OldMapsOnline Project Started

Friday, May 30, 2008

We are pleased to announce a start of the OldMapsOnline project! We aim to devolop freely available/open source tool chain and methodology which will allow anyone (namely libraries, archives and museums) to publish scanned old maps in both GIS and user friendly, standards based way.

The system will:

  • provide online georeferencing tool and online rectifier for large digitised maps which will generate geo-metadata for cataloguing the maps, search purposes as well as presentation and overlay of maps
  • suggest or develop software tools useful for publishing huge collections of scanned old maps
  • facilitate search for digitised maps and graphics linked to a certain geographic location
  • provide user friendly search interface using geographic and temporal information (marking an area on a map, timeline, map ranking)
  • be available in English and Czech and it will be possible to translate it into other languages.


We also plan to contribute to existing open source projects such as OpenLayers, MapServer, GDAL and IIPImage.

The four-year project (2008-2011) is backed by the Moravian Library in Brno with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic as a R&D project# DC08P02OUK006.

Have a look at online video from presentation of prototypes of our tools to get more information.
Tags: announcement