An Automatic Approach for Generating Rich, Linked Geo-Metadata from Historical Map Images

Zekun Li, Yao Yi Chiang, Sasan Tavakkol, Basel Shbita, Johannes H. Uhl, Stefan Leyk, Craig A. Knoblock

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (including crowd-sourcing) to generate the metadata (e.g., geolocations and keywords). Optical character recognition (OCR) software could alleviate the required manual work, but the recognition results are individual words instead of location phrases (e.g., "Black'' and "Mountain'' vs. "Black Mountain''). This paper presents an end-to-end approach to address the real-world problem of finding and indexing historical map images. This approach automatically processes historical map images to extract their text content and generates a set of metadata that is linked to large external geospatial knowledge bases. The linked metadata in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format support complex queries for finding and indexing historical maps, such as retrieving all historical maps covering mountain peaks higher than 1,000 meters in California. We have implemented the approach in a system called mapKurator. We have evaluated mapKurator using historical maps from several sources with various map styles, scales, and coverage. Our results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available as modules of the Kartta Labs project at https://github.com/kartta-labs/Project.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationKDD 2020 - Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages3290-3298
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450379984
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 23 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Aug 23 2020Aug 27 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Conference

Conference26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/23/208/27/20

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. IIS 1564164 (to the University of Southern California) and IIS 1563933 (to the University of Colorado at Boulder), NVIDIA Corporation, and the USC Undergraduate Research Associates Program.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Owner/Author.

Keywords

  • entity matching
  • geolocalization
  • historical map processing
  • information extraction
  • neural networks
  • text linking

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'An Automatic Approach for Generating Rich, Linked Geo-Metadata from Historical Map Images'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this