Kartta Labs
Sasan Tavakkol, Yao‐Yi Chiang, Tim Waters, Feng Han, Kisalaya Prasad, Raimondas Kiveris · 2019
This paper introduces the Kartta Labs project, an ongoing open-source and open-data project aiming at organizing the world's historical maps and making them universally accessible and useful. Kartta Labs' framework is designed as a composition of multiple modules. Each module has a crowdsourcing implementation and an artificial intelligence based implementation. The framework takes images of historical maps, registers them in space and time, generates a vector version of the map content, and allows the users to query for the vector content and recreate the historical maps in various cartographic styles. We refer to this process as unrendering. The resulting machine readable map data can support a variety of scientific studies and applications that require long-term, detailed geographic information in the past, while opening up opportunities in other areas such as entertainment. This paper also presents the preliminary results from one automated module to geolocalize a given historical map.