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Linking Spaces with Places: Examples from the PastPlace Project
- 1. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Linking Spaces with Places: Examples from the PastPlace Project Humphrey Southall & Paula Aucott (University of Portsmouth/ Great Britain Historical GIS)
- 2. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Structure of Presentation: • Limitations of mainstream geospatial systems – When applied to historical contexts and textual content • Alternative more textual – geosemantic – methods – Most people find out about places by searching using placenames, not coordinates, and these days they use search engines, so where do they end up? – Looking online for information about ―Tallinn‖ – Exploring the Linked Data web, and Vision of Britain • Introducing Pelagios and PastPlace – Pelagios 3 is new project linking my team with the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world, based at New York University, and the China Historical GIS at Harvard – PastPlace is a rebranding and extension of Vision of Britain 19th September 2013
- 3. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Mainstream geospatial systems • ―Geographical Information Systems‖ – Raster GIS • E.g. IDRISI, ERDAS Imagine • Mainly for satellite data, etc, so not discussed further – Vector GIS • E.g. ArcGIS, MapInfo • Separate spatial data and attribute data • Spatial data = points, lines and polygons • Geospatial Database Management Systems – Implemented as extensions to (object-)relational database systems • E.g. Oracle and Oracle Spatial, Postgres and PostGIS • Geospatial databases can organise data as spatial+attributes, but permit other approaches 19th September 2013
- 4. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Limitations of ArcGIS, etc • Everything else exists as attributes of points, lines or polygons, so hard to work with information about unknown or uncertain locations • Toponyms treated as ―labels‖, and fiddly having more than one per geospatial object • ArcGIS data model works in terms of layers or coverages, which is fine for different kinds of feature but a very bad way of representing time 19th September 2013
- 5. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Gazetteer data standards • ISO 19112, ‗Geographic information — Spatial referencing by geographic identifiers‘ – Very general; e.g. does not require coordinates • Open Geospatial Consortium: Web Feature Server Gazetteer Service Profile (WFS(G)) – Is this still being actively developed? – OGC now discussing a different approach, OpenPOI • Alexandria Digital Library: – Gazetteer Service Protocol – Gazetteer Content Standard www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer/ContentStandard/version3.2/GCS3.2guide.htm – Gazetteer Feature Type Thesaurus: www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/FeatureTypes/ver070302/index.htm 19th September 2013
- 6. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time ADL Gazetteer Content Standard • Standard allows for many optional elements, but four compulsory elements: • A unique identifier – Usually a number • A name – May well be duplicated elsewhere – Standard optionally allows for many additional variant names • A footprint – A point, line or polygon • A feature type – To achieve interoperability with other gazetteers via the Gazetteer Service Protocol, the feature type must be taken from the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus 19th September 2013
- 7. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Issues with “geographical features” • Most major digital gazetteers are derived from GIS systems constructed by national mapping agencies – i.e. databases of points, lines and polygons • BUT: – Very hard to agree on a single standard classification of geographical features • Most existing thesaurii heavily influenced by symbologies of US Geological Survey – Real people don‘t care about features • Problem for crowd-sourcing gazeteers, e.g. in Geonames – Over historical time, individual features are ephemeral while ―places‖ endure • They have built a bridge in Oxford! 19th September 2013 Part of the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus
- 8. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Feature typing may be “standard” but it is not natural: • CLUN, a river, a small town, a parish, a sub-district, a district, and a hundred in Salop. The river rises near the boundary with Wales; and runs 11 miles eastward, and 7 southward, to the Teme, near Leintwardine. The town stands on the river, 3 miles W of Offa's dyke, 5½ SSW of Bishops-Castle, and 6½ N by E of Knighton r. station; is a polling-place, and a nominal borough, …. (from Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, 1872) • So how do we work with ―place information‖ in the real world? 19th September 2013
- 9. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Googlingoffor TallinnProject: most people find out about places – how A Vision Britain though Time 19th September 2013
- 10. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Wikipedia for Tallinn: English language 19th September 2013
- 11. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Wikipedia for Tallinn: Estonian language 19th September 2013
- 12. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Wikipedia for Tallinn: Estonian language How do we know the two Tallinn articles are about the same place? 19th September 2013
- 13. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Wikidata for Tallinn: web view • Created partly to just link the different language versions 19th September 2013
- 14. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Wikidata for Tallinn: RDF view • Created partly to just link the different language versions 19th September 2013
- 15. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Geonames for Tallinn 19th September 2013
- 16. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Geonames for Tallinn 19th September 2013
- 17. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Geonames for Tallinn: RDF 19th September 2013
- 18. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Geonames for Tallinn: RDF 19th September 2013
- 19. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Vision of Europe for Tallinn 19th September 2013
- 20. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Vision of Europe for Harjumaa 19th September 2013
- 21. Great Britain Historical Scrollingdown the GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time same page … Vision of Europe for Harjumaa 19th September 2013
- 22. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Modelling the history of Estonia 19th September 2013
- 23. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Part of the AUO Typology Thanks to Vojtech Kupca (Umea U.) for these visualisations of the ontology 19th September 2013
- 24. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Part of the AUO Typology Thanks to Vojtech Kupca (Umea U.) for these visualisations of the ontology 19th September 2013 But why does a UK researcher have all this information about Estonia?
