GeoJSON-T: adding time to GeoJSON

GeoJSON-T is a proposed extension to the GeoJSON data standard (spec) widely used “for encoding a variety of geographic data structures,” principally in web maps. GeoJSON-T is described in the README file of its GitHub repository, but there is not yet a versioned specification. Now would be a good time to make refinements and write one. To join that discussion, see Issue #3 in the GeoJSON-T GitHub repository.

GeoJSON-T was initially developed in 2017 [1], motivated particularly by requirements of historical researchers. Many geographic features of interest have a temporal scope, and a standard way of describing geographic and temporal extents together would benefit creators of web applications meant to view and analyze such data [2]. A pilot map+time application, now called Linked Paths, was developed at that time to test and demonstrate its implementation.

The temporal attributes of “typical” geographic features such as countries, regions, provinces, cities, buildings, and monuments are important for understanding change over time. But we also routinely map and analyze spatial patterns in many other kinds of historical phenomena: events, and “event-like” features including conflict, births and deaths, finds of archaeological objects, as well as many kinds of geographic movement, including journeys and flows.

Just use “properties”?

The temporal attributes of a GeoJSON Feature can be represented as among its “properties,” and web map applications are routinely built to parse temporal data there and use it to display dynamical change. For example:

{ "type": "Feature",
  "geometry": {"type":"Point", "coordinates": [0.0,0.0]},
  "properties": {
    "name": "Null Island",
    "start": "1492",
    "end": "1500",
    "prop1": "some value", ...
  }
}

But there are several shortcomings inherent in this approach, including:

1) A given feature might change location or shape over time; this can currently only be handled by creating multiple Features for the same thing/place, each with different time properties. Better to put all of a place’s geometries in a GeometryCollection and let each have its own “when.”

2) Likewise, other properties of a feature might change over time, for example name and type (e.g. villa to town to city). These too can be temporally scoped with their own “when.”

3) The labels used for temporal property keys (‘start’ vs. ‘begin’ vs. ‘year’ etc.) vary per dataset, so data from one project can’t be linked to or combined with data from another unless there is prior coordination. Without a standard vocabulary and structure, there can’t be a generic, open-source “time map” library for rendering maps with various temporal visualizations [2].

4) There are no conventions for expressing the various types of uncertainty found in historical data, including vagueness, imprecision, unknown values.

5) Movement features such as journeys, lifepaths, and flows can contain multiple nodes and edges, each with distinctive associated timestamps or intervals. In cases, sequence is known but dates are not.

Just add “when”

What GeoJSON-T does is specify vocabulary and structure for a “when” object, which can be added in several locations outside of the “properties” element required by GeoJSON (foreign member in the vocabulary of the GeoJSON spec):

1) At the level of a Feature, applying to all geometries within it (simple example here; for all options see the draft specification):

{ "type": "Feature", 
  "geometry": {"type":"Point", "coordinates": [0.0,0.0]}, 
  "properties": { "name": "Null Island", "prop1": "some value", ... },
  "when" {
    "timespans":[{"start": "1492", "end": "1500", }]
  }
 }

2) At the level of an individual geometry within a GeometryCollection, e.g.

{ "type": "Feature", 
  "geometry": {
    "type":"GeometryCollection", 
    "geometries": [
      {"type":"Point", 
       "coordinates": [0.0,0.0],
       "when": {"timespans":[{"start": "1492", "end": "1495", }]}
      },
      {"type":"Point", 
       "coordinates": [1.0,2.0], 
       "when": {"timespans":[{"start": "1498", "end": "1500", }]} 
      }]          
    },
    "properties": { "name": "Null Island", "prop1": "some value" }
}

3) At the level of a FeatureCollection, applying to all of its Features

A “when” object can include optionally one or more timespans, and/or one or more named periods from a time period gazetteer. These and other optional properties are described in the repo README. Some proposed changes are listed in Issue #3 in the repo, which is open for comment.

Existing GeoJSON-compatible apps and libraries will simply ignore “when” objects, wherever they might be. Support for “when” would be included in any new software and libraries supporting the GeoJSON-T extension.

Current and planned adoption

In recent months, GeoJSON-T has received increasing attention, a couple of test implementations, and plans for more. These have highlighted some issues, and the draft format needs a closer examination for it to become a versioned specification of a standard format.

