A Vision of Britain through Time: Putting the GB Historical GIS on the Web
Paul Ell, CDDA, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland - cancelled

QVIZ: Extending the GBH GIS Architecture across Europe
Martin Schaefer, Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth, England

The QVIZ project, led by Umeå University, Sweden, is funded by the European Union under its Sixth Framework programme to develop the query- and context-based visualization of time-spatial cultural dynamics.  Work at Portsmouth is focused on constructing a prototype data structure based on the GB Historical GIS but integrating similar data from the Swedish and Estonian National Archives.  These are being linked through a high-level ontology/GIS documenting the evolving states of Europe since 1815, including their names in different languages and their changing boundaries; the presentation will cover the sources being used, and one problem is locating information which is copyright-free.  A revised data architecture includes support for multiple languages; support for diverse character sets, including the Greek and Russian alphabets; and storing coordinate data using latitude and longitude rather than the various national coordinate systems.  This creates data translation issues, for example integrating GIS coverages for Estonian manors.  The presentation will include a demonstration of a text-only browser accessing the new ontology, and hopefully a separate demonstration of the extended version of our Historical Web Map Server, supporting OGC protocols and accessing 1:500,000 mapping of the whole of Europe.

http://www.qviz.eu

A New Architecture for the GB Historical GIS: Integrating Statistics, Polygons, Travel Narratives, Historic Maps …
Humphrey Southall, Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth, England

In 2001, the GB Historical GIS received major new funding from the UK National Lottery to extend our existing collections of historical statistics and digitised boundaries; to create new collections of descriptive gazetteers, travel writing and scanned maps; and to make the whole resource accessible via the web to a broad audience.  We wanted to build a site in which all information about a place could be located via a single name-based query, and which could be browsed indefinitely, moving from place to associated place by clicking on links. This required a radically different architecture, using an object-relational database rather than conventional GIS software to create a system that is simultaneously a toponymic database and a statistical mapping system. It draws on a range of emerging metadata standards: the Alexandria Digital Library’s Gazetteer Content Standard, which inspired our core gazetteer which holds polygons but only if available; the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Web Map Server standard, letting scanned historic maps appear as backcloths to boundaries and statistical mapping; the Data Documentation Initiative’s metadata which enables us to hold c. 11.5 million historical statistics in one column of one table; Text Encoding Initiative place-name mark-up linking in our travel narratives.  This presentation emphasises the underlying data structure, to which the Vision of Britain web site is just one of many possible interfaces.

http://www.gbhgis.org