- 25. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time GBH GIS / Vision of Britain / QVIZ / PastPlace • Original GB Historical GIS project: 1994-2000 – Built conventional ArcGIS-based system (OSGB coordinates) • Vision of Britain Mark 1: 2001-4 – Funded by UK National Lottery; New architecture – Support from UK archives crucial – needed authority list • QVIZ project: 2006-8 – EU FP6; led by Umea; incl Estonian & Swedish Nat. Archives • Vision of Britain Mark 2: 2007– Funded by JISC but used QVIZ infrastructure – So covers all of Europe (ETRS-89), in varying detail • PastPlace/Pelagios: 2013– Re-branding, global (WGS-84 coordinates) – Major focus on exposing our information as Open Linked Data 19th September 2013
- 26. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Original Inspiration: F. Youngs’ Local Administrative Units of England (Royal Historical Society, 1979 and 1991) We did not ―computerise‖ the pages Instead, we used information from Youngs, etc, to build a new database But how? One of most complex books ever 19th September 2013
- 27. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Administrative Unit Ontology E-R Diagram g_rel g_legal_rel PK,FK1 g_unit_type g_rel_type g_rel_unit_type notes created_by g_seq FK1 g_unit g_rel_to g_rel_type g_part g_part_area g_part_area_measure c_date_1 c_pop_1 c_hous_1 c_date_2 c_pop_2 c_hous_2 g_duration im_auth im_note ul_auth ul_note created_by notes g_unit_type FK2 g_unit_type PK g_unit_type FK1 FK2 g_type_level g_jurisdiction g_type_period g_duration g_foot stat_only n_language n_label n_label_plural n_description n_full_description n_label n_label_plural n_description n_full_description n_short_label g_label g_label_plural g_description g_full_description g_short_label notes created_by g_type_function FK3 FK3 PK FK1 g_language g_label g_description g_full_description 19th September 2013 g_unit g_foot g_duration im_auth im_note ul_auth ul_note use_for_search use_for_stat_map use_for_bound_map FK1 g_rel_type g_jurisdiction g_label preferred_language email_address notes postal_address telephone_number g_status g_unit_type n_language n_label n_short_label n_description n_full_description g_label g_short_label g_description g_full_description notes created_by g_language FK2 PK g_status_type FK1 FK1 g_jurisdiction g_auth_type g_auth_title g_auth_creator g_auth_creator_forename g_auth_publisher g_auth_pub_place g_auth_date g_auth_identifier url_works g_auth_rights g_auth_rights_string g_auth_description notes PK g_hint g_unit_type g_centroid g_place g_duration im_auth im_note ul_auth ul_note created_by notes g_language g_label g_authority g_language_iso notes g_jurisdiction g_type_function g_auth_type PK g_type_function_label PK,FK1 g_name g_auth_type g_language g_type_function FK2 g_language g_label g_description g_full_description g_label g_seq g_unit g_name g_name_status g_language g_duration im_auth im_note ul_auth ul_note created_by notes notes notes PK,FK1 PK,FK2 FK1 g_type_function g_auth_type g_auth_type_level PK PK g_name_status g_status g_seq FK1 FK2 g_authority notes created_by g_unit PK g_type_level PK g_rel_type PK PK g_adl_ft PK,FK1 g_authority g_seq g_label rev_label created_by PK g_type_level g_type_level_label g_rel_type g_language PK FK1 PK,FK1 PK,FK2 g_unit g_type_level PK g_foot g_rel_type_label PK g_unit g_status g_duration im_auth im_note ul_auth ul_note created_by notes g_name_status im_auth sort_order g_name_status_label PK,FK1 g_name_status FK2 g_language g_label FK2 g_place PK g_place g_seed g_name g_container g_centroid created_by 27
- 28. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Frequency of different languages for place names in Vision of Britain/PastPlace English Swedish Estonian German Welsh French Italian Turkish Other 0 19th September 2013 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000 160,000
- 29. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time “Places” and Units in the PastPlace data model • Places are ―above‖ units because units are named after places • There is only one ―names‖ table • Currently 22,371 places versus 81,886 units; 26,520 units not assigned to places, but only 5,492 of these in Britain, while 2,944 places have no units 19th September 2013
- 30. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Place names for Chester-leStreet 19th September 2013
