This is not about Ireland ...
As some members of this list will know, some of the funding for the GB Historical GIS team in 2006-8 came from an EU project, which enabled us to remove our dependence on the OS National Grid coordinate system and otherwise internationalise our framework, integrate some very detailed data covering the past administrative geographies of Estonia and Sweden, and add data on the states of Europe and their changing boundaries.
The vagaries of European funding meant that was looking like a complete dead end, but more recently we have started to work with the Center for Geographical Analysis at Harvard on the idea of a _Global_ historical GIS, and are seeking funding. The overall project is now very much based on the hybrid ontology-GIS architecture we have developed for Britain, which means we can hold a great deal of information about administrative bodies even if we don't know their exact boundaries -- but it is obviously better if we do.
We have already computerised most of the textual information in Hertslet's "Map of Europe by Treaty", plus later listings of changes produced by the US State Department, and would be extending this to the rest of the world.
I am currently trying to say what needs to be done on the boundary mapping side, and coming up with an almost complete blank on EXISTING digital boundary files for historical international boundaries. There is obviously the IEG-Maps system in Mainz, but that is mostly about central Europe, and mostly un-georeferenced Postscript files, not GIS files.
Our data model, and the way it lets us work in continuous time, means we are certainly planning something new. We are also planning to document the work very thoroughly, linking back to original sources (which will often be maps that are now on-line as digital images).
However, there must be more existing digital files than I have located so far. Suggestions?
NB this is specifically about historical boundaries, so I am excluding the last 40 years and digital boundaries that were modern when they were created but are now a bit historical. It is also about vector boundary data sets (Shape files or similar), not digital images of old maps; we know that the latter are now abundant, and expect to make great use of them.
If the project goes ahead, the new boundary construction would be mostly limited to international boundaries, but the system would be designed to assimilate more detailed boundaries from other researchers.
Thanks,
Humphrey Southall
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