Biszak Előd – Biszak Sándor – Timár Gábor – Nagy Diána – Molnár Gábor: Historical topographic and cadastral maps of Europe in spotlight – Evolution of the MAPIRE map portal. Conference: 12th International Workshop on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage. Volume: 12. Venice, 2017. 204–208.
International Cartographic Association, Commission on Cartographic Heritage into the Digital Proceedings 12th ICA Conference Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Venice, 26-28 April 2017 Editor Evangelos Livieratos AUTH CartoGeoLab, 2017, ISSN 2459-3893 In a few years it became obvious that a further publication has to be made in online manner. First, the second military survey mosaic was made available in the Internet on the Arcanum’s own website. The whole second military survey was also processed and put in a covered part of the website, not open for the public. That time, legal issues slowed the territorial extension of the covered area. Since the sheets of the historical Hungarian territories could be published according to the permission of the national authorities, considerable part of the scanned material was from the Austrian State Archives (Tímár et al., 2011). A meeting at an Italian workshop and presenting the ‘hidden’ material convinced the Austrian representatives to make a cooperation, which led to the MAPIRE initiative. Nowadays, MAPIRE (originally from the expression ‘historical MAPs of the Habsburg EmpIRE’) covers considerable part of Europe by historical map mosaics of different times (Fig. 1). The former Habsburg core territories are covered twice or three times, while southern Germany, Italy, France, Belgium (the former Austrian Netherlands), Great Britain, south Romania, southern Norway and Finland are shown, with cooperation of data providers, opening to Habsburg historical cadastres, historical maps of different European cities and, as a newest development, historical airphoto mosaics (Molnár et al., 2017). Our present work shows the technical, legal and scientific progress of the project since our last report made to the 2014 Budapest meeting (Biszak et al., 2014). Europe (XVIII. century) Europe (around 1850) Europe (1850-1890) Figure 1. Europe in different time windows, in the historical maps presented by MAPIRE. Technical advances The important modifications of the service in last 3 years were of two kinds: change of data storage and change in the base maps used. The first version of the MAPIRE was a simple continuation of a part of the Arcanum’s own website. The content was stored and provided to the users from the servers of Arcanum. It seemed handy at first, however as the number of web requests were increasing and sometime occurred in peaks, it resulted some sudden stops and needed administrator activity, sometimes in uncomfortable hours. Since Arcanum runs no 24-hour system control, it was a problem. Therefore, with increased capabilities of the external cloud services, we decided to move our website content to the Amazon cloud system. The base maps were originally used from Google Maps, also the Google API was applied for 3D presentation of the data. In 2015 we changed to the OpenStreetMap for vector and to HERE Aerial for raster background layers. Legal environment, cooperation In the first time, the Arcanum’s projects, thus the MAPIRE was based on cooperation of our core contributors. In Hungary, they were the Map Collection of the Institute and Museum of Military History of the MoD, The National and the Budapest Archive and the Institute of Geodesy, Cartography and Remote Sensing, with their county outlets. Our main and base cooperating partner is the Military Archive of the Austrian State Archive in Vienna. The very first version of the MAPIRE was published as a sub-domain of the Staatsarchiv.at. Many other maps, outside of the former Habsburg Empire, were Aristotle University of Thessaloniki [205] Laboratory of Cartography & Geographical Analysis
