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Title: Building a Historical GIS for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2015
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Abstract: A Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) is a way to create a time-variable spatial representation of geographic features, which is considered as a bridging technology between geography and history in a digital framework. The history of Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia covers several thousand years, with numerous sites representing important historical landmarks. As Makkah is the most important city in Islamic history, developing a HGIS for it would have significant meaning for the more than a billion Muslims around the world. A state-of-the-art HGIS has been developed for Makkah through acquiring, integrating, manipulating, and analyzing an extensive collection of spatial and non-spatial datasets. This research has resulted in the publishing of a bi-lingual atlas of historical sites in Makkah that contains more than seventy historical locations and covers almost a thousand years (500s to 1500s). Work is underway to also build an online HGIS on the Harvard WorldMap platform, so that materials in the atlas and beyond will be made available for researchers and the general public from any part of the world through a web-based dynamic mapping site. Future work may propel the system into an augmented reality innovation. This paper introduces the background and historical-geographic materials, summarizes the technical challenges and solutions, and presents milestones and perspectives for this on-going effort.
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Authors: Mirza, Meraj, N; Dawod, Gomaa, M; Elzahrany, Ramaze, A; Mirza, Mohammad, M
Publisher: Colorado State University, Harvard University
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Other, Population Data Science
Countries: Saudi Arabia