Archives of historical photographs have a great potential for "geo-or spatial sciences", for they can provide highly relevant visual data on historical landscapes, populated places and settlement structures, including those now destroyed. Processing of these archives represents many challenges, among them the application of geoinformatic concepts and information technologies. The article presents the example of geo-referencing, crowdsourcing, and other computer-based technologies applied to the archival photographs of today-destroyed sites on the Czech -Bavarian border, where many villages, farm sites and monuments were destroyed in the 1950s or abandoned as a consequence of post-WWII development. In the situation of dramatically changing landscape and land use, historical photographs are an important source of documentation for both research and virtual reconstruction of disappeared places, landscape, and society.

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Current metadata concepts insufficiently represent geospatial information. This is an obstacle for retrieval techniques as well as for geospatial disciplines. Main point is, that established standards cannot handle uncertainty of geospatial information or are the source for uncertainty. We recommend a new concept to store and handle geo-information as metadata for historical photographs. The approach presented in this paper suggests how to source the necessary information and deal with uncertainty using Volunteered Geographic Information concepts. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software organization and properties → Information systems → Data management systems → Information systems applications → Digital libraries and archives • Applied computing → Document management and text processing → Document management → Document metadata