Gustaf Svedjemo
@ Gotland University

 last updated: 2007-12-17

Lecturer in Archaeology
PhD candidate in Informatics

Employed since 1996 at Gotland University and since 1999 as teacher in GIS.

PhD candidate in GeoInformatics at  Universitity of Linköping, Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA)

Publications

Current research

The PhD thesis topic is Swedish Large scale Historical Maps in a Digital Environment.

On the 3 of April 2007 the degree of Licentiate of Philosophy was achieved with the thesis entitled: Ontology as Conceptual Schema when Modelling Historical Maps for Database Storage.
It is downloadable here >>

Abstract:

In many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, like history, human geography and archaeology, historical maps are of great importance as a source of information. They are used frequently in different studies for a variety of problems. Since the last decade or two, it has been more and more common to use data from historical maps in GIS-analysis. On Gotland, the large-scale map production has a more then 300-year history. There are several different map generations that are produced for different purposes. The first maps produced at the turn of the century 1700, where made for, mainly, fiscal reasons. From mid 18^th and up until mid 20^th maps were produced under different Acts of parliament concerning redistribution of land. Since early 20^th century, economic maps have been produced, and recently GIS-databases for agricultural subsidy are under construction. Many of these early map generations have extensive text descriptions, which via code marking are attached to the map. These texts have rich descriptions of different aspects of the mapped features. During the centuries several changes in semantics and map production techniques have been made, which makes an adaptation to GIS and thus comparative analysis, not as easy as can first be expected.

The scope of this work is to do Semantic Analysis and establish an ontology over all the concepts found in the maps and text descriptions over Gotland. This ontology will enable us to see how different phenomena and concepts in the various map generations have changed and thus can be temporal analyzed in a GIS, and stored in databases. The geometrical side of integrating different map generations will also be analyzed together with issues concerning data structures of the digitized maps.

The method used will be to do a semantic analysis and establish an ontology as a model of the Universe of Discourse, the Gotlandic Maps of 1700.

The ontology serves also as a conceptual schema in a database modeling process and is mapped to a database schema, for implementation in a RDBMS and GIS system.