Proceedings International Workshop Exploring Old Maps 2016

Many libraries own an extensive collection of historical maps. Beside their value as historical objects, these maps are an important source of information for researchers in various scientific disciplines. This ranges from the actual history of cartography and general history to the geographic and social sciences. With the progressing digitisation of libraries and archives, these maps become more easily available to a larger public. A basic level of digitisation consists of scanned bitmap images, tagged with some basic bibliographic information such as title, author and year of production. In order to make the maps more accessible, further metadata describing the contained information is desirable. This would enable more user-friendly interfaces, relevant queries of a database, and automatic analyses.
The International Workshop on Exploring Old Maps provides a forum for the communication of results that may be useful to the community. Researchers and practitioners of many areas working on unlocking the content of old maps have contributed to this year’s program - humanities scholars, developers, computer and information scientists as well as librarians, archivists and curators.