Fostering collaborative organization, sharing and documentation of geohistorical documents

English presentation of the project in pdf format

Geomatics does not deal anymore only in managing topographical entities, material objects and biophysical processes or phenomena. It is involved in building more general Georeferenced Information Systems including all kind of digital information including Web content, cultural work and even personal life (friends, messages, places …).

Geotopia is an attempt to address the question of georeferencing in document oriented communities (archives, museum, libraries, cultural institutions …).

• Imagerie et Systèmes d’Information Géographique (ISIG) UMR Environnement-Ville-Société of CNRS (http://umr5600.univ-lyon3.fr/isig.html)
• Computer Science Laboratory Pau University (LIUPPA : http://liuppa.univ-pau.fr ) and specifically “Electronic Document, semantics and Interaction“ Unit (DESI : http://liuppa.univ-pau.fr/DESI/ )
• Makina Corpus (http://makina-corpus.com/) an opensource software company.

The main source of funding is the TGE Adonis. We hope to get some additional funding in the future.

The “Very Big Equipment” Adonis, created in March 2007 by CNRS has the mission of supplying three kind of infrastructures in order to spread the use of data among researchers in Social Sciences :

• Data access and management platforms :
• Publication platforms
• Data storing platforms

• Make easier the publication, diffusion, exchange, commentary and analysis of archive data
• Establishing links between different collections of documents
• Facilitating access to the documents
• Sharing documents
• Collaborative enrichment of documents
• Using spatial and temporal properties of the documents to facilitate this collaborative work

• Implementation of an on-line platform in order to:
  • Georeference documents
  • Geovisualise documents
  • Annotate documents
  • Manage metadata
  • Offer collaborative tools
• Analysis of the use of this platform
  • How people use the platform
  • How they collaborate (community ?)
  • What is the impact for researchers, archivists
  • Education use of this platform

• History of the relations between a town and a river (The Furan in Saint-Etienne (J. Ultsch)
  • Gather historical data relating to the Furan in Saint-Etienne new ways of exploration,
  • Experimenting the construction of the spatial data set required (gazetteer)
  • Test the platform in different projects (publish a book, discuss a collection of documents)
• Architecture and urban shapes in Lyon for the last 30 years
  • Geohistorical research combining historical GIS and a data base of photos

Schedule 1st Phase Implementation of the platform between July 2008 and June 2009 3 releases First stable version (V2) in Jan-Fev 2009. Opened to the users in March 2009 Application to the data set of Saint-Etienne 2nd Phase (June 2009-2010) New functionalities Application to the data set of Lyon

• Metadata management
• Gazetteer building (global gazetter, BD IGN, street index…)
• Trust level in georeference (manual and interactive)
• Collaborative work organization (by areas, topics, projects…)
• Bulk data managements
• Data ownership, copyrights
• Use of Archive documents in present projects
• Collaboration between institutions, groups and individuals (amateurs)