edinburgh oldmapsonline workshop
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
Who am I?
Managing director of a small Swiss company: Klokan Technologies GmbH.
Innovative geo applications in culture heritage.
Software development services & customization of open-source projects, participation on grants.
Clients: BL.uk, NLS.uk, David Rumsey (USA), NationaalArchief.nl, MZK.cz, Swiss libraries, ...
Petr Pridal <[email protected]>
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK, December 13th 2012
www.oldmapsonline.org
The easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries
around the world.
www.oldmapsonline.org
Library catalogs & fulltext search fail on maps.
Search by geographic location / area on a modern world map
Indexing maps from many different library collections
One click to view the map in high resolution
Free to access and open for contributions
Search engine for maps
Contributor friendly
Bring online visitors to the websites of participating institutions to view the maps
Promote the map libraries and their content
Do proper crediting: logo and links back
Store only minimal metadata & thumbnails
Boost the number of online visits of maps
Make it easier to discover the scanned maps
Partners
More to come...
Open for new contributors. Institutions can let index their map collections. It is for free. The contributor retain all the rights.
Ongoing negotiation with additional libraries.
Submission of maps from individuals at a later point (technically more problematic)
ContributeHigh resolution (300dpi+ or 2 Megapixel+) maps with a zoomable viewer online
Permanent URL with direct access - no password or payment required
Metadata with DublinCore elements supplied in a spreadsheet (XLS). Later OAI-PMH harvesting.
Bounding box (MARC 034, DCMI BOX, ...)
http://project.oldmapsonline.org/contribute
Bounding box
034: $$dE0055700$$eE0102900$$fN0474800$$gN0454900255: $$cE 5°57'00"-E 10°29'00"/N 47°48'00"-N 45°49'00"
MARC: field 034
DCMI BOX: westlimit=5.9559; southlimit=45.818; eastlimit=10.4921; northlimit=47.8084
DublinCore: DCMI Box
ISO 19115 / FGDC / OGC
Bounding box encoding
BoundingBox Tool
How to create such records?
Georeferencer Tool+ Geoparser Tool
BoundingBox Tool: Cataloguing while holding the physical maps - manual selection of the area on an online map(used by Swiss libraries, David Rumsey, ...)
Geoparser: Semi-automatic rapid process - with suggestion of the area by analyzing existing textual metadata.
BoundingBox Tool
Enrichment of the online scanned maps
A tool which runs in a web browser
An online service - no software installation
Uses volunteers for metadata enrichment
Successful pilots in several institutions
Georeferencer Tool
16
17
Competitive Crowdsourcing
It allows to turn the existing online scans into geodata in a web browser
Metadata enrichment, with 3D visualization as a side product
Support true collaborative editing
It retains log of all operations (a la Wikipedia) - you can adjust it with a few clicks
Library can receive GeoTIFF / WMS / ...
Georeferencer
Project launched in the end of February in New York and London
Over 30.000 visitors per day on the website after launch
Two servers in a load balancer to handle the traffic after launch.
An amazing feedback from general public
Publicity
Social Networks: Twitter, Facebook
Google Developer Showcase + Google I/O 2012
BBC History magazine online slideshow
La Stampa (Milan, Italy) newspaper
Gizmodo, Ars Technica, The Verge
Wired.jp (Japan), About.com Genealogy, Playtech.r (Romania), Portsmouth News (UK), ... TV spot in Catalonya: link
high-resolution historical mapscovering the whole world
120.000
(by the end of the project it is going to be close to 150.000 probably)
During the last 10 monthswe have helped over
400.000people to find maps and visit
online map libraries
We have encouragedall libraries holding maps
to think about their metadatain a geographical context.
Technology
Based on the MapRank Search technology http://www.mapranksearch.com/
Released in 2010 by Klokan Technologies for Swiss project Kartenportal.ch, improved for Czech libraries and for David Rumsey
Useful for large metadata catalogs + geospatial digital repositories.
Details in the article published in D-Lib: doi:10.1045/september2011-oehrli
Technology
MapRank ranking: an advanced algorithm calculating coverage similarity of geographical area of query and area covered by every document and combining it with map scale, time range, predefined categories and traditional full text search.
Technology
Default user interface developed with Closure JavaScript Library + Closure Compiler.
Server component: FastCGI, C++, runs on UNIX/Linux
Data indexing implemented specifically to provide ranked real-time results even for large databases. Traditional R-Tree indexing or Lucene are failing.
0
225
450
675
900
Time in seconds
new implementationold implementation
70.000125.000250.000500.0001.000.000
Performancefor 70.000 test queries
with # of records:
Google indexing
1-3 position on Google for “old maps” phrase
The intuitive geographical search interface uses AJAX, it is only one page for Google bots :-(
The project must expose the metadata in a way indexable by traditional full-text search engine
Phrases such as the “Old maps of Edinburgh”, “Old maps of British Isles”, “of ...”, ...
World coverage, high quality geodata required
Linked network of geodata
Natural Earth Data - possible export as RDF/LinkedData in future
The future
Project actively developed with the support from JISC (UK) until January 2013
Basic maintenance covered until 2018
Google Ads to help cover the hosting costs
Participation on a future research projects for improvements of the technology and optimizations of the map management
Cooperation with libraries on improvement
Old Maps Online
www.oldmapsonline.org
... thank you ...