Example Applications of Historical Maps in GIS and Databases

Historical maps are a vital and often used source in a verity of disciplines and applications. Since a decade or two, they have moved into the GIS-community. A large scanning project by Lantmäteriverket will make most of the maps in Sweden available as raster images. Two major projects have modelled the maps for storage in databases, but they have several drawbacks. In our project we model the maps as close to the original structure as possible with a very data oriented view. In this article some different applications are presented, which goes beyond the traditional use of historical maps are used in GIS. These brief examples involve data mining, statistics, retrogressive analysis and hypothesis testing