- 31. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Source of first ranked results from searching google.co.uk for “history of <name>“ for all Herefordshire ancient parishes • Domination of placename search results by Wikipedia is not inevitable! • Surprising how little interest most academic and heritage sector projects have in good results in search engines • FINDABILITY 120 100 80 No. of parishes (N=188) 60 40 20 0 Wikipedia 19th September 2013 Vision of Britain Other noncommercial Commercial
- 32. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Tallinn in PastPlace RDF 19th September 2013
- 33. Great Britain Historical OpenLinked GIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Data as a lingua franca for the (semantic) web • Gazetteers act as hubs: – – – – • Wikipedia Geonames Open Street Map OS Linked Data NB diagram has not been updated since September 2011 as became too big 19th September 2013
- 34. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios 3: Early Geospatial Documents • 2 year project Sep 2013-Aug 2015 – funded by Mellon Foundation • Principal Investigators: • Leif Isaksen (Southampton Univ, UK) • Elton Barker (Open Univ, UK) • Rainer Simon (Austrian Inst of Tech) • Plus many partners: • • • • • • • • British Library: Kimberly Kowal Drew Univ Shannon Bradshaw, Martin Foys Harvard Univ: Lex Merrick Berman Indep: Johan Åhlfeldt, Tony Campbell, Mia Ridge New York Univ: Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies Queen Mary, London Univ: Yossef Rapoport Edinburgh Univ: Kate Byrne Portsmouth Univ: Humphrey Southall 19th September 2013
- 35. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios 3: Project and rationale • Project will annotate, link and index place references in digitized Early Geospatial Documents (EGDs) • EGDs are documents that use written or visual representation to describe geographic space prior to the European discovery of the Americas in 1492 – This event both radically transformed beliefs about the globe, and triggered the development of several standardising global cartographic conventions, including the Werner, Bonne and Mercator projections • EGDs include ancient and medieval geographic descriptions (geographiae and chorographiae and itineraries) world maps (mappaemundi) and portolan charts 19th September 2013
- 36. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios Data Model for Annotations • Linking related resources via Open Annotations • Six items of information form an annotation: 1. Target. A segment of the text or image identified as a place reference, expressed as a URI • Target URIs will be additionally annotated with relevant document metadata where known, including the author, date-range, provenance, language. 2. Toponym: the string of characters used by the author to identify a place 3. Place Identifier: linking the place to a URI based gazetteer 4. Source: of the identification between toponym and place 5. Annotator: The person who produced the annotation. 6. Confidence: a traffic light scheme: probable, possible, or unknown 19th September 2013
- 37. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Gazetteer Infrastructure • Pelagios aims to create a ―Gazetteer ecosystem‖: – URI-based gazetteers that are specific to a spatial, temporal or cultural milieu and maintained and curated by their respective research communities, but aligned through the principles of Linked Data and a common, overarching referencing framework • Two key challenges in creating such an ecosystem: – A common, generic gazetteer data model needs to be identified which suits the needs of the different individual stakeholders involved • All gazetteers in this ecosystem will be primarily of ―places‖, not geographical features – Referencing frameworks need to be agreed, through which different gazetteers can cross-link to each other 19th September 2013
- 38. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Participating Gazetteers • Project will re-use, and contribute to, three existing gazetteer platforms: – Pleiades (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU) – PastPlace/Vision of Britain (GBHGIS, University of Portsmouth) – China Historical GIS (CGA, Harvard) • All three gazetteers are more about ―places‖ than geographical features • Pleiades+CHGIS mature: few new places needed • PastPlace ―will be significantly augmented with contemporary and historic settlements extracted from open gazetteer services‖, beyond UK – Decided last week this would be based on Wikidata 19th September 2013
