour scheme. The first publicity flyer is nearly drafted and we have also implemented the MapRank Search software on our new server to do some functionality testing without various presentation features.

Free One Day Conference: Locating the Past (London, 29th Feb 2012)

2012-01-17T02:16:00.000-08:00

The UK launch of the new "Old Maps Online" web site will occur during this year's Gerald Aylmer Seminar, sponsored by the UK National Archives, the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research. This year the seminar is specifically focused on historical GIS and the event will also include an introduction to the field of historical GIS by Dr Humphrey Southall, Project Director of the currently funded JISC Old Maps Online project, who has been part of the seminar organising committee.

It is being held at the Chancellors' Hall, University of London Senate House, on Wednesday 29th February.
ATTENDANCE IS FREE BUT NUMBERS ARE LIMITED so please contact Ruth Roberts at the National Archives for an invitation.

PROGRAMME:

9:30am 9:50am: Coffee and registration

9:50am 10:00am: Welcome by Colin Jones (Royal Historical Society)

10:00am 10:30am: Introduction by Humphrey Southall (GBH GIS/Portsmouth), providing an overview of the field.

10:30am 11:45pm: Panel 1: SOURCES:
Three 15 minute presentations reviewing some of the sources available in developing historical geographic information systems, followed by an open discussion:

Kimberley Kowal (British Library)
Dominic Fontana (Portsmouth University)
Andrew Hudson-Smith (CASA/UCL, Tales of Things: Electronic Memory project)

11:45am 12:00pm: New approaches and technologies at The National Archives by David Thomas

12:00pm 12:45pm: LUNCH

12:45pm 2:00pm: Panel 2: APPLICATIONS/RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Three 15 minute presentations considering relevant research questions and applications, followed by an open discussion:

Ian Gregory (Liverpool University)
Richard Coates (University of the West of England)
Nigel Walford (Kingston University).

2:00pm 3:15pm: Panel 3: AUDIENCES AND ENGAGEMENT:
Three 15 minute presentations on achieving wider public impact, followed by an open discussion:

Caroline Kimbell (The National Archives)
Bruce Gittings (Edinburgh University)
Nick Stanhope (HistoryPin).

3:15pm 3:45pm: TEA BREAK

3:45pm 4:45pm: Keynote speech: Place and the politics of the past by Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire)

4:45pm 5:00pm: Closing comments

Remember, attendance is free but numbers are limited so you MUST contact the National Archives for an invitation.

More about Chancellors Hall

New ‘Old Maps Online’ project funded

2011-11-28T03:14:00.000-08:00

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have awarded a grant of £139,900 as part of their JISC Content Programme for 2011-13 for a new project called Old Maps Online: Finding and referencing historical mapping as a platform for research and teaching, which runs for fifteen months from November 2011.

Working together the GB Historical GIS project team, based at the University of Portsmouth, and Klokan Technologies GmbH will be creating a separate open access web site enabling users to search for online maps across many different digital libraries, based not on the titles of maps or who drew them, but on the places the user is interested in. We will not be starting from scratch, but rather beginning with the MapRank Search interface already developed for the David Rumsey Collection in the US by Klokan Technologies GmbH and developing from there.

To be included in the portal, old maps need to be:

Already scanned
Geo-referenced: we must at least know the approximate real world coordinates of the corners
Freely, directly and fairly reliably accessible on-line, on the web site of whatever library holds them

So long as these conditions are met, the portal will list maps covering the area the user is interested in, providing hyperlinks which lead directly to online views of the actual maps.

Our application was supported by the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and of Wales in the UK; and by the David Rumsey Collection, the Harvard Geospatial Library and the New York Public Library in the US. Because the project is based on existing software, we will be launching the first version of the portal at historic map-focused one-day meetings in New York and London in February 2012.

That first version will probably be limited to the Rumsey Collection, the National Library of Scotland and the Vision of Britain map collection, but during the rest of the project we will add access to our other partner libraries, and hopefully recruit additional partners. Our funding is about improving access to existing digital content, so we cannot help map libraries scan their collections, but we may be able to assist with geo-referencing, and advise on software for making map images viewable on the web. Note that the latter software does not need to have any geo-spatial capabilities, as those will be provided by the portal.

Another major component of the project is about making historical maps not just easier to find online but easier to cite, defining persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers.

