A Linked Open Data Platform for Historical Geographic Data (original) (raw)
Related papers
Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore , the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search-and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to " map " and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents' geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the " Graph of Humanities Data " that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages .
Towards semi-automatic annotation of toponyms on old maps. In: e-Perimetron 9.3 (2014) pp.105–112
Present-day map digitization methods produce data that is semantically opaque; that is to a machine, a digitized map is merely a collection of bits and bytes. The area it depicts, the places it mentions, any text contained within legends or written on its margins remain unknown - unless a human appraises the image and manually adds this information to its metadata. This problem is especially severe in the case of old maps: these are typically handwritten, may contain text in varying orientations and sizes, and can be in a bad condition due to varying levels of deterioration or damage. As a result, searching for the contents of these documents remains challenging, which makes them hard to discover for users, unusable for machine processing and analysis, and thus effectively lost to many forms of public, scientific or commercial utilization. Fully automatic detection and transcription of place names and legends is, likely, not achievable with today's technology. We argue, however, that semi-automated methods can eliminate much of the tedious effort required to annotate map scans entirely by hand. In this paper, we showcase early work on semi-automatic place name annotation. In our experiment, we utilize open source tools to identify potential locations on the map representing toponyms. We present how, in next steps, we aim to extend our experiment by exploiting the spatial layout of identified candidates to deduce possible place names based on existing toponym lists. Ultimately, or goal is to combine this work with a toolset for manual image annotation into a convenient online environment. This will allow curators, researchers, and potentially also the general public “tag” and annotate toponyms on digitized maps rapidly.
Annotating Geographical Entities
This paper describes a study based on exploration of relations between geographical entities. We suggested a new tool for training and evaluation required by related annotation experiments. It relates to an annotator used for semi-automatic annotation, starting with the geography manual. We define fifteen types of entities: location, geo_position, geology, landform, clime, water, dimension, person, organization, URL, Timex, resource, industry, cultural, unknown with their specific subtypes. Moreover, we present the annotation conventions for three semantic relations: referential, structural and spatial, considered to be optimal operators in understanding a geographical manual. A part of the annotation is done manually, while the other part is done automatically, such as the token, lemma, part-of-speech. The study is intended to create a tool for the automatic detection of semantic relations in texts on geographic issues such as geography manuals, travel guides, geography atlases, etc., in order to help children, professors, guides, PR specialists and to be useful for tourists, generally to discover the complexity and the beauty of the nature.
La toponomastica è una testimonianza della “saggezza del passato”, il patrimonio culturale stratificato di una comunità. È quindi necessario preservare i toponimi come espressione di questo patrimonio con una attenta analisi critica, interdisciplinare e “globale” delle loro proprietà geografiche e della loro genesi. In quest’ottica, il Laboratorio di Cartografia e Toponomastica Storica dell’Università degli Studi di Salerno raccoglie, cataloga, analizza e utilizza scientificamente, per la ricerca e la didattica della geografia, mappe e toponimi antichi su scala nazionale ed europea. Le ricerche, finora pubblicate in diversi saggi, sono basate su un modello originale di analisi e classificazione che mira a considerare tutti i diversi metodi di indagine geo-toponomastica, in senso diacronico e sincronico, con riferimento ai temi dell’identità e della pianificazione territoriale “geo culturalmente” sostenibile. Il presente contributo propone in particolare l’applicazione delle nuove tecnologie, con la realizzazione di una geo-atlante di toponomastica basato su GIS e web semantico, in grado di interfacciarsi con altre banche dati e aperto all’interazione attraverso l’attuazione di un sistema di codici a barre (basato su Web Tag, guide virtuali e mappe georeferenziate).
2018
Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Biondo research group questions an epistemology of spaces and their changes in the early modern history. At focus are relations between historical maps and texts aiming to explore the historical understanding of spaces and the knowledge associated with it. We take up approaches from cognitive science and computational linguistics arguing that cognitive maps depict culture-specific spatial knowledge and practices. Our interdisciplinary project combines cognitive-semantic parameters such as toponyms, landmarks, spatial frames of reference, geometric relations, gestalt principles and different perspectives with computational and cognitive linguistic analysis. Using new text and map markup and corpus-specific quantitative methods, historical geographical texts are processed and reinterpreted. Long-term research questions are: Which forms of knowledge represent spatial relations? How can spatial transformation processes be represented and analyzed? What is the con...
Semantically geo-annotating an ancient Greek "travel guide" Itineraries, Chronotopes, Networks, and Linked Data. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities'20). , 2020
Pausanias's second-century CE Periegesis Hellados presents a tenvolume grand tour of the Greek mainland. After the post-enlightenment rediscovery of ancient Greek literature, his Description of Greece proved highly influential as a guidebook to Greece's antiquities, directing travellers and archaeologists alike to uncovering and interpreting major sites, notably at Athens, Corinth and Olympia. Recent studies focusing on his Description as a narrative, however, have drawn attention to the textual construction of space, and the different ways in which space and place are conceptualised and related to each other. This paper outlines the initial work of the Digital Periegesis project, which is using semantic geo-annotation to capture and analyse the forms of space within and the spatial form of this narrative. In particular, it discusses the challenges and affordances of using geo-parsing, spatio-temporal analysis, network analysis, and Linked Open Data (LOD) for rethinking the geographies of a non-modern literary text as based more on topological connections than topographic proximity.
Towards semi-automatic annotation of toponyms on old maps
Present-day digitization methods produce data that is semantically opaque; that is to a machine, a digitized map is merely a collection of bits and bytes. The area it depicts, the places it mentions, any text contained within legends or written on its margins remain unknown - unless a human appraises the image and manually adds this information to its metadata. This problem is especially severe in the case of old maps: these are typically handwritten, may contain text in varying orientations and sizes, and can be in a bad condition due to varying levels of deterioration or damage. As a result, searching for the contents of these documents remains challenging, which makes them hard to discover for users, unusable for matching processing and analysis, and thus effectively lost to many forms of public, scientific or commercial utilization. Fully automatic detection and transcription of place names and legends is, likely, not achievable with today’s technology. We argue, however, that s...