SpatialNews Press Release
David Rumsey Internet GIS Service Expands With Addition of 18th and 19th Century Boston
www.davidrumsey.com/gis
www.telemorphic.com
San Francisco, CA - Interactively visualizing Boston, MA, from the mid-1700s to the late 1800s, is the latest addition to the David Rumsey Internet GIS Service (www.davidrumsey.com/gis), a revolutionary web browser-based mapping and visualization service that combines centuries-old maps with contemporary geospatial data. Boston is the second city made available through this freely accessible Internet GIS Service that provides display and analysis capabilities to support a series of GIS and image visualization processes.
First launched with historical and contemporary maps of San Francisco Bay, CA, the service now includes 18 different historical maps of Boston's downtown and metro-area, dating from 1776 to 1897. Modern data include true and false color infrared Landsat satellite imagery, shaded relief data, digital orthophotos and a statewide mosaic of 7.5' quads from the state of Massachusetts, plus detailed streets, lakes and parks data from StreetMap (ESRI, Inc., Redlands, CA).
"The addition of the Boston data set extends the Internet GIS service's geographic coverage, and further demonstrates the importance of historical maps to our understanding of history and the geographical changes that have taken place across time," said David Rumsey, president of Cartography Associates.
One of the older maps in the collection, Thomas Jefferys' pre-revolutionary work titled "The Provinces of Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire," shows a plan for the "town of Boston" dated to 1776. Another, "Plan of Boston," published in 1835 by Boston publisher George G. Smith, is a rare wall map of the city created during a time of rapid change. A very decorative map, F. G. Sidney's 1852 "Map of the City and Vicinity of Boston" includes inset views of Faneuil Hall and the State House mounted on linen and bordered by green silk.
Rumsey's Internet GIS service, part of the award-winning David Rumsey Historical Map collection (www.davidrumsey.com), an Internet site featuring over 6,500 high-resolution digital images from one of the largest private map collections in the U. S., will soon include 3-D flythroughs and historical maps of Washington, D.C., New York City, NY, Los Angeles, CA Chicago, IL, and ultimately, regions, states and continents.
Rumsey's Internet GIS Service, powered by Maplicity software (Telemorphic, Inc., Berkeley, CA), supports a wide variety of industry standard web browsers and operating systems. Telemorphic also rectified the historical maps to the current geospatial data.
"Working with historical maps is a real challenge," said Todd Helt, president of Telemorphic Inc. "Many of these maps were created prior to modern mapping and surveying methods and in some cases, the maps are based on an artist's illustration."
Consequently, bibliographic data and other information regarding estimated error associated with the rectification process are provided for each historical map in the GIS collection.
Rumsey's collection numbers over 150,000 physical maps and the distinguished online collection has been recognized as Yahoo's Pick of the Week, Best of the Net from About.com, Site of the Day from USA Today, and Editor's Choice from Netscape, Lycos, AOL and other search engines, and Wired and Mercator's World magazines. Recently, the site was featured in
WiredNews (www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50785,00.html)
and on TechTV (www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,24330,3369256,00.html).
Visit www.davidrumsey.com/gis for more information about the Internet GIS service and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.
About Cartography Associates, Inc.
Cartography Associates, founded in 1996, promotes the distribution of digital facsimiles both in print and electronic media. Specializing in both primary source documents and cutting-edge technology, Cartography Associates is committed to developing tools that integrate cataloging with visual images on the Internet. CA's vision is to offer users the best of both worlds: the powerful searching, access, and user functionality made possible by technology, combined with the visual beauty, technical mastery and intellectual richness of original source materials.
About Telemorphic, Inc.
A leading innovator in web-based mapping products and services, Telemorphic, Inc. (www.telemorphic.com), leverages rapidly converging communications and computing technologies (C3T) to improve functionality, reduce costs and add value for its customers. Maplicity is a trademark of Telemorphic, Inc.
All other brands and trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
Contact
Press Contacts:
Dana Wormer (e-mail danawormer@earthlink.net; tel.: 215-563-2454)
David Rumsey (e-mail: rumsey@luna-img.com)
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