We are one of 7 funded projects under Strand C of the JISC Content Call, on Clustering Content. For more information about the funding programme please see the relevant page on the JISC website.

NLS Maps API: historical map of Great Britain for mashups

2010-05-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

With the help of the software developed in our project OldMapsOnline.org has prepared a very interesting historical mapping application, allowing anyone to include selected historical geo-referenced maps of Great Britain in their own websites. Sets of Ordnance Survey mapping relating to Scotland, England and Wales, dating from the 1920s to 1940s, have been seamed together and geo-referenced, then specially prepared for use in external websites.

NLS Maps API: Historical maps of Great Britain for use in mashups

For more information, please view http://geo.nls.uk/maps/api/

The maps have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, allowing free use and adaptation of the mapping, provided it is properly attributed. The maps were scanned and geo-referenced by the National Library of Scotland, and rendered on the Amazon EC2 computer
cluster by Klokan Technologies GmbH, with a software based on a customised version of the MapTiler application.

The maps can be used for many purposes - they can be integrated with other mapping, used for research purposes, used as a backdrop for bespoke markers or mapping data, or used to create other maps (such as OpenStreetMap). The application will also run on many mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad or Google Android based phones - simply by opening the website http://nls.tileserver.com/.

The historical map API homepage provides simple instructions for how to embed the mapping in websites, and use it with the most popular free web-mapping services, including Google, Bing, and Openlayers.

OldMapsOnline.org project will include this map as one of the reference maps in our Georeferencer.org online service.

More info at http://geo.nls.uk/maps/api/

Meet us at the ICA CartoHeritage Workshop in Vienna!

2010-01-18T05:57:00.000-08:00

The ICA Commission on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage and Vienna University of Technology are organising the 5th International Workshop on Digital Approaches in Cartographic Heritage in Vienna on February 22–24, 2010.

We will give a talk OldMapsOnline.org: IIPImage, JPEG2000 and Georeferencer.org during this workshop.

Please follow direct link to the registration form if you are interested to participate.

We look forward to discuss our project and related topics with the attendees of this workshop!

IIPImage JPEG2000: Free Software for Zoomable High Resolution Online Images!

2010-01-13T05:47:00.001-08:00

Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project are proud to announce the release of a new version of the open-source IIPImage server software (http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/).

The freely available IIPImage software can be used for stunning online presentations of scanned documents, paintings, maps, books, newspapers, photographs or other high-resolution images on the web directly from JPEG2000 or TIFF files.

The new version allows direct publishing from JPEG2000 images to a wide variety of different client technologies based on AJAX, Adobe Flash or Silverlight. These include popular pan&zoom viewers based on Zoomify or Seadragon technology (including the Seadragon AJAX viewer and the Seadragon iPhone application) as well as it's own AJAX enabled IIPMooViewer. The documents provided by IIPImage can be displayed in any web browser and on a number of platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux or iPhone.

The software is primarily targeted at institutions who operate their own server connected to the Internet and who want to publish large collections of digital images directly from JPEG2000 or
TIFF files.

Institutions who does not have the necessary infrastructure can follow our alternative tutorial at http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/ on how to achieve the same using standard web hosting and free software.

IIPImage is a light-weight client-server system for fast and efficient online viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be bandwidth and memory efficient and usable over a slow Internet connection even on gigapixel sized images.
It is available for free, under an open source license (GNU GPL). We recommend installing
the software on a Linux (or other UNIX) server. We have prepared an easy to install binary package for Debian and Ubuntu with step-by-step instructions for installation.

JPEG2000 support has been implemented using the Kakadu library, which provides one of the fastest implementations of the JPEG2000 ISO standard and is redistributable for non-commercial use.

The enhancement of IIPImage was developed by the Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project with the support of grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

The Moravian Library (http://www.mzk.cz/), based in Brno, Czech Republic, is a research institution and a legal deposit library. Project OldMapsOnline.org (http://www.oldmapsonline.org/) is a research project of the Moravian Library that aims to develop software to assist in the management, manipulation and visualisation of historical map collections on the web. The project team is designing online tools for publishing, collaborative georeferencing, annotation, 3D visualisation, accuracy analysis and geometadata specification for old maps.

For more information and for the IIPImage JPEG2000 software, see http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/.

Workshop in Scotland (BCS Map Curators' Group)

2009-10-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

OldMapsOnline.org workflow was presented during a Workshop organized by The Map Curators' Group of the British Cartographic Society.
The title of the workshop was "From paper to screen: Putting maps on the web".

