Menu Close

GIS, Access, Archives and Daydreams

Today in my Information Structure class, our topic was Entity Relationship Modeling. While this is a technique that I have used frequently over the many years I have been designing Oracle databases, it was interesting to see a slightly different spin on the ideas. The second half of class was an exercise to take a stab (as a class) at coming up with a preliminary data model for a mythical genealogical database system.

While deciding if we should model PLACE as an entity, a woman in our class who is a genealogy specialist told us that only one database she has ever worked with tries to do any validation of location – but that it is virtually impossible due to the scale of the problem. Since the borders and names of places on earth have changed so rapidly over time, and often with little remaining documentation, it is hard to correlate place names from archival records with fixed locations on the planet. Anyone who has waded through the fabulous ship records on the Ellis Island website hunting for information about their grandparents or great-grandparents has struggled with trying to understand how the place names on those records relate to the physical world we live in.

So – now to my daydream. Imagine if we could somehow work towards a consolidated GIS database that included place names and boundary information throughout history. Each GIS layer would relate to specific years or eras in time. Imagine if you could connect any set of archival records that contained location data to this GIS database and not only visualize the records via a map – but visualize the records with the ability to change the layers so you could see how the boundaries and place names changed. And view the relationship between records that have different place names on them from different eras – but are actually from the same location.

I poked around to see what people are already doing – and found all of this:

I know it is a daydream – but I believe in my heart of hearts that it will exist someday as computing power increases, the price of storing data decreases and more data sources converge. I do forsee another issue related to the challenges presented by different versions of borders and place names from the same time period – but there are ways to address that too. It could happen – believe with me!

Posted in access, database design, digitization, GIS, search, what if

9 Comments

  1. Dorothea

    I vaguely recall reading about a digital-gazetteer project along the lines you suggest. I think it was geographically-limited, though (just one country?), and for the life of me I can’t remember where I saw it.

    Might be easier than a GIS approach, might not; I’m not sure.

  2. Jeanne

    Dorothea,

    I will have to hunt for that a bit (or at least keep my eyes open for it!). I have some more ideas on this whole thing – has had my mind racing since I thought of it in class yesterday. Watch for more posts on this topic in the next couple of days.

    Jeanne

  3. Jeanne

    Thomas,

    Thank you so much for both of these comments. These sites are great – I will definitely be spending some more time exploring them. Of course now wishing I could take Prof. Turkel’s class. I guess I could just do all the readings – right?

    Jeanne

  4. Anne Beaumont

    Jeanne, (and anyone else who cares to respond)
    I came back to your blog because I was looking for a copy of your poster about context in online collections (I have saved it to print on A3 when we get our colour printer back) because I was going through some responses to an online survey which was created to elicit feedback on a map digitisation project we undertook, and it seems the interface was not clear – at least to some of those who responded.
    I would appreciate your comments – preferrably directly rather than via the survey.
    http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/about/pastfuture/future/digitising/mmbw.html
    anne

Comments are closed.