The GB Historical GIS would like to know not about GIS-driven historical web sites in general, but about web sites which support some kind of public interface allowing users to enter the site by specifying a geographical coordinate.

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CONTEXT

The re-launch of the Vision of Britain web site, created by the Great Britain Historical GIS project, has proved almost as tortuous an experience as the original launch.  Up to now, the most visible improvements have been to the library of historic maps (which covers the whole of Europe, not just Britain):

  http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/maps (and NB you can pan right from that initial view, not just zoom)

The site has never been designed as a conventional GIS-driven site, but rather as a source of information about "places" and their history, and the improvements here are starting to be visible. In particular, while the old site had just one page for "places", as distinct from administrative units, we now have four:

    Location -- a pair of maps, one showing location within Britain and the other a more detailed excerpt 
    from a historical map, the latter providing a link into our historical map library.

    Historical writing -- access to our libraries of historical gazetteers and travel writing.

    Historical units and statistics -- access to the original core of the system, i.e. legally defined 
    administrative areas, and statistics for those areas.

    Related websites -- Links to other sites.

We also offer the same four pages for any arbitrary location, reachable by typing searching by a postcode, clicking on a map in our historic map library with the "information" option selected, or coming in from outside the site using a URL with this format:

    http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/location_page.jsp?easting=465475&northing=101993

... where the coordinates are meters from the Ordnance Survey grid origin south west of Cornwall.  In this case, the content linked to from the various pages is necessarily based on spatial searches.  For named "places, you get the results of the spatial searches but also, if it exists, explicitly-linked content.  For example, the spatial search for "historical units and statistics" is "point in polygon": completely ignoring names, obviously excluding units that do not cover the "place" and also excluding the many units in our system we do not have polygons for; conversely, the non-spatial search basically returns units named after the place, which will include the Registration sub-Districts and Sanitary Districts we have no polygons for, and Rural Districts which generally did not include the towns they were named after.

Similarly, for "places" we can offer two kinds of "Related websites".  One set link to sites that have large number of pages about towns and villages, such as the Victoria County History and Wikipedia.  The other set links to sites which, like ours, provide access based on coordinates.  For example, the aim of the Geograph site is to include at least one photograph for every 1 km grid square in Britain:

    http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/SU655020

The Geonames site is building a vast global gazetteer based on user contributions:

    http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_50.81322_-1.07052.html

Those are two of the seven geo-referenced web sites we are currently linking to, but none of them are exactly historical.  CAN ANYONE SUGGEST GEO-REFERENCED SITES THAT _ARE_ HISTORICAL?

We are obviously particularly interested in sites covering Britain, but I would like to hear about such sites for any part of the world.  Note that our new system is, architecturally, a European system rather than a British system, although more work is needed before pages for areas outside Britain work properly.  When they do, we will be publishing an alternative call into our location pages that uses latitude and longitude (WGS-84), and the above example of how we link to Geonames shows that we can already call out using WGS-84.  Internally, the site uses the Lambert Bipolar Conic projection, which works well for Europe as a whole but not for the world.

You will note that our site also provides geo-referenced access to the site of Cassini Maps, who sell reproductions of historical maps.  They pay us a royalty on sales, but in general we would prefer not to link to commercial sites.  I would still be interested in hearing about them.

I would also be interested in hearing from anyone working on "geo-referencing text", like my work with travel writing.

Best wishes,

Humphrey Southall