Presentation given by Stuart Macdonald on Addressing History at RunCoCo workshop: Community Collection Online - sustainability and business models, University of Leeds, 3 November 2010

1. Stuart Macdonald
AddressingHistory Project Manager
EDINA
http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/
To create an online crowdsourcing tool that will combine data from
digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories with
contemporaneous historical maps

2. • Historic maps georeferenced by NLS
• PODs digitised by NLS with the Internet Archive
• Project focussed on 3 volumes of PODs: 1784-5; 1865; 1905-6
• Scalable to accommodate 400 Scottish PODs currently being digitised
• POD entries georeferenced by moving a pin on a digitised map thus
facilitating the addition of a grid reference to the OCR’d POD held in XML
database
• Mass geo-coding of PODs using Google geocoding services
• Mechanism to check user-generated content such as georeferences
• Amplification of tool and API via Social Media Channels
• Each POD entry will be accessible via the API through a unique URI -
opening up content to LOD cloud through RDF & Ontologies (geonames,
DBPedia)
CC image courtesy of Flickr –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/karenhorton/4477409137/

3. stuart.macdonald@ed.ac.uk
THANKING YOU!
Acknowledgements:
• JISC - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
• National Library of Scotland - http://www.nls.uk/
• Visualising Urban Geographies (VUG)
project – http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/
• Edinburgh City Libraries –
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/libraries/