Exploring Old Maps EOM 2017

Historical spatiotemporal datasets are important for a variety of studies such as cancer and environmental epidemiology, urbanization, and landscape ecology. However, existing data sources typically contain only contemporary datasets. Historical maps hold a great deal of detailed geographic information at various times in the past. Yet, finding relevant maps is difficult and the map content are not machine readable. I envision a map processing, modeling, linking, and publishing framework that allows querying historical map collections as a unified and structured spatiotemporal source in which individual geographic phenomena (extracted from maps) are modeled with semantic descriptions and linked to other data sources (e.g., DBpedia). This framework will make it possible to efficiently study historical spatiotemporal datasets on a large scale. Realizing such a framework poses significant research challenges in multiple fields in computer science including digital map processing, data integration, and the Semantic Web technologies, and other disciplines such as spatial, earth, social, and health sciences. Tackling these challenges will not only advance research in computer science but also present a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary research. About the author: Yao-Yi Chiang is Assistant Professor of Spatial Sciences in the Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (USC). His general area of research is artificial intelligence and data science, with a focus on information integration and spatial data analytics. He develops computer algorithms and applications that discover, collect, fuse, and analyze data from heterogeneous sources to solve real world problems. He teaches data mining, spatial databases, and mobile GIS. Prior to USC, Chiang worked as a research scientist for Geosemble Technologies (now TerraGo Technologies), which was founded based on a patent of which he was a co-inventor on geospatial-data fusion techniques. 6 Exploring Old Maps (EOM) 2017