Historical Map Applications and Processing Technologies

Abstract

Digital map processing has been an interest in the computer science and geographic information science communities since the early 1980s. With the increase of available map scans, a variety of researchers in the natural and social sciences developed a growing interest in using historical maps in their studies. The lack of an understanding of how historical maps can be used in research and the capabilities of map processing technologies creates a significant gap between the wide range of communities that could benefit from the advances in digital map processing technologies and the disciplines in which the technologies are developed. As a result, researchers who intend to use historical maps in their studies still need a significant amount of resources to digitize their maps, while the existing digital map processing technologies are difficult to apply and understand and thus do not look promising. In many cases, existing digital map processing technologies could help facilitate the digitization process, and it just requires additional knowledge to select an appropriate technology given the problem scope (e.g., the number of maps for processing, map conditions, and style varieties). The result is that researchers waste time and resources building and testing various systems that partially duplicate prior work and cannot fully use the potential of existing technology. This chapter presents real-world applications of historical maps and case studies of both semi-automatic and fully automatic approaches for geographic feature extraction from historical maps. These real-world applications illustrate and exemplify various needs and scopes of using historical maps in scientific studies (e.g., processing thousands of historical maps from a map series vs. a few historical maps from various publishers and with different cartographic styles). The two example map processing technologies described help understand current strengths and weaknesses. These examples also illustrate tremendous collaboration opportunities between and beyond the computer science and geographic information science communities to build advanced map processing technologies that are more effective in transforming the scientific studies that use historical maps.