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historical maps

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has it been considered our would it be possible to create layers with historical street maps, say of a city or town in a certain century? this would also apply to ancient courses of rivers or ancient coast lines, say for troyes or pompeii etc.

asked 19 Mar '19, 07:52

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Sundar1
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One Answer:

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Yes, it has. There are numerous instances of this across the internet, often hosted by national mapping agencies (e.g., SwissTopo) or libraries (e.g., National Library of Scotland).

OSM itself hosts a number of historical maps for Great Britain largely sourced from contributors map collections. Quite recently maps from Southern Africa dating to the 1970s were also collected.

Wikimedia have a historical map project which incorporates a mapwarper developed by a long-time OSM contributor. There is a standalone version of MapWarper which has been widely used by OSM projects such as Irish Townlands.

There have been talks and blog posts on using historical maps with OSM since the first conference in 2007: far too many to provide even sample links.

answered 19 Mar '19, 10:25

SK53's gravatar image

SK53 ♦
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Source code available on GitHub .