Linked Places format
The GeoJSON-T patterns for time were adopted for Linked Places format (LPF), developed in 2018 for contributions to the World Historical Gazetteer and Pelagios project’s Recogito platforms. LPF is not only valid GeoJSON, but valid JSON-LD, a syntax of RDF, and it standardizes the representation of several additional dimensions of Place beyond geometry and when: names, types, relations, descriptions, depictions, depictions, and links to corresponding external place records.

Linked Places format is therefore a specialized superset of GeoJSON-T, intended for historical gazetteer platforms specifically.

WebMaps-T
This early-stage project led by the British Library [3] seeks to develop a standard, customizable library for map+time visualizations in web applications, and would render data formatted as GeoJSON-T.

IIIF Maps Community Group
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) now has a working group dedicated to “defining best practice in associating geographical information with IIIF materials.” The Maps group is “explor(ing) creating a JSON schema [meeting] the needs of the IIIF community” specifically for map images, and is at least informally evaluating GeoJSON-T toward that end.


Notes

[1] In 2016, supported by a small Resource Development Grant from the Pelagios project, I met with colleagues Lex Berman and Rainer Simon to outline a GeoJSON format extension that could handle features representing historical geographic movement. GeoJSON-T and the Linked Paths pilot were products of that work. That project, titled “Linking Linked Places,” is documented in this blog post.

[2] The Timemap.js library developed by Nick Rabinowitz in 2008 joined the SIMILE Timeline library with several web mapping libraries of that era. It has fallen into disuse due to outdated dependency issues.

[3] An initiating hackathon for WebMaps-T took place in London in 2019, hosted at the British Library by Gethin Rees and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, with funding from a Pelagios Working Group small grant. Work to refine its early products continues, albeit slowed by lack of further funding. WebMaps-T is intended to have a modular structure permitting several types of temporal visualizations, including multiple timeline styles and histograms.

linkedplaces.draw (part 1)

In Part 2, I describe the functionality in linkedplaces.draw to date. At some point, a collaboratively authored functional spec for a ‘proper’ crowd-sourcing tool will come together on GitHub.

I have been building a pilot tool for digitizing features from georeferenced historical maps (and maps of history such as found in historical atlases), tentatively named linkedplaces.draw. Its immediate intended use is for what we at the University of Pittsburgh World History Center have been calling “historical mapathons.” We are planning to facilitate, stage and encourage such events, in which individuals and small groups can virtually gather to harvest temporally scoped features from old maps, for their immediate use and for preparing contributions to World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) [1]. We have begun testing it by digitizing features for settlements, archaeological sites, regions, dynasties, and ethnic groups from the highly regarded “An Historical Atlas of Central Asia” (Bregel 2005).

linkedplaces.draw app (June 2020 alpha)
Fig. 1 – linkedplaces.draw app (June 2020 alpha)

Maps v. Texts as Gazetteer Sources

Old maps represent a largely untapped storehouse of information about geographies of the past. Digitizing features from maps that can be geo-referenced (a.k.a. geo-rectified, or warped) without too much distortion provides an estimated geometry that is invaluable. The most immediate use scenario driving development of WHG is mapping place references in historical texts and tabular datasets. But to make a digital map you need geometry, however approximate. Discovering suitable coordinates for lists of place names drawn from historical texts is far and away the most difficult and time-consuming task in this scenario. If your source texts are of a region and period it makes sense to build a gazetteer of that region and period using maps made at the time–and then to contribute the data to WHG so no one has to ever do it again! Certainly, the feasibility of deriving useful geometry in this way is reduced the further back in history one goes.

Maps made prior to the 18th century–beautiful, instructive, and useful as they may be–normally don’t have sufficient geodetic accuracy for this purpose (Fig. 2b). Obtaining geometry for place references made in earlier periods will require a different approach, e.g. capturing topological relations like containment. Also, one can also digitize features from maps of history, as we are doing with the Bregel atlas mentioned above.

a) S. America 1812, b) "Aphrica" (& Arabia) 1600
Fig. 2 – a) S. America 1812, b) “Aphrica” (& Arabia) 1600

The GB1900 Proof-of-Concept

Although hundreds of thousands of old maps have been scanned and made available for viewing and download by map libraries around the world [2], the names and estimated coordinates of features on them have not been transcribed in any quantity. The recent project GB1900 provided a successful proof-of-concept (cf. “The GB1900 project–from the horse’s mouth“). Crowd-sourcing map transcription software was custom built for the public at large to work with a single Ordnance Survey map, and over a period of months millions of names and geometries were digitized. Preliminary results can be viewed at http://geo.nls.uk/maps/gb1900/; analytical products are sure to follow. Unfortunately the software used for GB1900 cannot be re-purposed for other maps and general use.

