This presentation was given to the seminar on “Integration of onomastic data into geo-spatial infrastructure” in Tallinn, Estonia, on September 19th 2013. This meeting was organized by the Baltic and Northern Divisions of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), and the UNGEGN Working Group on Toponymic Data Files and Gazetteers.
Computer 10: Lesson 10 - Online Crimes and Hazards
Linking Spaces with Places: Examples from thePastPlace Project
1. Great Britain Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS
Googlingoffor TallinnProject: most people find out about places
– how
A Vision
Britain though Time
19th September 2013
10. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Wikipedia for Tallinn: English language
19th September 2013
11. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Wikipedia for Tallinn: Estonian language
19th September 2013
12. Great Britain Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Geonames for Tallinn
19th September 2013
16. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Geonames for Tallinn
19th September 2013
17. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Geonames for Tallinn: RDF
19th September 2013
18. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Geonames for
Tallinn: RDF
19th September 2013
19. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Vision of Europe for Tallinn
19th September 2013
20. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Vision of Europe for Harjumaa
19th September 2013
21. Great Britain Historical
Scrolling down the GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
same page …
Vision of Europe for Harjumaa
19th September 2013
22. Great Britain Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Modelling the history of Estonia
19th September 2013
23. Great Britain Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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
28. Great Britain Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Place
names for
Chester-leStreet
19th September 2013
31. Great Britain Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Tallinn in PastPlace RDF
19th September 2013
33. Great Britain Historical
Open Linked 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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
48. Great Britain Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS 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 Historical GIS Project:
A Vision of Britain though Time
Example of unit with many names
• Newborough, Anglesey parish
19th September 2013