Archive | 2021
Big Historical Geodata for Urban and Environmental Research
Abstract
Historical geoinformation is a valuable resource for various scientific disciplines, ranging from urban and environmental research to the emerging field of digital humanities. This chapter elucidates potentials and applications of big geospatial data which it has recently become possible to automatically retrieve from historical records. Large volumes of historical textual and cartographic documents are currently being made digitally accessible by libraries and other institutions. With the help of computer vision and image analysis techniques, the hitherto only implicitly, i.e. human-readable, contained historical geoinformation can be made machine-readable and can hence be spatiotemporally analyzed and associated with current big geospatial databases filled with satellite imagery, digital maps or user-generated geocoded content. The chapter begins with an overview of existing geohistorical data sources and processing approaches and describes challenges posed by the sheer number and diversity of the sources. The main part is dedicated to potentials and applications of the derived geoinformation in the various environmental research domains, such as long-term land change monitoring, sustainability research, and Earth system modeling for studying the complex human-environment interactions between land, climate change, ecosystem and biodiversity changes during the Anthropocene.