Communications of the ACM
Spatial Technology Opens a Window Into History
The Strabo software reads scanned maps to automatically identify historical locations ranging from long-closed factories to lakes and rivers that dried up decades ago.
Credit: Yao-Yi Chiang
University of Southern California (USC) researchers have developed Strabo, software that reads scanned maps and automatically identifies historical locations.
However, the researchers say Strabo is just a first step toward a larger goal. "The software I ultimately want to create will be a user-generated platform offering information about any given piece of land from multiple sources," says USC professor Yao-Yi Chiang. He says the program eventually will support automatic reasoning, which will provide information to users with only the coordinates of a location and how the land will be used.
In 2014, a British company hired Chiang to help them determine whether areas of land had been subject to previous contamination. Chiang updated Strabo to automatically scan historical ordinance survey maps covering the entire country. The program now integrates multiple maps to identify areas that once supported factories, mines, quarries, or gas works that no longer exist.
The researchers note the platform is entirely open source. "Anyone can use our software without paying a licensing fee," Chiang says. "Users can write their own code on top of our software--in fact, we encourage people to do that."
From USC News
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