Unfortunately, although the code for the GB1900 crowd-sourcing software is available, it is not re-usable; at least I and others have been unable to revive it. Hence, linkedplaces.draw, which will hopefully serve as a demonstrator that could be used in finding funds to build a sturdy open-source platform that can be used by groups of any size–including “the crowd”–to do this valuable work.

Related Tasks and Software

Several existing free software packages and web sites provide users the capability to perform these tasks related to old map feature digitization, in some combination: a) georeference a map image and save the rectified result as a GeoTIFF, b) create web map tilesets from a GeoTIFF file, and c) display single images or tilesets as overlays on modern web base maps. Typically viewers for these provide an opacity control, allowing comparison of old and modern geography. This is all great, but what is missing is the capability to draw or trace features from the rectified images.

Coda (for the moment)

For years, computer scientists and others have explored the possibility of automated feature extraction. There are a few such efforts under way right now. I wish them godspeed, and do believe machine methods will ultimately be able to extract a list of names from some relatively recent map series having especially clear cartography, but also that they will never handle maps like Figure 2a, and will never successfully extract the estimated geometry of even point features. Yes I know, never say never. In the meantime…


[1] The World Historical Gazetteer project is building a web platform for developing, publishing, and aggregating data about places drawn from historical sources by members of the broad community of interest studying the past within and across numerous disciplines. A Version 1 launch is planned for June/July 2020. See the About pages and Tutorials as http://dev.whgazetteer.org for details.

[2] The extraordinary David Rumsey Map Collection has many extended features and direct hi-res downloads; Old Maps Online is a “gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.”

Linked Paths

Fig. 1 - Linked Places sandbox
Fig. 1 – Linked Paths sandbox

Linked Paths is a sandbox web application for experiments in representing historical geographic movement: journeys, named routes (and route systems), and flows. The term path, (synonymous with course), refers to the spatial-temporal setting for any of these. Linked Paths displays several exemplar datasets formatted as GeoJSON-T, my proposed temporal extension to the venerable GeoJSON.

The site features and functions bear some explanation, as they’re not all immediately apparent.

Historical geographic movement data:
Journeys, Routes, and Flows

Last fall, Lex Berman, Rainer Simon and I came up with draft conceptual and logical models of historical geographic movement, which are described in some depth in blog posts here and here. Briefly, we posit three classes of movement we wish to model.

Journeys

Fig. 2 - Seven journey, flow, and route datasets
Fig. 2 – Seven journey, flow, and route datasets

Journeys are events—individual occurrences of one or more persons moving between two or more places over some period of time. Journeys are often typed according to purpose (pilgrimage, expedition, migration, march, Grand Tour, etc.) or mode of travel (voyage, flight). Spatial data for journeys always includes two or more places (i.e. an itinerary), normally ordered temporally. The actual paths traveled between places may be known, unknown, estimated, or ignored. Similar variation in completeness holds for temporal attributes as well: we might know the year(s) or decade(s) the journey took place, dates for some or all departures and arrivals, durations of segments, or simply sequence. Linked Paths depicts two pilgrimages from the 4th and 7th centuries, and a recent 5-month journey of my own I called “Roundabout.”

Named routes and route systems (hRoutes)

Routes are the named courses of multiple journeys known to have occurred over a period of time (notably, for trade and religious pilgrimage); they are differentiated from the physical media for those journeys (roads, rivers, etc.). That is, a route may comprise segments of multiple roads and rivers. Exemplar route data in Linked Paths are for Old World Trade Routes, Ming Dynasty Courier Routes, and the pilgrimage route described on the Vicarello Beakers.  Other well-known route systems include the Silk Road, the Pilgrimage Routes to Santiago de Compostela, the Incense Route, the Amber Routes.

Flows

Flows are aggregated data about journey events; that is, the movement of something at some magnitude over some period of time. The Incanto Trade flow example in Linked Paths aggregates data about the number of ships involved in 840 individual commercial voyages outward from Venice between the 13th and 15th centuries.

