Finally, we plan to permanently catalog this spatial data in Stanford’s Digital Repository and make it open and discoverable to the public through the Stanford Libraries’ geospatial data platform and multi-institutional search tool Earthworks. Third, we will digitally annotate the textual information on the maps and develop a metadata record for each object aided by additional research and associated with authority files to meet linked open data (LOD) standards. Second, we will georeference the material on an object-by-object basis at 1-2m accuracy, significantly enhancing its compatibility with other spatial data and its usability with location services in current and future digital mapping systems. First, we will be able to complete a multi-year effort to create vector-based tracings of every feature of Nolli’s and Lanciani’s maps, allowing for the complete delamination, separation, and recombination of the vast material contained within them (thousands of structures such as walls, churches, domes, streets, piazze, obelisks, aqueducts, etc.). Open Rome will achieve several major milestones in rectifying this rather surprising failure of the digital information age. Despite contemporary advances in cartographic software, web browsers, and database technology, neither paper map has been substantially improved as a tool for documenting and analyzing the topographic history of Rome. And Lanciani’s Forma Urbis Romae is a pioneering, color-coded account of Rome’s physical development over nearly three millennia and an encyclopedic repository of such things as inscriptions found and excavations conducted across the city. Nolli’s Pianta Grande di Roma is a touchstone of orthogonal mapping and the quintessential figure-ground representation of urban space, which remained among the most accurate of city maps for over a century. Together they serve as compelling visual and conceptual precursors to contemporary geographic information systems (GIS) technology and the field of spatial history, capturing numerous layers of data on the form and history of the city in a single synoptic view. Among an abundance of maps of Rome, Nolli and Lanciani’s maps are doubtless the most comprehensive and detailed ones of modern and ancient Rome respectively. For over a decade, our project team has been developing geographically-linked databases for the study of Rome using material derived substantially from two cartographic monuments authored by Giambattista Nolli (1748) and Rodolfo Lanciani’s (1901). This project will georeference, annotate, permanently archive and make open a trove of digital cartographic material that traces the spatial history of Rome from antiquity to the present.
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