Details about this workshop are available online at the BCS website, including a programme with several interesting presentations related to the subject.

The morning session of the second day of the workshop was devoted to a practical demonstration where Christopher Fleet (National Library of Scotland) and Klokan Petr Pridal (Moravian Library Brno, OldMapsOnline.org) used Bartholomew 1912 map of Edinburgh to present a complete old map processing workflow starting from scanning, over online publishing and georeferencing, to the visualization on the web by overlaying of Google Maps and Google Earth.

Here are the slides from the workshop:

From paper to screen: Putting maps on the web

The online map presentations created during the workshop:

Zoomify presentation of the scan of the paper map.
Google Maps overlay generated by MapTiler from the georeferenced image.
OpenLayers viewer generated by MapTiler from the georeferenced image.

You can also download the original files for this map and try the suggested workflow yourself:

The file as it was produced by the scanner: 74400474.tif (!!! big: 200+ MBytes - use right click and "Save as")
The georeferenced image: 74400474-geo.tif (!!! big: 200+ MBytes - use right click and "Save as")

A step by step tutorial for publishing with Zoomify and MapTiler is available on on our website:
http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/

Poster at ICHC 2009

2009-07-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

ICHC 2009 - International Conference on the History of Cartography was this year in Copenhagen, Denmark - July 12th - 17th.

Historians and librarians, map curators and people from all around the world who knows each other from discussions at the maphist@, who works at the The History of Cartography Project and who are behind the collections and activities linked from the website http://www.maphistory.info/ had a chance to meet there face to face.

I presented at this conference a poster (PDF) describing our software tools and workflow we are working on, with screenshots of the latest prototypes.
I also made a short demo at the ISCEM meeting (International Society of the Curators of the Early Maps).

This was the first public presentation of the online tools, which are under heavy development now. I also made a report about the development of the open-source image server for JPEG2000 files based on IIPImage, which we are going to publish soon.

ELAG: Workflow for old maps in libraries

2009-06-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

At the European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conference we discussed the comprehensive workflow which we recommend for rare maps publishing in libraries.
The final summarizing presentation is attached to this blog post.

OldMapsOnline.org: ELAG 2009 Workshop Report

Detailed notes and links to software tools and online prototypes are available at our support website: http://help.oldmapsonline.org/.

MapTiler: Desktop application for map online publishing from GIS tools

2009-05-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

We actively contributed to the development of the MapTiler application, which is an excellent tool for fast and easy to use publishing of any existing raster maps, which are already georeferenced with GIS tools.
MapTiler runs under Windows, MacOSX and Linux. It is a desktop application which loads your existing geodata in formats such as GeoTIFF, JPEG2000 (GeoJP2), ECW, MrSID, HFA, BSB etc. It then generates tiles which are compatible with Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Live (Bing) etc. Resulting maps based on your geodata can overlay these base maps and online visitors can compare them by changing the transparency in the webviewer supplied as part of the output.

To publish your maps you don't need to setup anything special on your webserver, just copy the automatically generated files (JPEG tiles and HTML based webviewers). The form of the publishing is similar to Zoomify tiles, but your georeferenced maps are correctly transformed from the original coordinate system into a Mercator projection used in popular web applications.

We presented the MapTiler application at the ICA Fourth International Workshop: Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage in Venice, Italy 6 – 7 April 2009

More info at http://www.maptiler.org/.

In case you are not using any GIS tools in your library yet you probably should not process the maps with MapTiler. We are working on online tools which would allow you to georeference your maps and generate map overlays a la MapTiler from your scans using only a web browser.

On the other hand, if you already use GIS application for georeferencing, then MapTiler is very practical tool for quick and easy publishing your old map on the Internet. Some old maps were published with MapTiler in the National Library of Scotland or in Spain in Malgrat de Mar city council as well as in Czech Republic in Olomouc (Olomouc Bastion 1842, Bohemia and Moravia from 1910).

Meet us at ELAG 2009!

2008-12-20T07:24:00.000-08:00

We have proposed to organize a workshop as a part of the ELAG 2009: New Tools of the Trade conference, which will be held on 22-24 April 2009 in Bratislava, Slovakia. We have just been informed that our proposal has been accepted by the programme committee.

