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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. These historical images would benefit from metadata (at least time & location) annotation, to improve discovery and visualization. E.g. placing documents in the context of J.B. Spark's 4000 year Histomap.

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2012/04/fromdavidrumseycomrand-mcna...

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I've got a project that is trying to do just this sort of thing, check out https://retred.org

You can go to a time and place and see exactly what kind of events were happening at that point of time. I haven't opened it up to things yet, but am planning to pretty soon!

Looks promising!

The closest projects I've seen are http://pleiades.stoa.org/home for Ancient GIS open-data and an iOS App with a timeline database, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/timeline-eons-free/id4333521...

Edit: David Rumsey's classic site has many historical maps & charts, e.g. http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2012/3/28/timeline-maps

That's really cool! The problem seems to be that for all these things the data isn't stored anywhere in an easily digestible format. It would be great if you could query something and procedurally generate any of these graphs.

DBpedia appears to have historical data extracted from Wikipedia, not sure how usable it is: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1205/1205.4138.pdf

Found a UI demo & thesis project for DBpedia GIS: http://latemar.science.unitn.it/spacetime/usecase.html & http://latemar.science.unitn.it/spacetime/FabioValsecchi-the...

That's where I've got all my initial seed data from already!

Does that mean you've converted it into a more digestible format that others could use :)

I have - you can checkout https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander and build it using my parser from a dbpedia dump!

This is fantastic, but you broke my back button!

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