Local Market GIS and Traditional Korean Culture in Late Chosun Dynasty
Choe, Young jun / Sin, Hang su / Jung, Chi young / Kim, Heung kyu
Institute of Korean Culture, Korea University, Korea

Institute of Korean Culture(IKC) of Korea University has since 2002 worked on the Electric Cultural Atlas of Chosun Korea. Included in 24 research agendas is Local Market GIS which deals with information on the location of periodic markets and merchandise exchanged at market places. More than two thousand periodic markets are identified along with their sites and situations, and other information relevant to the markets is collected, stored, retrieved and processed using Local Market GIS.

Characteristically, most pre-modern Korean local markets opened every five days. From this, Local Market GIS reconstructs the commercial network and the range of tertiary industry of late Chosun Dynasty. As in other countries, traditional Korean local and regional markets were the place of trade and at the same time the scene of cultural activities. Compared with other cultural geographic information systems, Local Market GIS lends an additional information on social lifes of the period. Location of periodic markets and private schools of local elite called seowon, for instance, can be combined in
a meaningful way together to link the relationship between commerce and education. The research can be further extended into folk customs and religious cultures. In this way, it is possible to come up with
regionalization other than administrative districts. This research, in all, testifies the potential of cultural studies in humanities applying geographic information technology.

Building a historical GIS for Ireland: Importance and potentials
Paul S. Ell
Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, Queen's University Belfast, UK

In the mid 1990s the Database of Irish Historical Statistics was created at the Queen's University, Belfast. This is one of the largest quantitative resources on Irish history holding data from the census, poor law and sources through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Database led directly to the publication of an atlas "Mapping the Great Irish Famine" that gave a spatial history of the causes and impacts of the Famine in the mid-1840s. At the time the Database was created, however, no attempt was made to build a comprehensive GIS of the changing administrative units of Ireland. This paper reviews plans for creating such a system based on using townlands, a tiny and very stable administrative unit of which there were 60,000 in Ireland. These will be digitised and look-up tables created to allow them to be aggregated to create Ireland's larger administrative units, particularly baronies and poor law unions. These can then be linked back to the Database. This paper describes the way that the system will be created and describes its potential for invigorating the study of Ireland's spatial history.

Mapping and "Mindscapes"
Maurizio Forte
CNR-ITABC, Rome

In recent years great efforts were undertaken to acquire, store, distribute and visualize archaeological objects and whole excavation cites. Computer Graphics and Virtual and Augmented Reality techniques were employed to reconstruct and visualize features of artefacts and sites that might otherwise be difficult to appreciate. Furthermore, this technology was utilized to educate students and the general public about cultural heritage.

Past efforts for integrating Cultural Heritage content within a computer-based rich media framework have fallen in either one of two categories, each of which has its own methodologies and techniques, which have made tremendous progress independent from each other over the last years: 3D capturing: many semi-automatic methodologies and devices have been proposed to reconstruct 3D models from existing scenes/artefacts (range scanning, photogrammetry, shape from video, etc.); synthetic reconstruction: 3D modelling from scratch, based on incomplete data such as floor/ground plans, stylistic information and educated guessing. The models produced are based on a logical organization and more synthetic (modelling by feature or components); on the other hand, metrical accuracy is often unknown and depends heavily on the operator cleverness.

Starting from these premises a multidisciplinary effort have to be addressed towards an integrated approach, with the possibility to use all the spatial technologies available for the survey, the monitoring and the reconstruction of an archaeological site or landscape: everything in 3D with an excellent accuracy of the whole process. In theoretical sense we distinguish three levels of landscape to investigate and to interpret: mapscape (virtual landscape by GIS and spatial data), taskscape (activities and relations of the landscape), mindscape (perceived landscape, digital ecosystem). In conclusion, we will face up methodological and technological problems of the virtual reconstruction using OpenGl software and libraries in order to project, to reconstruct and to navigate the ancient landscape in real time. The new rules of this digital ecosystem will be “autopoietic”, in the sense that they follow ecological and cyber-anthropological theories. Each interaction in real time within the virtual landscape will produce difference and, through the difference, new ways of learning.

Gazetteers, Visualization and Geo-Referenced Media in
Researching Tibetan and the Himalayan Places
David Germano
Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia, USA

We will begin by showing a relatively simple extension of the gazetteer involving the use of MapServer to plot each feature against the backdrop of basic administrative and environmental GIS layers. We will then show how the gazetteer is used to refer to rich interactive maps drawing upon a Flash-XML-MYSQL model, and themselves incorporating databases of texts, images, audio-video and three-dimensional immersive reconstructions. Finally, we will discuss our current work on using the gazetteer to georeference media collections, such that feature entries can automatically become rich, multimedia studies without manual interventions.

Particular challenges which will be discussed in this paper, along with the lessons learned from them, include a methodology for metadata integration, the recording of bounding boxes and image registration data for several thousand maps, issues of map accuracy and projection, and methods for effective listing and display of rich map resources covering the same or overlapping areas.

Chinese and Taiwan Historical GIS
Tina Lou
Senior GIS Analyst, Academia Sinica Computing Centre, Taiwan

Based on the requirements of multi-disciplinary research applications, the goal of the two systems is constructing an integrated WebGIS-based application infrastructure on the spatial extent of China and Taiwan, in the timeframe of Chinese and Taiwan history, and with the contents of Chinese and Taiwan civilization. This system consists of basic geospatial materials, WebGIS integrated application environment and thematic map information. Through those integrations, an interface for data search and application was developed, and further facilitated ongoing research projects of different kinds. Those systems also established a feedback mechanism for collecting research and application results continuously.

In this presentation, we will discuss our current work on digitalizing the historic data and making the digital thematic map. Furthermore, we will talk about the future work and seek further cooperation between different institutes.