Assessing the planimetric accuracy of Paris atlases from the late 18th and 19th centuries

Abstract

The recent initiatives to digitize cultural heritage resources and publish them on the Web have renewed interest in historical maps for the diachronic analysis of territories in GIS applications. However, such analyses should not be done without a good understanding of the possibilities and limitations of geographical information provided by historical maps, i.e. their quality. One of the major concerns regarding historical maps quality is their positional planimetric accuracy which highly depends on survey techniques used at the time. As these techniques are not always thoroughly known and as ground truth is most of the time not sufficiently available, direct absolute evaluation approaches have been proposed to assess historical maps positional planimetric accuracy. In this article, we follow the intuition that the most widely adopted georeferencing-based approach for assessing the positional planimetric accuracy of historical maps can be adapted to provide an evaluation of the error caused by the survey process in cases like Paris atlases where the georeferencing transformation can be estimated with ground control points based on geodetic features and where the projection of the map can be approximated by a well known projected coordinate reference system. We apply this tuned approach on the Verniquet atlas and evaluate the validity of our hypothesis about projection approximation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.