A map and data-dependent temporal visualization

figure3
Fig. 3 – Four types of temporal visualizations

Linked Paths consumes data in GeoJSON-T format and renders it on the fly to a web map and one of four kinds of temporal visualization depending on the nature of the data:

  1. a timeline of events (journeys)
  2. a timeline depicting a relevant period and its immediate context, drawn from PeriodO collections (where period is the only temporal information known)
  3. a histogram indicating the number of segments valid for a period (time-indexed trade routes)
  4. a histogram indicating magnitude of flows per period

The color for journey segments is scaled: earlier=lighter, later=darker

Linked Data

Fig. 4 - Place popup links to external gazetteer, segment search for connections
Fig. 4 – Place popup links to external gazetteer, segment search for connections

Place dialog popups include links to gazetteer APIs, including Pleiades, GeoNames, and the temporal gazetteer (TGAZ) of Harvard’s China Historical GIS.

Period timelines for Courier, Vicarello, and Bordeaux datasets are drawn dynamically from the PeriodO API, rendering the relevant period and adjacent neighbors from a collection.

Search

Query a union index of selected fields in all Place records from the 7 individual project gazetteers. Results are grouped by dataset, and leverage name variant data within Place records. For example, Dubrovnik and Ragusa are known to refer to the same place.

The “Find connections” link in place popups (Fig. 4) queries identifies segments associated with a given place from all 7 datasets.

GeoJSON-T

The GeoJSON-T format is a work-in-progress. Code and preliminary documentation is available at its GitHub repository.

Briefly, GeoJSON-T:

  • Permits adding an optional “when” object to Features in one of two locations
    • as a sibling to “geometry” in a Feature
    • as a sibling to “coordinates” in each member of a GeometryCollection
  • Leverages GeometryCollections for changing geometries over time (similarly to the HistoGraph project) and permits “properties” in GeometryCollection members
  • Will be processed by existing GeoJSON-compatible software, simply ignoring “when” objects and processing geometry and properties found in the standard places

A Case for GeoJSON-T

GeoJSON has become a popular standard format for representing geographic features in web mapping applications. It is supported by the key JavaScript libraries Leaflet, Mapbox, OpenLayers, and D3, and to some extent by desktop GIS software (QGIS, ArcMap). GitHub renders valid GeoJSON as simple maps, and web-based utility applications like geojson.io and GeoJSONLint help users create, edit and validate it.

As the name suggests, GeoJSON-T adds time to GeoJSON. Geographic features, defined broadly[1], include events we want to map and analyze (e.g. births, deaths, battles, journeys, publication). For many analyses and mapping tasks, the temporal attributes of geographic features are as important as their geometry. Furthermore, many non-eventive geographic features–settlements, polities, buildings, monuments, earthworks, archaeological finds and so on–have essential temporal attributes.

linkedplaces-screen
Figure 1 – Xuanzang’s 7c pilgrimage in Linked Places demo

It is hardly controversial that a great many natural and fictional phenomena have a relevant spatial and temporal coverage (cf. Dublin Core), or setting.[2] Shouldn’t the de facto standard for geographic feature data account for time?

It could be (and has been) argued that time can be added to a GeoJSON feature as a member of its “Properties” element, organized however one sees fit. Certainly true, and many have. At issue is whether there should be a simple accepted standard location and format for temporal information within a GeoJSON Feature. If there were, a) new software, or new versions of existing software, could parse those temporal elements and render them to timeline visualizations[3], and b) data from multiple projects could be linked and analyzed by means of period assertions or computed “temporal topology” (e.g. Allen’s interval algebra[4]: equals, overlaps, before, after, starts, finishes, meets).

How would this work?

The first conceptual step is a simple matter: wherever a “geometry” element is required in GeoJSON, an optional adjacent (sibling) “when” element is allowed. Existing software supporting GeoJSON would simply ignore these and function normally. New software, or new versions of existing software, would parse them and offer visualization and analytic functionality. In the Linked Pasts demo prototype, I render “when” elements to a timeline using the venerable if outdated Simile Timeline library, linked to the “geometry” elements rendered traditionally to a Leaflet map (Figure 1).

Developing a standard

It’s well and good to say, “wherever there’s a ‘geometry’ allow an optional ‘when’,” but the devil is in the details. What is required and allowed in that “when?” I’m not experienced at ringleading standards development; what I’ve done for starters is create a provisional standard for discussion, then made the aforementioned demo app as proof-of-concept. The “when” looks like this:

"when": {
  "timespans": [["-323-01-01 ","","","-101-12-31",
     "Hellenistic period"]],
  "duration": "?",
  "periods": [{
    "name": "Hellenistic Period",
    "period_uri": " http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0mn2ndq6bv"
 }],
  "follows": "<feature or geometry id>",
}

An explanation of each element:

When

Optional. A sibling of “geometry” in a Feature (a), or of “coordinates” in a member of a GeometryCollection (b)

