Markus JOBST / Georg GARTNER
(Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Historic geospatial contents form an important part in actual planning, documentation and cartographic applications. Spatial planning situations take historic developments or states into account and therefore use historic maps, cartographic applications and geo-reference data. The main dilemma with historical geospatial content occurs, when the required content cannot be accessed, understood or (geo-)referenced, which is a result of technological dependencies, loss of semiotic description and loss of metadata descriptions. Analogue maps, like paper maps, offer a visible depiction at any time and request a legend and reference frame in order to be spatially usable. Simple digital maps need much more: beside an application that offers some interaction with the digital map, the format, the data´s reference frame, transmitting media and transmitting media´s characteristics / requirements need to be supported in order to receive a visible map. This requirement´s complexity is also true for (primary) digital geoinformation, which is mainly stored in bits and bytes. This ongoing investigation within the commission on digital technologies of cartographic heritage focuses on the latest developments of modern maps, which lead to neo-cartographic environments and its related archiving concepts. The steps from digital maps to multimedia-, web-, and Service-oriented maps result in real-time content which is affected by user participation in ubiquitous environments. It becomes obvious that these distributed, interactive, multimedia and real-time maps can hardly be archived by following old archiving paradigms: to keep the application/content in a save place forever. Instead, new methods have to be developed in order to keep digital contents “online”, accessible and thus ensure historic applications of tomorrow. Accompanied by technical methods, legal issues and the interdisciplinary understanding of archiving have to be adapted to the prospective historic use of digital geoinformation and modern maps. This is a starting point to remove the main barrier for the prospective history in modern cartography.
Keywords: Cartographic Heritage, Archiving, Geoinformation