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/