Old maps and open data networks

Old maps are a record of the past, exposing features people might want to tell stories about. Maphub is a Web application that enables them to do so by creating annotations on digitized high-resolution historical maps. By semantically tagging regions on the map, users create associations between their annotations and resources in open Web-based data networks. These associations are leveraged to enable multilingual search and to generate overlays of historical maps on modern mapping applications. Contributed annotations are shared on the Web following the W3C Open Annotation specification. Preliminary studies show general user satisfaction with our approach.