The ability to draw and view maps is a primary necessity in history teaching and research. Historiographus was planned with that in mind. The coordinate properties of Category:Places follow a number of rules to assure they are compatible with different tools, inside and outside the wiki. Properties Latitude and Longitude are defined as equivalent to geo:lat and geo:long, and are entered in decimal degrees. This way, both attributes remain compatible with the HEML. Historical Event Mark-up and Linking Project and the GMT - Generic Mapping Tools. Property:Latitude Longitude is based on geo:lat_long but adapted to SMW Geographic coordinate type, in order to be directly used in Historiographus.
Viewing maps with SMW links to online maps services
Historiographus uses the SMW links to online maps services. Through the property Latitude Longitude, any user can view the location of places in Google Maps, Mapquest or other services.
Creating maps with online tools
Historiographus uses cartographic information that can be easily used to draw maps for the wiki and other purposes.
The base of the map of Linnaeus' route in his Lapland journey (1732) was made with the OMC - Online Map Creation tool.
We just needed to know the longitude and latitude coordinates (in decimal degrees) and names of all places to be ploted in the map:
- 20.2578, 63.8285, Umeå
- 18.6667, 64.5667, Lycksele
- 16.9000, 65.2333, Lycksmyren
- 22.1667, 65.5667, Luleå
- 19.8333, 66.6167, Jokkmokk
- 15.2167, 67.5667, Rörstad
- 24.1667, 65.8667, Tornio
- 23.5, 67.183333, Kengis
- 21.6667, 67.6833, Vittangi
This information was first annotated in the respective articles. Besides that we only had to choose the adequate map boundaries and projection, decide that we wanted a grid, rivers and channels and a b/w map. Other options are present. The resulting raster image is of low quality and barely adequate for previewing, but the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file is quite good. We added the arrow lines with a vector drawing program (in our case we used Inkscape). If you need a higher degree of customization you may use directly the GMT - Generic Mapping Tools. The GMT is the actual rendering software used by OMC, but that implies a bigger learning curve than using the above mentioned method.