An Open Source Toolkit for Flexible Browsing of Historical Maps on the Web

Using Keyhole Markup Language (KML) makes it possible to integrate these maps with Google Earth. There is some research on historical maps on Google Earth (Zeile et al. 2007Nishimura et al. 2007). Although those tools are highly functional for defining 3D geographical information on the web, the user interface is not easy to use for traditional humanities scholars who are normally not familiar with KML language. Moreover, setting the image in Google Earth is not always their priority. Therefore, when it is necessary to exhibit original, hand-drawn maps on the web, one has to take different approaches to integrating these images into the web.