(a)

{
"type": "FeatureCollection",
"features": [
 {
 "type": "Feature",
 "id": "",
 "properties": {},
 "geometry": {},
 "when": {}
 }
]
}

(b)

"geometry": {
 "type": "GeometryCollection",
 "geometries": [
   {
    "type": "LineString",
    "coordinates": [[93.867,40.35],[108.9423,34.26]],
    "when": {}
   }
 ]
}

Timespans

Required. An array of one or more 5-part arrays, the positions of which are Start, Latest Start, Earliest End, End, Label. Of these, only Start is required. The first 4 positions accept any ISO-8601 temporal expression, with the ‘accepted convention’ of a minus sign for BCE years. Label is an optional short text string that would (presumably) appear alongside a visual representation of the timespan.

Duration

Required. A null value indicates the phenomena occurred (or was valid) throughout the feature’s Timespans. If it occurred only for some part of it/them, enter an integer followed by a single letter code for the increment (d=days; m=months; y=years) or a “?” for an unknown duration. For example, a weeklong festival at some unknown time within a year timespan would be indicated as “duration”:”7d”; a birth as (perhaps) “duration”:”1d”

I anticipate timeline visualizations will be find this distinction essential; a birth for example does not occur throughout a year.

Periods

Optional. An array of Period objects defined in an external period gazetteer (e.g. PeriodO, each with a “name” and “period_uri” that can be dereferenced dynamically.

Follows

Optional. If the Feature or GeometryCollection member is in a meaningful sequence, enter the internal identifier of the element it follows here. Software indicating order or directionality visually or in lists will make use of these values if present.

Next Steps

I’d like to move the development of GeoJSON-T into a more formal process, but perhaps that should follow more informal discussion. A more detailed explanation of GeoJSON-T and its implementation for data about historical movement — journeys, flows and named routes — appears in the Topotime GitHub repo.

Please let me know your views on how we might proceed, by twitter (@kgeographer) or as a GitHub issue or preferably both. In the meantime, I will continue converting exemplar datasets into the provisional format outlined here, and developing software and utility scripts to manage, display, and even analyze it.

[1] A GIScience-ish definition for geographic features: “Phenomena on or near the earth surface for which location and other spatial attributes are integral for understanding and analysis.”

[2] An ontology design pattern for Setting was proposed in Grossner, K., Janowicz, K. and Keßler, C. (2016). The Place of Linked Data for Historical Gazetteers. In R. Mostern, H. Southall, and M.L. Berman (Eds.). Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[3] As I have begun demonstrating with Linked Places work (http://topotime.org/linkedplaces)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen’s_interval_algebra

Linking Linked Places

lp-banner
Screenshot from demo web map/timeline app

NOTE: This project has been subsequently renamed, now titled “Linked Paths.”

A little context

The tag line for the Pelagios Commons web site is, “Linking the Places of our Past,” and that project is indeed facilitating the linking of historical place attestations published in digital gazetteers. From my perspective (and many others’) , the initiative is going great, bravo!

There are other ways that places are or have been linked and I’ve been plugging away at a facilitating representations and analysis of those connections in a couple of ways. The first was The Orbis Initiative, an ambitious and sadly unsuccessful NSF grant proposal to develop software and systems for extracting information about roads, rivers, canals, railways, and footpaths–and the places connected by them–from the million or so high-quality scans of historical maps. That data is of the physical channels (a.k.a. media, ways) used for the movement of people and goods across the earth surface. Although the grant wasn’t awarded, I’m happy to say a manageably-sized portion of the work it described was taken up by the CIDR team at Stanford University Libraries, just as I was leaving (amicably) in September. I expect fantastic results!

Since that work on geographic networks is in such good hands, I’ve begun to focus on the other side of that coin, the movement over such networks: individual journeys, named historical routes and route systems, and flows. I’m calling the project Linked Places (GitHub repository), and a mini-grant from Pelagios Commons has helped to jump-start it. It’s part of my larger DH/GIScience research frame, Topotime, which has a broad goal of joining Place and Period in data stores and software for historical research and education.

Enough context, this blog post is intended to describe the status of the Linked Places work products.

Linked Places Phase Two Status

I’ve described the goals of Linked Places and its early results in two blog posts on Pelagios Commons earlier this year (July and October respectively). In Phase One, Lex Berman and Rainer Simon joined me in clarifying a conceptual model for what we wanted to do, refining a provisional spec for a GeoJSON temporal extension (GeoJSON-T), then adapting the GeoJSON-T format for representing route data. We agreed on the term route for an overarching class encompassing journeys, flows, and historical routes and route systems (hRoutes). The conceptual model was then “expressed” in the GeoJSON-T form (Figures 1 and 2).

