[Talk-GB] Hand-drawn OS maps on Wikimedia Commons

Tim Waters chippy2005 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 7 16:47:55 UTC 2013


Hi folks,

just to add a little bit of brain food. I'm involved with the
georeferencing  / georectification side of things with the Wikimaps project
with Wikimedia Commons with Susanna Anas as mentioned earlier. We're using
a stripped down version of the open source mapwarper software which
essentially uses the GDAL library behind the scenes.

The idea is that an image of a map from the Commons can be georeferenced or
georeferenced into a new warped image.

There is of course a discussion about what to do with these resulting
images, but there's also some interesting design threads about how to embed
the georeferencing data back into the original image's metadata. This is
all with a view towards the metadata needs to a library or archive for
example (since they would be the types of organisations giving the source
images to Commons).

At the easiest level - what can be stored is a set of coordinate points,
ground control points which match features on image space to geographic
space. In addition a choice of mathematical transformation could also be
stored. The idea is that a user can replicate the processing using GDAL
and/or other desktop GIS programs. I'd say that corner points is useful for
placing the image roughly in space but it's not reproducible nor
comprehensive.

I would imagine that there's already some well established standards within
the library space. I think that any solution needs to be as open,
accessible and reproducible as possible.

It's only just getting it's feet off the ground but it's an interesting
discussion anyhow, please do join!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikimaps

cheers and happy mapping!

Tim


On 4 October 2013 23:59, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

> The answer is "it isn't really done" ;-)
>
> As far as I can tell Commons currently has no documented way of
> embedding anything other than a single coordinate pair for an image,
> which is obviously okay for photos but pretty unhelpful for maps (or
> indeed aerial/satellite imagery). This is a pity, as there's some
> nicely curated map collections there and of course Susanna's work is
> likely to bring us a lot more. (I'll drop her a note about this
> discussion)
>
> I put together OSDcoords, which Andy pointed out, as a quick and dirty
> hack to make them display with the hope that it could be transformed
> into machine-readable multi-point metadata at a later date; to the
> best of my knowledge, its the only example we have of this.
>
> Making something more usable out of it is probably beyond my
> cartographic expertise, but we're happy to take guidance!
>
> Andrew.
>
> On 2 October 2013 16:17, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think what is best is a 'world file'. See
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_file.
> >
> > I dont quite know what technology wikimedia are using, but there are some
> > experienced wikimedians in the OSM community: Susanna Anas from Helsinki
> has
> > been driving a lot of activity about using old maps from GLAMs
> (Galleries,
> > Libraries, Archives and Museums). Obviously there is a need to store
> > geolocation metadata with maps on wikimedia, but it's not obvious to me
> how
> > this is done at the moment.
> >
> > Jerry
> >
> >
> > On 30 September 2013 23:10, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi Steven,
> >>
> >> The short answer is not quite sure - I bodged these together from a
> >> couple of CSV metadata sheets. I think they've been exported from
> >> something else to get to this stage but I don't have access to that
> >> (though I could ask). Do you have an example of the kind of
> >> metadata/formatting you would need?
> >>
> >> (I mostly lurk on this mailing list; not a very active OSM/digital
> >> cartography type, so may be missing something obvious here)
> >>
> >> Are the KMZ/KML files from the BL sufficient? This is the same
> >> metadata & same files (give or take a bit of cleaning up) so should
> >> match directly.
> >>
> >> Andrew.
> >>
> >> On 29 September 2013 17:20, Steven Horner <steven at stevenhorner.com>
> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >> Corner coordinates are now displaying, allowing these to be aligned &
> >> >> adjusted to fit. Have fun!
> >> >>
> >> >
> >> > Are the configuration files available already somewhere or is there a
> >> > plan
> >> > to make them available so users of the maps could just load the maps
> >> > rather
> >> > than having to align themselves with the given coordinates.
> >> >
> >> > I have just aligned about half a dozen of the maps using MAPC2MAPC and
> >> > the
> >> > coordinates posted but it's a long job to do the whole 200 files.
> Happy
> >> > to
> >> > post the files somewhere of the ones I have done.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> - Andrew Gray
> >>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Talk-GB mailing list
> >> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
> _______________________________________________
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