NLS Maps API: historical map of Great Britain for mashups

With the help of the software developed in our project OldMapsOnline.org has prepared a very interesting historical mapping application, allowing anyone to include selected historical geo-referenced maps of Great Britain in their own websites. Sets of Ordnance Survey mapping relating to Scotland, England and Wales, dating from the 1920s to 1940s, have been seamed together and geo-referenced, then specially prepared for use in external websites.

NLS Maps API: Historical maps of Great Britain for use in mashups 

For more information, please view http://geo.nls.uk/maps/api/

The maps have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, allowing free use and adaptation of the mapping, provided it is properly attributed. The maps were scanned and geo-referenced by the National Library of Scotland, and rendered on the Amazon EC2 computer
cluster by Klokan Technologies GmbH, with a software based on a customised version of the MapTiler application.

The maps can be used for many purposes - they can be integrated with other mapping, used for research purposes, used as a backdrop for bespoke markers or mapping data, or used to create other maps (such as OpenStreetMap). The application will also run on many mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad or Google Android based phones - simply by opening the website http://nls.tileserver.com/.

The historical map API homepage provides simple instructions for how to embed the mapping in websites, and use it with the most popular free web-mapping services, including Google, Bing, and Openlayers.

OldMapsOnline.org project will include this map as one of the reference maps in our Georeferencer.org online service.

More info at http://geo.nls.uk/maps/api/

Meet us at the ICA CartoHeritage Workshop in Vienna!

The ICA Commission on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage and Vienna University of Technology are organising the 5th International Workshop on Digital Approaches in Cartographic Heritage in Vienna on February 22–24, 2010.

We will give a talk OldMapsOnline.org: IIPImage, JPEG2000 and Georeferencer.org during this workshop.

Please follow direct link to the registration form if you are interested to participate.

We look forward to discuss our project and related topics with the attendees of this workshop!

IIPImage JPEG2000: Free Software for Zoomable High Resolution Online Images!

Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project are proud to announce the release of a new version of the open-source IIPImage server software (http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/).

The freely available IIPImage software can be used for stunning online presentations of scanned documents, paintings, maps, books, newspapers, photographs or other high-resolution images on the web directly from JPEG2000 or TIFF files.

The new version allows direct publishing from JPEG2000 images to a wide variety of different client technologies based on AJAX, Adobe Flash or Silverlight. These include popular pan&zoom viewers based on Zoomify or Seadragon technology (including the Seadragon AJAX viewer and the Seadragon iPhone application) as well as it's own AJAX enabled IIPMooViewer. The documents provided by IIPImage can be displayed in any web browser and on a number of platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux or iPhone.

The software is primarily targeted at institutions who operate their own server connected to the Internet and who want to publish large collections of digital images directly from JPEG2000 or
TIFF files.

Institutions who does not have the necessary infrastructure can follow our alternative tutorial at http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/ on how to achieve the same using standard web hosting and free software.

IIPImage is a light-weight client-server system for fast and efficient online viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be bandwidth and memory efficient and usable over a slow Internet connection even on gigapixel sized images.
It is available for free, under an open source license (GNU GPL). We recommend installing
the software on a Linux (or other UNIX) server. We have prepared an easy to install binary package for Debian and Ubuntu with step-by-step instructions for installation.

JPEG2000 support has been implemented using the Kakadu library, which provides one of the fastest implementations of the JPEG2000 ISO standard and is redistributable for non-commercial use.

The enhancement of IIPImage was developed by the Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project with the support of grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

The Moravian Library (http://www.mzk.cz/), based in Brno, Czech Republic, is a research institution and a legal deposit library. Project OldMapsOnline.org (http://www.oldmapsonline.org/) is a research project of the Moravian Library that aims to develop software to assist in the management, manipulation and visualisation of historical map collections on the web. The project team is designing online tools for publishing, collaborative georeferencing, annotation, 3D visualisation, accuracy analysis and geometadata specification for old maps.

For more information and for the IIPImage JPEG2000 software, see http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/.