In Phase Two, I holed up in beautiful Ascoli Piceno to a) convert five exemplar data sets to a generic CSV form, b) write Python scripts to transform that CSV to GeoJSON-T and to populate an ElasticSearch index, and c) build a demo web map application that consumes GeoJSON-T data and puts it through some paces. That app, which mashes up Leaflet/Mapbox map with a Simile Timeline, is not designed as such–it’s been thrown together for discussion about what real apps might be interesting. I will be presenting this now completed Phase 2 work at the Linked Pasts workshop in Madrid, 15-16 December 2016.

Linked Places Work Products

GeoJSON-T

GeoJSON-T simply adds an optional “when” element to native GeoJSON. That “when” is typically placed at the same level as a “geometry” element (the “where”), which can appear in a couple of places: as a top-level attribute of a Feature (Figure 1), or, in the case of routes data, as a member of a GeometryCollection (Figure 2). The GeoJSON GeometryCollection is a relatively infrequently used construct, but is essential to how we represent journeys and hRoutes. There is some more explanation on the Github wiki.

Figure 1. Generic GeoJSON-T Feature, with “when” member in a FeatureCollection (simplified gazetteer record)

geojson-t_syntax02

Figure 2. Route feature (featureType Journey); segments are geometries in GeometryCollection

geojson-t_syntax01

Scripts

I’ve made the assumption that a large proportion of historical route data will be developed in spreadsheet or CSV format natively. Attributes and coding terminology will of course be distinct for every project that develops data. There’s nothing to stop anyone from creating GeoJSON-T route data from scratch, by whatever means, but if a researcher can rearrange their CSV data in a standard form, it can be converted and ingested automatically for use in the existing demo or future GeoJSON-T compatible applications.

At present, one would need to create two CSV files, one for places, and one for route segments. The core fields that are required, but in cases can have null values, are:

PLACES:

[‘collection’, ‘place_id’, ‘toponym’, ‘gazetteer_uri’, ‘gazetteer_label’, ‘lng’, ‘lat’]

ROUTE SEGMENTS:

[‘collection’, ‘route_id’, ‘segment_id’, ‘source’, ‘target’, ‘label’, ‘geometry’, ‘timespan’, ‘duration’, ‘follows’]

Following these, data files can have any number of further attributes/columns, which will appear in various ways within any given app. A complete accounting of these fields, and further details about data preparation and the Python conversion/ingestion scripts (csvToGeoJSON-T.py and elastic.py) will appear on the GitHub repository wiki soon. If you are anxious to play with this stuff before then (or afterwards), get in touch with me directly.

Linked Places Demo App

The GeoJSON-T format and its implementation for route data allows for some interesting display and analysis possibilities. The app so far only explores the visualization side. I’m planning to follow up this work with at least two “real” applications that do more: one for data exploration and discovery across a large distributed corpus/repository, and a second that allows manipulation and analysis of a given network of geographic movement (e.g. commodity flows like Incanto Trade, or route systems like the Ming Courier Routes). I’ve identified a few other exemplar datasets and welcome inquiries for collaboration.

Features

Load one or more datasets; view linked gazetteer records for places; events or optionally “fuzzy” periods rendered on timeline

Linked Places screenshot 01

Search for Places, identify all members of its “conflation_of” set; and all route segments associated with it, from multiple datasets

Linked Places screenshot 02

Rudimentary timeline visualization (Simile Timeline); timeline and map features are linked

Linked Places screenshot 03

Load places and segments for flows and hRoute systems (nodes and links/edges) into D3 force-directed graph; download GeoJSON-T

screen capture, D3 graph visualization

View linked Place gazetteer data (Pleiades, TGAZ, Geonames)

lp-features_06

View linked Period gazetteer data (from Perio.do)

lp-features_05

Summary

The results of this work: a conceptual model for routes (journeys, flows and historical routes/route systems), the GeoJSON-T extension, its implementation for route data and reliance on CSV input, and last but not least the map/timeline mashup, are all provisional and experimental. The models have been tweaked (‘refined’) as requirements come to light, and that should continue for at least a little while longer. I welcome comments — here, on twitter (@kgeographer), via the project GitHub repo, or by email: karl[dot]geog[at]gmail[dot]com.