addressinghistory - crowdsourcing historical data and maps

Stuart MacdonaldAddressingHistory Project ManagerEDINA & Data LibraryUniversity of Edinburgh

http://edina.ac.uk/projects/addressinghistory_summary.html

• JISC-funded Community Content project

• 6 months (April 2010 – September 2010)

• Partner with NLS

• Advisory Board

CC image courtesy of Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/karenhorton/3970883720/

• To create an online crowdsourcing tool which will combine data from digitised Scottish Post Office Directories (PODs) with contemporaneous historical maps

CC image courtesy of Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/karenhorton/4418947864/

• Project will focus on 3 volumes of PODs: 1784-5; 1865; 1905-6)

• Historic maps georeferenced by NLS

• PODs digitised by NLS in conjunction with the Internet Archive

• Public domain

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CC image courtesy of Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/karenhorton/4463849542/in/set-72157613482977550//

• Tool will allow ‘the crowd’ to georeference POD entries by ‘clicking’ on a digitised map facilitating the addition of a grid reference to the OCR’d POD held in XML format in a database structure

• Sympathetic to tools developed by related projects incl. VUG, Edinburgh town atlas

•Tool built using open standards forinteroperability with potential hosting infrastructures e.g NLS

• Potential for linking with other spatially referenced resources e.g census

• Scoping mass geo-coding of PODs using OS Codepoint, Yahoo and Google geocoding services

• Also build APIs to exploit the value-added content

• Explore exposing content to LOD via RDF triples

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• Interface has to be easy-to-use for a range of users

• Robust and scalable to accommodate 400 Scottish PODs currently being digitised

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• Mechanism to check user-generated content such as georeferences,tags/annotations

• Possible crowdsourcing of mass geo-coded content

• Edinburgh Beltane – beacon of partnership & CHSS Knowledge Transfer office

• Amplification of tool and APIs via Social Media Channels

• Open knowledge evangelists – spread the gospel according to AddressingHistory!

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THANKING YOU!

Acknowledgements:

• JISC - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

• National Library of Scotland - http://www.nls.uk/

• Visualising Urban Geographies (VUG) project – http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/• Edinburgh City Libraries – http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/libraries/