Map Vectorizer – Map polygon and feature extractor

I'm part of the team at NYPL Labs that's been working on these historical geospatial projects for the past few years (The Vectorizer is the work of our own @MGA), and that's EXACTLY what we've been working toward. For almost 4 years, we've had staff and volunteers going over scans of geo-rectified (stitching and stretching a raster image so it aligns with geospatial coordinates) historical insurance maps of NYC meticulously extracting the information on there. Namely we go after the outlines of buildings to capture the amazingly detailed datapoints these maps had about every building in the city all the way back to the first half of the 19th century.

These are nice to have for researchers, but the real purpose of collecting this is, just as you note, to unlock the hidden historical geospatial data in textual materials. Once we've got all those names of places, their addresses, their lat/lon coordinates, and their timeframes of existence, we can start to search through texts to find linkages. Old city directories (they're basically books of ghosts) start to show you who lived and worked where [1] (and in the process starts to get you more names you can associate with these places), address matches in historical newspapers start to show you what happened in these places, and the maps start to become this geospatial backbone to traverse across tons of different datasets.

The Vectorizer is so freaking cool for so many reasons, but mostly because it's going to let us actually get through these insurance atlases to collect this data before we all die (one of our favorites is the 1854 William Perris Atlas [2][3] but it took nearly 3 years to actually get through the 64,000+ buildings in Manhattan south of 42nd st) so we can start doing this kind of querying with it. The real geniuses behind all this, our Geospatial Librarian Matt Knutzen and the team at Topomancy, have been working on an experimental gazetteer [4] so that we'll finally have this as a public web service for people to hack on all these places as we collect and conflate them. Give us a few months...

In the meantime, sign up for the Open Historical Maps project listserv [5] that some of the OSM crew is working on (including the geniuses at Topomancy).

Also, this came out of a historical geospatial hack day [5] we threw a few months back, which you should check out if you want to play around with some of our data sources for this kind of work or for building something else out of historical NYC's geospatial footprint.

[1]: http://andrewxhill.github.io/cartodb-examples/scroll-story/b... [2]: http://maps.nypl.org/warper/layers/861 Tileserver, please forgive me for linking to you [3]: http://aaronland.info/nypl-perris/ YEAH SHAPEFILES! [4]: http://vimeopro.com/openstreetmapus/state-of-the-map-us-2013... Schuyler Earle's presentation on their version of historical gazetteer they're building for the Library of Congress at State of The Map US 2013 [5]: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/12/maphack-hacking-nycs-pas...

This can be boon for Environmentalist to figure out:- "How many trees in a given area is cut down in given month." we can zeroed-in on places where deforestation is happening rapidly, and publish that data to "Goverments" to look into that.

I literally love that map warper! You can upload your own images at mapwarper.net as well.

OpenCV is used here only for the "has dot/cross" aspect of feature detection (and it is very primitive still). The polygons themselves are more a work of R and GDAL.

It does vary from map to map although it is optimized for insurance maps (or any map made mostly with clearly delineated polygons). We've included a config file that you would modify to suit the maps you are working with. The current process takes advantage of preexisting features in mapping tools and adds feature detection (e.g. polygon is/isn't a building) and concave hulls.

We do welcome input and merge requests to improve the tool!

OSM's been pretty hardcore about their no import policy because of accuracy issues in validation. They want to map these places themselves and don't want to trust others for accuracy, let alone the legal issues that come with importing data (ugh).

We, however are far more lenient (mostly because we can't afford to build a time machine to map the past ourselves).

On the other hand, Mike Migurski's Green Means Go [1] project is fantastic for figuring out where batch imports into OSM will be greeted with confetti and parades for filling out parts of the US without enough coverage to warrant anti-import protectionism.

[1]: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/green-means-go.html

MapBox is working on a user-assisted vectorizer for satellite images: http://www.mapbox.com/blog/user-friendly-guided-feature-extr...

Mapbox is working on a really slick tool for guided feature extraction from satellite maps [1] that'll be part of the iD editor for OpenStreetMap. I'm hoping this will provide a HUGE help in adding more buildings into OSM.

And while not mapping, John Resig's Ukiyo-e [2] project is one of the coolest projects I've seen in the digital cultural heritage space in some time. He's been applying image recognition to these incredible Japanese woodblock prints from museums, galleries, dealers, universities and libraries all around the world. Because these things are prints, there could be hundreds of prints from the same block master all around the world, but because the expertise in the field is so divergent, the cataloging practices are really inconsistent. Different institutions might call artists by totally different names (or think a print is by totally different artists). So he built a search-by-image search engine of hundreds of thousands of Ukiyo-e that finds and reunifies prints totally independently of their metadata. Which is cool when you find 5-10 of the same print in places around the world. But it's cooler when it matches 2 prints with totally different artists and publishers and dates because at some point after the first print was made, someone bought the block master, cut out the face and replaced it with another, then did the same for the signature [3][4].

Actually, The Vectorizer owes a big debt of gratitude to John and his brother Mike. Mike Resig is a geographer and was the first to show us a process for how this kind of automated identification is possible.

[1]: http://www.mapbox.com/blog/user-friendly-guided-feature-extr... [2]: http://ukiyo-e.org [3]: http://ukiyo-e.org/image/met/DP134583 [4]: http://ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc214530

There are lots of commercial packages. (e.g. The ArcScan extension to ArcGIS: http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//0... )

A naive version is also fairly easy to build up from existing tools (e.g. OpenCV), but getting it to work reliably is often a pain. Even with the best tools, this sort of thing requires a lot of manual QC. It still greatly speeds things up, though!