Geopan at@s: A brokering based gateway to georeferenced historical maps for risk analysis

Abstract

Importance of ancient and historical maps is nowadays recognized in many applications (e.g., urban planning, landscape valorisation and preservation, land changes identification, etc.). In the last years a great effort has been done by different institutions, such as Geographical Institutes, Public Administrations, and collaborative communities, for digitizing and publishing online collections of historical maps. In spite of this variety and availability of data, information overload makes difficult their discovery and management: Without knowing the specific repository where the data are stored, it is difficult to find the information required. In addition, problems of interconnection between different data sources and their restricted interoperability may arise. This paper describe a new brokering based gateway developed to assure interoperability between data, in particular georeferenced historical maps and geographic data, gathered from different data providers, with various features and referring to different historical periods. The developed approach is exemplified by a new application named GeoPAN Atl@s that is aimed at linking in Northern Italy area land changes with risk analysis (local seismicity amplification and flooding risk) by using multi-Temporal data sources and historic maps