Open Maps Meeting

The Open Maps Meeting is an Open Science Meeting funded by Open Science NL.

Introduction

More and more libraries and archives are making their digital collections accessible according to open standards and with open licences. These collections contain numerous maps, which are a valuable source for researchers across different domains. Projects such as Allmaps and MapReader offer open source software to enrich maps with additional information. How can researchers use these tools? And how are heritage institutions able to benefit from the results?

To answer these and more questions, the Open Maps Meeting brings together an international community of geospatial researchers, map curators, heritage and data specialists, open-source developers and other professionals who share an interest in historical maps.

The goals of the Open Maps Meeting are to:

1. Connect different expert groups that already exist and work within the context of recently launched mapping-related tools and platforms;
2. Jointly discuss the overlaps, gaps and untapped potential of these tools and platforms in order to identify possibilities for further integration and cross-development;
3. Stimulate the wider adoption of working with open tools for mapping purposes and promote a sense of collaboration and shared workflows across a new Open Science community.

Day 1: Expert sessions

The first day of the Open Maps Meeting builds common ground between expert participants by introducing and discussing a series of ongoing projects developed with mapping tools, presented by researchers from different institutions. Specific challenges are further addressed in parallel working sessions, reflecting the different phases of a collaborative workflow. At the end of the day, results are pitched by community members chairing the different sessions.

View the programme for day one

Day 2: Plenary outreach

Like the first day of the Open Maps Meeting, the second day is open to anyone interested, but particularly aimed at researchers, archivists, curators, data stewards and open science advocates who are relatively new to the cartographic tools and workflows discussed during the first day and would like to learn more about their possibilities.

View the programme for day two

Background

Libraries, archives and museums are increasingly implementing open protocols and licences for accessing, researching and reusing digitised heritage collections, including historical cartographic resources such as maps, plans and aerial photos. In response to this, various open-source tools and research projects have emerged for viewing, enriching and curating such resources.

Often developed by international consortia of cultural heritage institutions, digital humanities scholars and developers, these tools and projects try to cross disciplinary domains and connect different research fields based on Open Science-driven community impulses. However, outside of enthusiastic project initiators, wide-spread dissemination and adoption often tends to be slow among larger groups of researchers, as they remain unaware of the availability of new digital applications or continue to favour existing, individual workflows, fearing that new tools may not be suitable for their interests.

Moving towards an active Open Science community that, across different research endeavours, archival collections and institutional affiliations, embraces a shared workflow supported by an ecosystem of well-integrated tools therefore requires the construction of collaborative alignment among researchers, institutions as data providers, and developers, while further increasing the interoperability of existing tools according to community needs.

Central to the Open Maps Meeting is the open-source project Allmaps, co-founded by TU Delft Library, consisting of tools to work with digitised cartographic resources. TU Delft Library has been actively seeking collaborations with researchers, data and heritage specialists to promote the adoption of Allmaps, and has repeatedly observed interest in connecting Allmaps to related open source tools, such as MapReader, a computer vision pipeline for annotating map features developed at the Alan Turing Institute, and Madoc, a crowd-sourcing platform developed by the UK company Digirati with funding from the Belgian CLARIAH-VL network. The Open Maps Meeting would bring together all project representatives and their respective users for the first time.