DIGMAP

DIGMAP was a project that developed solutions for georeferenced digital libraries, especially focused on historical resources (old maps or related documents). The project was partially funded by the eContentplus programme of the European Commission.

The main purpose was to develop a specialized service, reusing metadata from European national libraries, to provide discovery and access to contents provided by those libraries. Relevant metadata from third party sources was also reused, as also descriptions and references to any other relevant external resource.

The project made a proof of concept reusing and enriching the contents from the National Library of Portugal (BNP), the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), the National Library of Italy in Florence (BNCF), and the National Library of Estonia (NLE). In a second phase, that will be complemented with contents and references from other libraries, archives and information sources, namely from other European national libraries members of TEL – The European Library (DIGMAP might became an effective service integrated with TEL - in this sense the project is fully aligned with the vision “European Digital Library” as expressed in the “i2010 digital libraries” initiative of the European Commission).

The final results of the project consisted in a set of services available in a portal, and in reusable open-source software solutions for back-office professional services. The portal demonstrates searching and browsing services for resource discovery. Professional services comprise mainly the cataloguing of new on-line resources, including their geographic indexing, and the extraction of relevant features from on-line images.

DIGMAP Services

 * Geoparser - DIGMAP Geographic Parsing
 * Gazetteer - A database of geographic names, with their geographic locations and other descriptive information
 * DIGMAP Map Services (GeoIndexer, GeoBrowser and GeoTimes) - Services for indexing maps and display them using Google Maps
 * FXT - Image Feature Extractor - Extract features from images that have geographic meaning
 * nail.map - Build Thumbnails
 * cat.on.map - Catalogue On-line Resource

DIGMAP is aligned with the following efforts

 * TEL - The European Library
 * Europeana – The European Digital Library.