Towards a Collaborative Map Annotation Workflow: Annotating Ancient Places on Rigas' Charta of Greece

Abstract

Two-dimensional geospatial information has long been essential to archaeology, with the field being an early adopter of maps. Historical maps play a crucial role in archaeological research, serving as invaluable resources that deepen our understanding of past landscapes, settlements, and human activities, while enriching our historical perspective. Annotation, in turn, has emerged as a powerful tool in facilitating research, enabling scholarly communication and collaboration, and providing a foundation for further analysis and interpretation. Enriching the metadata of historical maps through semantic geo-annotation and linking place names to global authority records or gazetteers has proven to be an effective mechanism not only for geo-referencing primary sources but also for interlinking diverse datasets within and across disciplines (Rainer et al. 2019).

How can researchers carry out these activities in a systematic, effective, and reproducible way? What processes, tools, and methods should they adopt, and in what order? Creating a clear, reusable, and sustainable workflow for collaborative map annotation is a key component of the Geospatial Workflow being developed within the ATRIUM project (https://atrium-research.eu/). This endeavor focuses on enabling the ingestion and use of maps from repositories either via IIIF (when available) or by direct upload of image files into tools such as Recogito Studio (https://recogitostudio.org/) for collaborative annotation and geo-tagging of place names.The resulting information will then be accessible to services such as catalog enrichment pipelines and applications for interactive visualization of geospatial data. While initially tested in Recogito Studio, the workflow is designed to be adaptable to various annotation tools, making it applicable across different scenarios. Additionally, it will be accompanied by a demonstrator, which serves as an exemplary use case focused on a specific topic or dataset, to showcase the practical potential of the workflow. This paper outlines both the ongoing efforts to identify and establish a collaborative, reusable map annotation workflow as well as the development of a demonstrator focusing on the Charta of Greece by Rigas Velestinlis, a culturally rich map, with multifaceted historical and archaeological information.

The Charta (Map) of Greece (Pazarli 2014) is a landmark work of the Modern Greek Enlightenment and a key example of pre-revolutionary Greek cartography. Created by Rigas Velestinlis, a writer and revolutionary influenced by Enlightenment and French Revolutionary ideals, it serves as both a cartographic achievement and a symbol of Greece's late 18th-century cultural and political aspirations. Engraved by Franz Müller and published in Vienna between 1796 and 1797, the map consists of 12 sheets (each approximately 70cm x 50cm), depicting a region from the Danube River to the Libyan Sea, including parts of Asia Minor, the Aegean and Ionian islands, Crete, and the Dodecanese.

More than just a geographic document, the Charta promotes the vision of a unified and independent Greek state by emphasizing locations and events from Greek antiquity, Byzantine history, and the Ottoman period. This richly layered historical and cultural content is integral to the Charta’s design and message, as it inspires hopes for liberation and democracy across the region. The Charta’s complex, multi-layered composition supports this symbolic vision, containing over 5,800 place names, often including both ancient and modern versions, and various archaeological comments. It portrays important ancient cities, historical figures, and 162 ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins, represented as inserts within the map, sometimes filling in the space reserved for water or specific regions. Additionally, it includes a windrose, nine detailed city plans, mythological illustrations, a time scale, and a legend.

Annotating a map as rich in content and cartographic design as the Charta of Greece (Rēgas 1797), with interconnections to other cartographic products from the same period and its longstanding tradition, provides a valuable testbed for identifying the aspects and challenges associated with the in-depth exploration of a historical map. Addressing key questions—such as defining the goal of the annotation; identifying the types of places to be annotated; selecting suitable gazetteer(s) for geo-annotation; capturing place names from various historical periods; considering how to annotate objects, comments, and other features alongside places; determining the necessary level of detail for the tagging vocabulary; managing ambiguities; and incorporating a critical examination of the map—will yield valuable insights into the process and user needs. This understanding will, in turn, inform our workflow and ensure that all relevant aspects are taken into consideration.

Furthermore, various scenarios will be explored and tailored to meet the needs of identified stakeholders. To ensure sustainability and leverage BPMN’s (Business Process Model and Notation, https://www.omg.org/bpmn/) ability to systematically represent complex processes, the resulting workflow will be formulated as a BPMN-style diagram. This diagram will illustrate the interconnections, iterations, and possible disjunctions among the various activities and steps within the process. Indeed, the workflow may sometimes not take the form of a strictly linear sequence of steps, but involve phases of mutual feedback and improvement between earlier and later stages of the process (for example, a tagging vocabulary may be revised based on feedback received during the actual annotation activity).

Additionally, the workflow will be transformed into a format compatible with the SSH Open Marketplace (https://sshopencloud.eu/ssh-open-marketplace), where it will be hosted, enhancing the findability, accessibility, and reusability of the workflow. A description of the demonstrator as well as the resulting output data will also be made available, to both validate the applicability of the workflow and share the outcomes yielded by the work on the Charta of Greece.

References

Pazarli, Maria. 2014. “Righas Velestinlis’ Map (Charta) of Greece: A Cartographic Approach.” PhD diss., Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. https://doi.org/10.12681/eadd/34604.

Rēgas. 1797. Charta tēs Hellados en hē periechontai hai nēsoi autēs [kai] meros tōn eis tēn Eurōpēn [kai] Mikran Asian polyarithmōn apoikiōn autēs [Map]. Franz Müller. Harvard University, Harvard Map Collection, G6810_1797_R4_stitched. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/ids:24146534.

Simon, Rainer, Valeria Vitale, Rebecca Kahn, Elton Barker, and Leif Isaksen. 2019. “Revisiting Linking Early Geospatial Documents with Recogito.” e-Perimetron 14 (3): 152–63. https://www.eperimetron.org/Vol_14_3/Simon_et_al.pdf.