- 39. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios 3 Content Work Packages No Name Example EGDs Gazetteer 1 Latin Tradition Antonine Itineraries, Ravenna Cosmography, Bordeaux Itinerary, Natural History (Pliny) Pleiades 2 Greek Tradition Geography (Strabo), Armenian Geography, Suda, Manual of Geography (Ptolemy) Pleiades 3 Early Christian Tradition Gough Map; Description of the World (Marco Polo), Fra Mauro Map, De Virga world map, Vesconte World Map, approx. 320 sundry EGDs from the British Library PastPlace 4 Early Maritime Trad. Le Liber (portolano), Lo Compasso (portolano), c. 180 Portolan charts PastPlace 5 Early Islamic Tradition Image of the Earth (Al Khwarizmi), al-Kashgari World Map, Tabula Rogeriana (al- Idrisi) Book of Curiosities, Maps of the Balkhi School PastPlace 6 Early Chinese Tradition Yujitu (‗Map of the Tracks of Yu‘), Songhuiyao, Chinese Buddhist Temple Gazetteers, ‗Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms‘ CHGIS 19th September 2013
- 40. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios WP3: Early Christian Tradition • Maps and geographic texts from medieval ‗Christendom‘ • Mixture of maps and texts e.g.: • Mappaemundi and T-O maps • Gough Map • Description of the World (Polo) • Vesconte World Map • Past Place gazetteer • May work back from modern translations using Edinburgh geoparser using tools developed by DM project and use toponym detection 19th September 2013
- 41. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios WP4:Early Maritime Tradition • Portolanos (texts) and portolan charts • Approximately 180 maps available from work of Ramon Pujades (2007) • Past Place gazetteer • Use toponym detection and gazetteer and identification work and gazetteers of Tony Campbell and Ramon Pujades 19th September 2013
- 42. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Pelagios WP5:Early IslamicTradition • Maps, texts and gazetteers in Arabic up to approx. 1492. • Maps and texts e.g. • Al-Khwarizmi • Book of Curiosities • Balkhi School • Tabula Rogeriana • Past Place gazetteer + Pleiades • Use toponym detection and gazetteer and identification work of Yossi Rapoport, Emily Savage-Smith, Kennedy & Kennedy and others 19th September 2013
- 43. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Geo-semantic methods are inferior to Geo-spatial … • You can derive that B is in A, or C is near B, from the map, but you cannot derive the map from the text … except when • We are working with the past – Textual descriptions are often all we have – Old maps are very inaccurate • We are working with the web – The web is a textual structure linked by explicit relationships • We are working with people – People think about geography through named places not coordinates defining spaces • NB Vision of Britain/PastPlace has plenty of geospatial functionality 19th September 2013
- 44. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Web sites, etc • Vision of Britain: www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk • Great Britain Historical GIS: www.gbhgis.org www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis • PastPlace (very preliminary site!): http://www.pastplace.org • Pelagios project http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk • Contact us: gbhgis@port.ac.uk 19th September 2013
- 45. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time 19th September 2013
- 46. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time 19th September 2013
- 47. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time 19th September 2013
- 48. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Count of number of names per language LANGUAGE NUMBER OF NAMES ENGLISH 62603 SWEDISH 7507 ESTONIAN 11973 GERMAN 5032 WELSH 1069 FRENCH 61 GREEK 3 ITALIAN 3 RUSSIAN 2 TURKISH 2 OTHER LANGUAGES WITH 1 NAME EACH 19th September 2013 26
- 49. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Unit relationships • All held in single table, allowing many-tomany relationships • Current system has 81,886 units but 260,602 relationships • Have dates, g_unit http://www.icpsr. authorities, etc umich.edu/DDI/ g_name • • • • IsPartOf SucceededBy (‗see also‘) AdministeredBy Boundary Changes – – – – – ReducedToEnlarge ReducedToCreate AbolishedToEnlarge AbolishedToCreate BoundaryChange (other unit unknown) g_rel_type http://www.icpsr. umich.edu/DDI/ g_rel http://www.icpsr. http://www.icpsr. umich.edu/DDI/ 19th September 2013 g_status umich.edu/DDI/
- 50. Great Britain HistoricalGIS Project: A Vision of Britain though Time Example of unit with many names • Newborough, Anglesey parish 19th September 2013