Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Applied Science
Journal Title
PLOS ONE
Pub Date
11-2021
Publisher
PLOS
Volume
16
Issue
11
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
A great deal of information is contained within archival maps—ranging from historic political boundaries, to mineral resources, to the locations of cultural landmarks. There are many ongoing efforts to preserve and digitize historic maps so that the information contained within them can be stored and analyzed efficiently. A major barrier to such map digitizing efforts is that the geographic location of each map is typically unknown and must be determined through an often slow and manual process known as georeferencing. To mitigate the time costs associated with the georeferencing process, this paper introduces a fully automated method based on map toponym (place name) labels. It is the first study to demonstrate these methods across a wide range of both simulated and real-world maps. We find that toponym-based georeferencing is sufficiently accurate to be used for data extraction purposes in nearly half of all cases. We make our implementation available to the wider research community through fully open-source replication code, as well as an online georeferencing tool, and highlight areas of improvement for future research. It is hoped that the practical implications of this research will allow for larger and more efficient processing and digitizing of map information for researchers, institutions, and the general public.
Recommended Citation
Bahgat, Karim and Runfola, Daniel, Toponym-assisted Map Georeferencing: Evaluating the Use of Toponyms for the Digitization of Map Collections (2021). PLOS ONE, 16(11).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260039
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260039
