ONTOLOGICAL STANDARDIZATION FOR HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTIONS: STUDYING THE GREEK BORDERLINES OF 1881

Abstract. Historical maps deliver valuable historical information which is applicable in several domains while they document the spatiotemporal evolution of the geographical entities that are depicted therein. In order to use the historical cartographic information effectively, the maps' semantic documentation becomes a necessity for restoring any semantic ambiguities and structuring the relationship between historical and current geographical space. This paper examines cartographic ontologies as a proposed methodology and presents the first outcomes of the methodology applied for the historical map series «Carte de la nouvelle frontière Turco-Grecque» that sets the borderlines between Greece and Ottoman Empire in 1881. The map entities were modelled and compared to the current ones so as to record the changes in their spatial and thematic attributes and an ontology was developed in Protégé OWL Editor 3.4.4 for the attributes that thoroughly define a historical map and the digitised spatial entities. Special focus was given on the Greek borderline and the changes that it caused to other geographic entities.