The emphasis of the ELAG conference is on new developments and practical experience with library technology, but workshops make ELAG different from most conferences. They are taking place during the first two days in between plenary sessions while on the last day, each workshop will present its results in a plenary meeting.

We look forward to see you and to discuss our project and related topics!

Mashups and tiles a la Google Maps

2008-11-27T02:33:00.000-08:00

Old maps publishing is an important part of the workflow which is being developed by our project. We would like to simplify this process as much as possible and that is why OldMapsOnline.org supported the development of the MapTiler application, which is in early beta now.

Once you have a georeference for your maps, MapTiler can greatly simplify the rest of the publishing process. It is as easy to use as Zoomify: it generates tiles from your maps and you just place those tiles on your web server in the same way you did with Zoomify tiles.

The main difference is that MapTiler can produce tiles which are compatible with Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps and also with Google Earth for 3D presentation. You can use such tiles to overlay the satellite imagery in mashups, combine them together and create new map applications.

A simple presentation similar to Grand Canyon USGS raster map example is generated by the MapTiler automatically.

But you can go further. You can put on the map some placemarks, add search functionality, overlay other data or different raster maps etc. just by playing with the template and modify a bit the JavaScript code.

If you plan to create such mashups with map tiles you should read the Google Maps API documentation or alternatively you can use OpenLayers open-source project if you don't want to depend on a commercial company like Google.

We have just released a new online tool which could be an excellent starting point for people who are interested in publishing raster maps as tiles and are already familiar a bit with Google Maps API. This tool can help you to understand how the tiling using Spherical Mercator works in Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, OpenStreeMap and other services. It shows you how the tiles are referenced and how they are stitched together in the web browser. It is part of MapTiler documentation.

It also contains all the math you might need to overlay your own geodata from external sources be it tiles pre-generated by Maptiler/GDAL2Tiles, MSR MapCruncher, tiles generated dynamically by WMS servers and cached by TileCache etc.

The online tool visualizing the tiles is available here:

Tiles à la Google Maps: Coordinates, Tile Bounds and Projection

BTW Some old maps were published with the beta version of the MapTiler/GDAL2Tiles already. Have a look at Historical Map Overlays from National Library of Scotland: http://geo.nls.uk/maps/.

MapAnalyst Online: Accuracy of old maps

2008-10-27T02:32:00.000-07:00

MapAnalyst is a software for the accurate analysis of old maps. Its main purpose is to compute distortion grids and other types of visualizations that illustrate the geometrical accuracy and distortion of historical maps.

The software uses pairs of control points on an old map and on a new reference map. The control points are used to construct distortion grids, vectors of displacement, accuracy circles, and isolines of local scale and rotation. As a by-product, MapAnalyst also computes the old map's scale, rotation and statistical indicators.

More info at http://mapanalyst.cartography.ch/

Bernhard Jenny from ETH Zurich, author of this tool, is working with us on an online interface for the generation of the accuracy visualizations. Our online georeference tool will give excellent base for this functionality, because we will have there already a database of Ground Contol Points, which we use to reference the maps and to generate metadata. We would like to use those GCPs also to generate visualizations a la MapAnalyst directly from the webbrowser.

Right now we just have simple prototypes and a lot of work in front of us. But in the end, as soon as you specify the control points for your map, you will be able to get a visualization similar to the one you see in this blog post just by one click of a mouse. The visualization will appear directly over the web presentation of your map. There will also be a possibility to download a high quality print-ready version (probably in SVG format).

The prototypes of the accuracy analysis online visualization of an old map of Switzerland:
MapAnalyst Online: Raster Demo

We will be using GeoJSON vector format like in this prototype to display the visualization:
MapAnalyst Online: Vector Demo

MapAnalyst is an open-source project so the online version is going to be available as an open-source as well. We will post progress reports on this blog.

Article: Tiles as an approach to on-line publishing of scanned old maps, vedute and other historical documents

2008-09-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

An article describing open-source tools for publishing scanned old maps and also prototypes and planned tools of our grant was published in the latest issue of e-Perimetron - the international quarterly e-journal on sciences and technologies affined to history of cartography and maps.

Summary of the article:

This paper describes a complete process of publishing of historical maps using a collection of freely available open-source tools. Special attention is being paid to the tiling approach for online map publishing to achieve compatibility with mapping web applications like Google Maps or Google Earth. Format and cartographic projection of the tiles used in such systems is described together with software projects which can be used to produce them.

