The use of mapping as a front end to information is of interest in the very
different world of advice services. Colleagues in Resource Information
Services (partners in our NOF project) are developing a website for the
Greater London Authority to provide information on services for homeless
people. The site makes some use of mapping as one means of access to
information about services, but also provides other routes - the type of
service, or 'who for'.
If it's of interest the beta test site is at www.ris.org.uk/homelesslondon.
Martin
-----Original Message-----
From: Humphrey Southall [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 13 March 2002 21:40
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Demo geographical front-end to cultural collections
Dear All,
Many projects within nof-digitise are creating place-specific content, but
how do we create a SENSE of place? Obviously, if a collection comes
entirely from a single small area, some kind of sense of place may be
created simply by looking at it. However, most projects cover areas larger
than most people's notion of a place -- a neighbourhood or locality, but
certainly not a whole county let alone a whole region. Sense of place must
therefore be partly about selection within a collection.
However, it is less than obvious that simply providing some kind of
geographical search engine, within a single site or via some kind of
programme-wide portal, is all we need. Some very old ideas from geography
say that places are defined by site and situation; by the land they sit
on, and the other places that surround them. In this sense, place is about
context as much as content, and we need to PRESENT our content
geographically, not just provide a spatial search engine.
... all of which leads into some work the Great Britain Historical GIS
project has been contributing to. James Macgill of GBHGIS and Colin
Chinnery of the British Library's International Dunhuang project have
created a demonstration system that presents one vision of how a
geographical front end to the BL's content might look. A version of this
demonstration is now on-line at:
http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/geotools/blpilot/MapKiosk.html
Please note that address; although it may look like part of the BL site,
it is hosted at Leeds University and nobody is saying the BL will
necessarily create such a system for itself, as part of its work for
NOF-Digitise or otherwise (so please do not circulate this address widely,
or link to it). However, a presentation of the demonstration system to BL
staff a few weeks ago seems to have created considerable interest. NB the
system now on-line is slightly cut down from the system shown
internally: a base map showing relief features ran off an overseas site
and had to be removed for performance reasons, and some excerpts from the
National Sound Archive raised IPR issues. This means you can no longer use
the system to locate recordings of wrens singing, and then compare the
songs of English, Greek and Taiwanese wrens.
The demonstration system is hopefully fairly self-explanatory, but it was
constructed using GeoTools, an open source toolkit for geographical
visualisation of which James Macgill is the principal developer (see
www.geotools.org). Geotools is written in Java, so there are some
restrictions on what browsers it will run within. However, it has been
written very carefully to use a limited "lowest common denominator" subset
of Java, and we would claim it should run on just about any desktop PC
unless you have tried really hard to find a SERIOUSLY obsolete
browser. The GBHGIS site itself is being designed so that reference
enquiries will not depend on the use of GeoTools, and it is hard to imagine
anyone wanting to do interactive graphic visualisation on a mobile
phone. It would be useful to have some feedback on compatibility; did it
just run?
The "BL" demo system enables users to select material by location and time
period as well as type -- you can zoom in on particular areas, and narrow
the time period via a "timeline" bar. This obviously depends on including
metadata over and above Dublin Core. This is an area where there is a good
deal of development work currently going on. Programme participants may be
interested in a meeting I am organising within the Social Science History
Association meeting this October, on "Metadata for Time and Space". So
long as no-one drops out, this will include presentations on the Alexandria
Digital Library's Gazetteer Content Standard, the Electronic Cultural Atlas
Initiative's Timemap extensions to Dublin Core, English Heritage's
Timelines time period thesaurus, the Federal Geographic Data Committee's
standards, and a round table covering work in progress to add geography to
the Data Documentation Initiative's standard. At this point I have to add
that the meeting is in St. Louis, Missouri -- but the real focus of most
standard setting work is the US, and unless we interact with US projects we
cannot expect to have much impact on these processes. I find it irritating
that we have been specifically forbidden to use NOF funds to attend such
meetings, and a bit humiliating that I have only been able to get so
involved through US bodies funding my travel.
Geotools, incidentally, is ahead of any similar open source project
elsewhere in the world, compares well with commercial alternatives which
generally involve Windows-only plug-ins or ActiveX components, and provides
a significant part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative's technical
infrastructure. Being open source, anyone can use it free of charge, but
it is a toolkit so you will need someone to bolt different tools together
into an applet. ECAI's Timemap Viewer (see
http://www.archaeology.usyd.edu.au/timemap) is a general purpose and
ready-assembled applet built from GeoTools.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
======================================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: (07736) 727928
Web site: http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis
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