Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

Reconsidering the Western town planning approach for Historic Cities and Memories in Mediterranean Region: The Agence Prost from Paris to İstanbul (1910s-1950s)

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Assessing the planimetric accuracy of Paris atlases from the late 18th and 19th centuries

International audiencee recent initiatives to digitize cultural heritage resources and publish them on the Web have renewed interest in historical maps for the diachronic analysis of territories in GIS applications. However, such analyses should not be done without a good understanding of the possibilities and limitations of geographical information provided by historical maps, i.e. their quality. One of the major concerns regarding historical maps quality is their positional plani-metric accuracy which highly depends on survey techniques used at the time. As these techniques are not always thoroughly known and as ground truth is most of the time not su ciently available, direct absolute evaluation approaches have been proposed to assess historical maps positional planimetric accuracy. In this article, we follow the intuition that the most widely adopted georeferencing-based approach for assessing the positional planimetric accuracy of historical maps can be adapted to provide an evaluation of the error caused by the survey process in cases like Paris atlases where the georeferencing transformation can be estimated with ground control points based on geodetic features and where the projection of the map can be approximated by a well known projected coordinate reference system. We apply this tuned approach on the Verniquet atlas and evaluate the validity of our hypothesis about projection approximation. CCS CONCEPTS •Information systems → Geographic information systems; Digital libraries and archives; Information retrieval; KEYWORDS planimetric accuracy assessment; historical maps ACM Reference format: Bertrand Duménieu, Nathalie Abadie, and Julien Perret. 2018. Assessing the planimetric accuracy of Paris atlases from the late 18th and 19th centuries

Geographic Information Science (GIScience) and Geospatial Approaches for the Analysis of Historical Visual Sources and Cartographic Material

This book focuses on the use of GIScience in conjunction with historical visual sources to resolve past scenarios. The themes, knowledge gained and methodologies conducted might be of interest to a variety of scholars from the social science and humanities disciplines