Combining current vector data with historical textual data and data extracted from old maps to study the development of the city of Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract

Settlement development is a topic of great interest for many researchers from different scientific areas. The research on this topic is based on historic city plans and maps from different time periods, or even on historical textual data, which can give information concerning the construction year of the buildings or information about expansions of the city plans over time. The unavailability of historic city plans, maps or diagrams at specific time periods and the mistakes and missing information in historical textual data make it difficult to use only one source of information on visualizing the settlement development in an area. For the visualization of the settlement development in Switzerland from 19th to 21st century, we use current vector data in combination with textual information about their construction year from different official sources. Additionally, we use relevant information mined from historic maps. In this paper, we combine the historical textual data for the city of Zurich with information extracted from historic maps in the area, in order to improve the visualization of settlement development in Switzerland depicted on the Atlas of Switzerland - online.