Encoding and Querying Historic Map Content

Abstract

Libraries have large collections of map documents with rich spatiotemporal information encoded in the visual representation of the map. Currently, historic map content is covered by the provided metadata only to a very limited degree, and thus is not available in a machine-readable form. A formal representation would support querying for and reasoning over detailed semantic contents of maps, instead of only map documents. From a historian's perspective, this would support search for map resources which contain information that answers very specific questions, such as maps that show the cities of Prussia in 1830, without manually searching through maps. A particular challenge lies in the wealth and ambiguity of map content for queries. In this chapter, we propose an approach to describe map contents more explicitly. We suggest ways to formally encode historic map content in an approximate intensional manner which still allows useful queries. We discuss tools for georeferencing and enriching historic map descriptions by external sources, such as DBpedia. We demonstrate the use of this approach by content queries on map examples.

Synchronising geometric representations for map mashups using relative positioning and Linked Data

“…The querying capability of Linked Data has gained much attention especially from the geospatial semantics community as the Linked Data paradigm can facilitate the discovery of geospatial data and knowledge. For example, Scheider et al (2014) formally encoded historic map content in Linked Data, and a number of questions about the map metadata and map content were then formulated into SPARQL queries. With our approach, we could also formulate various questions towards the formally encoded spatial relations between thematic and background features in SPARQL and retrieve the answers with low computational cost, for instances:…”

Exploratory querying of SPARQL endpoints in space and time

“…However, it remains unclear, first of all, how to formulate the right query, and secondly, which kinds of relations and concepts are required and available in order to formulate the right query [44]. Furthermore, in our case, the historian might want to filter results by a certain spatial area in Russia and a certain time interval (1812-1813) and thus needs to handle georeferenced historical map regions with complex polygon shapes [44]). This requires specific interaction strategies to facilitate map overview, zooming, as well as geometric comparison and filtering.…”

“…While information on the Web is largely referenced to space-time in rather simplistic ways 8 , certain types of information require interaction of users with more complex references. Examples range from historical and cultural information 9 , such as historical maps [44] and museal artefacts [24] whose spatial references are extended and may even undergo complex changes in time [31], to information about the human environment, such as Earthquakes or the Cadastre system (cf. Sect.…”

“…Linked open data, even though it changes the conditions for and approaches to retrieval of spatio-temporal and other information in positive ways [50,34], places further burdens on a user. Think about an historian or librarian who wants to find maps which contain information about Napoleon's invasion to Russia [44] (Figure 1). Suppose he or she is given a list of URIs of 4 Compare the representative sample of linked geospatial data crawled from the Web and described in http://stko.geog.…”

Linked Data - A Paradigm Shift for Geographic Information Science

“…Thanks to the Linked Data paradigm, digital maps and other geospatial models can now be seen as sets of statements made by authors with some reputation at some well-defined points in time [25]. Ideally, these statements will never be removed, because it is valuable (and sometimes legally required or otherwise essential) to know about previous world views or states of affairs.…”