Developing and Disseminating a New Historical Geospatial Database from Kitchener’s 19th Century Map of Cyprus

Abstract

Extraction and dissemination of historical geospatial data from early maps are major goals of historical geographic information systems (HGISs) in the context of the spatial humanities. This paper illustrates the process of interpreting, georeferencing, organizing, and visualizing the content of a historical map of Cyprus in the context of GISs and highlights the development of a national-scale spatial database of the island in the 19th century. This method was applied to Lord Kitchener’s historical map of Cyprus (published in 1885), which is considered the product of the first scientific topographic survey of Cyprus, is rich in geographic information about the area, and covers the entire island at a scale of 1:63,360. Previous attempts to create historical geodatabases have either focused on small areas or, when conducted on a national scale, have been thematically focused. The positional accuracy of the map was found to be 1.08 mm in map units, which was equivalent to 68.76 m on the ground. Accordingly, the main categories of geographic content (land cover, administrative units, settlements, transportation/communication networks, stream networks/water bodies, points of interest, annotations) were digitized from the georeferenced historical map. The Web-based application developed in this study supported the visualization of the historical geographic content of the map and its comparison with modern basemaps. The creation of the geodatabase presented in the study provides a template for similar studies and a basis for further development of the historical geodatabase of Cyprus.

Geovisualization of Historical Geospatial Data: A Web Mapping Application for the 19th-Century Kaupert’s Maps of Attica

“…Similarly, the "Kitchener's survey of Cyprus 1878-1883" project documents and arranges information from Kitchener's historical map of Cyprus, making it easily accessible to users via a dedicated web application. The online application encourages the sharing and utilizing of this data by individuals interested in historical cartography and geography [22]. Both projects allow for basic and advanced searches, and the data are presented in a user-friendly format to appeal to a broad audience.…”

Long-Term Dynamics of Viticultural Landscape in Cyprus—Four Centuries of Expansion, Contraction and Spatial Displacement

“…The map offers a unique window to study the geography, history and culture of the island as it is a rich and invaluable source of a multitude of detailed information. However, land cover information is very poor and absolutely no information is provided for about 54% of the island which was categorized as "Unclassified" type of land cover [38]. Kitchener's historical map is the only source that provides professionally surveyed geographic data for Cyprus in the 19th century.…”

“…Regarding the allocation of control points, for the GSGS 4242 and K715 maps, we focused on the coordinate system, while for K-map we focused on landmarks and especially on churches and monasteries as previously described [38]. The K715 map was georeferenced according to its reference grid and the mean rectification accuracy of this basemap, applying a first order affine transformation, was 5.5 m. The GSGS 4242 map sheet distribution corresponds to the 1:5000 Cassini cadastral plan sheet distribution, available by the Department of Lands and Surveys of the Republic of Cyprus [53], transformed to the modern and official Cyprus Local Transverse Mercator system (EPSG:6312).…”

“…In order to assess the comparability and accuracy of the three topographic maps, we collected 354 trigonometric stations from the GSGS 4242 map, which were compared with the corresponding locations on the K715 map, yielding a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 41.52 m. Following our previous work [38], a set of 340 validation Control Points (CP), churches and monasteries, selected from the CPs dataset used to georeference the K-map, was identified in both the K-map the and GSGS 4242, yielding a total RMSE of 71.32 m. Taking into account that the total RMSE between K-map and K715, using also a subset of the CPs used to georeference the K-map, was calculated previously at 68.76 m [38], the convergence between the three maps, about one millimeter of map's scale, was considered satisfactory for the scale of the study. After the georeferencing process, features from each map were digitized and organized in an appropriate spatial form (polygon layers) within the GIS environment of ArcGIS 10.8.1.…”

A historical geospatial database of the island of Cyprus in the 1960s

“…British control replaced Ottoman control in 1878 and remained until the Republic of Cyprus declared independence in 1960. The landscape of the late Ottoman era can be considered as recorded in the first trigonometric survey of the island, carried out by Horatio Herbert Kitchener, and published in 1885 [7] . The dataset published in this manuscript was created to study the dynamics of landscape development and change during the British period in Cyprus (1878-1960), as it can be assumed that the K715 series map published in 1969 describes most of the landscape's features of the late British era.…”