Collaborative map annotation in the context of historical GIS

Abstract

In this paper we present work in progress on a system for exploring and geo-referencing scanned historical maps based on collaborative user annotations. We discuss the feature set of our current implementation and identify use cases for our system. Furthermore, we place our work in the larger context of an “open historical GIS”: we explain our view of such a system as a platform for capturing, aggregating, analyzing and publishing free historical geographical data on the World Wide Web; and we argue that our prototype system addresses core functionality — in particular with regard to user-driven capturing and aggregation of historical geospatial data.