The article also proposes an alternate simplified workflow for scanned old maps publishing. It is targeted on libraries and other memory institutions which are digitizing historical documents but do not have the resources for their correct geo-referencing. The web-based tools necessary for this workflow are now in the development through the OldMapsOnline.org project (http://www.oldmapsonline.org/).

Citation:

Pridal, P; Zabicka, P. (2008). 'Tiles as an approach to on-line publishing of scanned old maps, vedute and other historical documents'. e-Perimetron Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 10-21:
http://www.e-perimetron.org/Vol_3_1/Pridal_Zabicka.pdf

Old Maps Search Interface - ideas and existing projects

2008-08-27T02:00:00.000-07:00

How should the search interface produced by our project look like ?

Let's have a look first at existing implementations of such search...

One of the best map search interfaces is now definitively the Google Maps interface. Clean, straightforward, user-friendly and not over-complicated. This will surely be the first inspiration for our work.

But we need more than a text search, in fact we need "Where, When, What and Who" search approach analogous to Electronic Culture Atlas Initiative (ECAI):

Other inspiring interfaces were developed by Alexandria Digital Library (look at their WebClient) and by DigMap.eu (look at their Portal) and other related projects.

Some time a go we used (open source) TimeMap.net system for similar kind of search on a small collection in the Moravian Library in Brno (you can search subset of Old Map and Manuscript collection on the map and filter results by time and fulltext query at http://timemap.mzk.cz/).

Unfortunately the TimeMap project is not able to handle any larger number of documents as all the data are loaded into a client-side based Java Applet.

Therefore, we are looking for usable building blocks for a new search interface, which should be strictly web-based (JavaScript, AJAX) and which will allow us to use powerful spatial search algorithms on the server side (we will write about them later).

For a map query window we would like use maps data published by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or OpenStreetMap. That should be relatively easy as all of these are supported by an open-source OpenLayers project.

Second component of the search interface is a web-based timeline widget, similar to the one implemented in Google Labs Experimental Timeline View:

We did a research into projects implementing Timeline for selecting a time range or date range and summarized the result list on our Wiki.

If the publishing format of digitized maps and an existing georeference data allow us to overlay maps we will implement an interface similar to MapSynthesizer - a scalable prototype user interface for browsing, searching, and information discovery. MapSynthesizer has been developed by Microsoft Research and published online as open-source. Unfortunately, its source code is almost unusable and we would like to base this kind of interface on OpenLayers anyway, rather than on one specific map API (Virtual Earth in this case).

Anyway, you can have a look at this really nice vision of a future user interface for online map libraries:

More info about MapSynthesizer including source code, live prototype (IE only) and a PDF article about this project is available online.

In case you have anything to say about your expectations from search interface, or feel that some project is missing on the linked lists... don't hesitate and write a comment to this blog post!

Georeferencing Images by Control Points: TransGen and gcps2wld utility

2008-07-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

We have just released TransGen, a utility based on GeoTools/Java. It allows you to generate a best fitting affine transformation from the set of control points.

The set of control points can be generated for example by our online tool prototype and has a simple text format: "latitude longitude pixelx pixely" per line. A sample of file with GCPS points and related JPG image derived from Natural Earth II is available in our code repository.

The utility generates a World File, which represents the best fitting transformation for given set of ground control points (GCPs) in a format that can be used by virtually any GIS system.

The process of image registration is done by an algorithm, which allows you to restrict some of the standard operations. By default all the six affine operations are applied (translate x, translate y, scale x, scale y, rotate, skew).

But you can set constant value for some of the operations, thus for example eliminating the skew/shear (this is what you need for generation of KML for Google Earth which only supports affine5) or rotation (when you know that the map has north orientation already). There is also a possibility to compute the best similarity transformation.

You can download the command line utility implementing this algorithms:

TransGen.exe (for MS Windows)
TransGen.jar (Mac, Linux, ...). Run as: "java -jar TransGen.jar"

TransGen source code is available in our code repository. The programming and design of the algorithm was done by Jan Jezek and was funded from our grant. The main functionality is now available as part of Java GeoTools package, and therefore available to the community as well as to other programmers.

We are going to embed the algorithms from this tool in the user friendly web-based tool we plan to develop to produce georeference for scanned maps. We have converted this utility to the Python programming language for production use (gcps2wld.py), where we used Affine6 and Affine5 implementation from excellent open-source MapAnalyst application.

