Managing director of Klokan Technologies GmbH, a small Swiss company that develops innovative geo applications for cultural heritage institutions. The document discusses Old Maps Online, a project that provides an easy-to-use gateway for searching historical maps from libraries around the world. It allows users to search maps by geographic location on an interactive world map and view high resolution maps from contributing institutions with proper crediting back to the libraries. The project is open to additional map contributors and uses tools like BoundingBox and Georeferencer to help enrich map metadata.

1. 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, ...

2. Petr Pridal <petr.pridal@klokantech.com>
www.oldmapsonline.org
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK, December 13th 2012

3. www.oldmapsonline.org
The easy-to-use gateway to
historical maps in libraries
around the world.

4. Search engine for maps
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

6. 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

7. Partners

8. 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)

9. Contribute
High 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

10. Bounding box

11. Bounding box encoding
MARC: field 034
034: $$dE0055700$$eE0102900$$fN0474800$$gN0454900
255: $$cE 5°57'00"-E 10°29'00"/N 47°48'00"-N 45°49'00"
DublinCore: DCMI Box
DCMI BOX: westlimit=5.9559; southlimit=45.818;
eastlimit=10.4921; northlimit=47.8084
ISO 19115 / FGDC / OGC

12. How to create such records?
BoundingBox Tool
+ Geoparser Tool
Georeferencer Tool

13. BoundingBox 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.

14. http://boundingbox.klokantech.com

15. Georeferencer 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

16. 16

17. 17

19. Competitive
Crowdsourcing

20. Georeferencer
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 / ...

21. 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

22. 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

23. 120.000
high-resolution historical maps
covering the whole world
(by the end of the project it is going to be close to 150.000 probably)

24. During the last 10 months
we have helped over
400.000
people to find maps and visit
online map libraries

25. We have encouraged
all libraries holding maps
to think about their metadata
in a geographical context.

26. 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

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. with # of records:
70.000
Performance 125.000
250.000
500.000
for 70.000 test queries 1.000.000
900
675
Time in seconds
450
225
0 old implementation
new implementation

30. 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

34. Linked network of geodata
Natural Earth Data - possible export as RDF/LinkedData in future

37. 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

38. Old Maps Online
www.oldmapsonline.org
... thank you ...