The Alps, E. von Sydow's School Atlas, 1865

One of several maps found at my Grandmother's house. The maps are from various school atlases from between 1850 and 1890. The books themselves were mostly gone, with only a few loose pages remaining. The map below, though, is from one where title and index pages are still preserved: E. von Sydow's Schulatlas, 17th Edition, 1865.

The map image is zoomable (try clicking on it!) and has a total resolution of 23.569 x 15.801 pixels. You can use the '+' and '-' keys (or your mousewheel) to zoom in and out, and arrow keys (or mouse) to pan.

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I scanned some of the maps with a flatbed scanner at 2400dpi resolution, turned them into zoomable Web images with our excellent open source tool MagickTiler, and used the OpenZoom viewer to embed them here. The maps have meanwhile found new permant residence in an acid-free cardboard box wrapped in archive-grade polypropylene envelopes.

Thanks go out to Publishers Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH for allowing me to use the maps from this atlas on my blog!

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The COMPASS Crowdsourcing Experiment IS ON!

We've now opened up full access to our small crowdsourcing experiment: the COMPASS Map Labeler. The experiment is part of a study we are conducting within the scope of the EuropeanaConnect project. The goal is to investigate the effect of social tagging and end-user map annotation on search & retrieval in online map portals, and eventually build a 'ground truth' for the evaluation of map search engines.

In our experiment we are asking volunteers to judge the relevance of a particular text label (pre-selected automatically by our system) to a random map from a test collection (kindly provided by the US Library of Congress, and mass-tiled using our very own MagickTiler). Users can also add their own labels to the maps if they see fit.

The task is simple, quick, and it's actually fun, too! (And, by the way, also a nice way to discover some hidden gems in the LoC's map collection!) So in case you want to join - head over to our study portal right now, sign up for an account, and get started!

http://compass.cs.univie.ac.at/

There's also a second stage in our experiment. It will be about map annotation, will open very soon, and I'll cover it in one of the next posts. You can already catch a first glimpse of it here, though.

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MagickTiler at Toronto JUG

Last week Christian presented MagickTiler - our new open source Java image tiling tool & library - at the Toronto Java User Group meeting! I wasn't there but hey - I'm pretty sure it must have been met with wild excitement and lively discussion :-) (And rumor has it that there may have been some beer involved, too...)

You can find the slides on slideshare & embedded below!

Update: Christian's post on MagickTiler (including some example code) is here.

View more presentations from aboutgeo.

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