Note:
GeoTools.org is being used by OpenSource projects like GeoServer or uDig. Plenty of websites and information systems are profiting from the functionality provided by this library. For example Great Britain Historical GIS Project is utilizing it for development of its http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/ website)

Introduction of OldMapsOnline.org

2008-07-15T04:29:00.000-07:00

The presentation of our project, together with a demo of prototype tools is the fastest way for anybody to see what we are working on.

If you have 15 minutes you can have a look at the OldMapsOnline.org related part of the presentation "Tiles as an approach to on-line publishing of scanned old maps, vedute and other historical documents" (SlideShow) from 3rd International Workshop on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain 26 - 27 June 2008 organized by the ICA Commission on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage and the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya.

Link to the video playback.

Image Server IIPImage now supports Zoomify

2008-06-23T01:05:00.001-07:00

Zoomify tiles are very popular for publishing old maps and other historical documents - it is the easiest way of publishing of large scanned images on the web. Also, the free Flash based Zoomify Viewer looks very nice. Zoomify works with directory structure which contains image tiles and accompanying XML. You can just upload it all to a server and you have your image online. Zoomify tiles are going to be supported in all our tools for georeferencing and searching of old maps.

Now you can also use the freely available image server IIPImage to deliver tiles from your TIFF files on demand, but still use the same viewer. This way the data from your digital repository can be used both for long-term digital preservation and also for online publishing.

IIPImage support for JPEG2000 format as the source raster image is scheduled for the next year by our grant.

IIPImage is quite easy to setup on your server which runs UNIX or Windows (now Microsoft IIS is supported too).

The default Zoomify viewer with tiles generated by IIPImage:

Fullscreen version of the same viewer

Behaviour for the user is practically identical to the images served from small static files from the disk. IIPImage has support for cashing and is already a mature project, used for example in labs of Louvre in Paris.

Your image is at the same time available also by an IIP protocol, therefore you can also use the native clients supporting this protocol. One of the best such viewers is a very nice AJAX based IIPMooViewer.

Development of Zoomify extension was done with our funding by Ruven Pillay, maintainer and developer of the IIPImage. Source code is now available in IIPImage SVN at SourceForge. It is going to appear in next stable version.

Note: a project j2ktilerenderer is also generating Zoomify tiles - from JPEG2000.

OpenLayers support for Zoomify - first version

2008-06-12T01:37:00.000-07:00

OpenLayers is an open-source JavaScript based mapping client a la Google Maps.

OpenLayers can display several map sources, like maps from Google Maps, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Maps as well as from any WMS compatible map server. Therefore you can combine maps from different sources, you can even create and modify vector features or sketch on top of the maps - just like when you create your own maps in Google My Maps.

We have extended OpenLayers project with functionality needed to display Zoomify tiles (source code of this patch is here).

Simple example displaying Zoomify tiles in OpenLayers is in our code repository:

http://oldmapsonline.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/openlayers/examples/zoomify.html

(we will improve this patch - it's loading is very slow for now as OpenLayers is not merged into one file and it is not compressed)

This is the core functionality of our planned georeference tool (GUI prototype), which will allow anyone to generate georeference metadata for already published maps: especially those published as zoomify tiles, TMS Tiles or through a WMS standard from a MapServer.

OldMapsOnline Project Started

2008-05-30T00:13:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce a start of the OldMapsOnline project! We aim to devolop freely available/open source tool chain and methodology which will allow anyone (namely libraries, archives and museums) to publish scanned old maps in both GIS and user friendly, standards based way.

The system will:

provide online georeferencing tool and online rectifier for large digitised maps which will generate geo-metadata for cataloguing the maps, search purposes as well as presentation and overlay of maps
suggest or develop software tools useful for publishing huge collections of scanned old maps
facilitate search for digitised maps and graphics linked to a certain geographic location
provide user friendly search interface using geographic and temporal information (marking an area on a map, timeline, map ranking)
be available in English and Czech and it will be possible to translate it into other languages.

We also plan to contribute to existing open source projects such as OpenLayers, MapServer, GDAL and IIPImage.

The four-year project (2008-2011) is backed by the Moravian Library in Brno with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic as a R&D project# DC08P02OUK006.

Have a look at online video from presentation of prototypes of our tools to get more information.