Old Maps Online: Sites

Welcome

Important Note: This project has a successor led by University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland with the target to develop the Worldwide Federated Map Search Portal, which will run on www.oldmapsonline.org address. Read more at: http://project.oldmapsonline.org/

OldMapsOnline.org is a research project which aims to develop software to assist in the management, manipulation and visualisation of historical map collections on the web. We are designing online tools for collaborative georeferencing, annotation, 3D visualisation, accuracy analysis and geometadata speciﬁcation. To use these tools you need only a web browser.

With our online tools it should be possible to find maps of a particular area within different online map collections, as well as allowing the visual integration of historical map layers and overlaying these on top of Google Maps and similar base maps.

We provide free software and tutorials for online publishing of your scanned maps on your own hardware infrastructure - either as pre-rendered tiles (Zoomify) or in a dynamic form directly from your TIFF / JPEG2000 images. You can use our open-source tools for publishing maps on your own websites and even choose one of the attractive pan&zoom web viewers for the visualisation of your scanned maps.

How to, links & best practice:

News from our project (the blog):

Displayed from: http://blog.oldmapsonline.org/

for more please go directly to: http://blog.oldmapsonline.org/

Project outputs and software published:

Published open-source applications:

MapTiler (desktop application): simple online publishing as mashups, for old maps in GIS formats. http://www.maptiler.org/
IIPImage Zoomify + JPEG2000 (image delivery system): Zoomify-compatible image delivery directly from JPEG2000 or TIFF images on your own hardware infrastructure: http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/ and http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/
TransGen/gcps2wld (command line utility) - georeference using ground controls points, generates best-fit afffine transformation with optional limits on rotation or skew + modification of GeoTools library.
OAI-PMH client (prototype) written in Python for harvesting metadata from map collections with open access catalogs.

We have several prototypes of online tools available:

Georeferencing Tool (early prototype) - You can zoom&pan and select control points on the scanned image as well as on a the reference base map
Bounding Box (prototype) - Visual selection of the area covered by a paper map you are cataloguing. The tool creates MARC metadata. Look at older stable version
MapAnalyst Online (gui prototype) - We are going to generate an accuracy visualisation for old maps and display this on top of online images (vector gui prototype). We are working with the author of the MapAnalyst application to build this functionality.

The complete online system is under development right now. When appropriate, we will publish requests for testing on the blog.

Articles and References:

List of published articles relateing to this project (useful for citation).

For developers:

Source code for most of the tools and software components which we developed is available in the project repository here: http://code.google.com/p/oldmapsonline/

The wiki pages with notes for developers are part of this repository.

We have also implemented new features within several mature open-source project like OpenLayers, GeoTools, IIPImage, GDAL. Our enhancements to these projects have been formally accepted within the publicly-available code-base.

Project supported by:

Moravian Library Brno, Czech Republic.

Czech R&D Project DC08P02OUK006 - OldMapsOnline.org

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