Shortest-Path Route Extraction From City Map

Project Plan

Our final goal is to create a simple Google-Maps-style navigation tool for the past. The user will be able to select two points, and see the shortest path between these two points. This would be a useful for someone to estimate how they would navigate through a city - possibly hundreds of years ago. Florian has been tasked with pre-processing the historical map. This involves searching for the best maps and cleaning them. Cleaning is crucial to ensure that an accurate graph is extracted from the map. Jonathan is working on representing the graph visually, creating interactivity, and hosting it on a website.

Already Completed

- Researched software that will help us with graph extraction

- Took the first steps to developing a cleaning process for each map

- Written Python code to display a graph from a text list of nodes and edges

- Completed simple routing between two nodes

- Setup a website and domain (www.dhproject.cf) to showcase our project

Future Goals

- Refine (and automate) the cleaning process. This may involve researching other maps and choosing the best ones for our needs

- Develop a manual process for assessing how accurate graph extraction is, and correcting if necessary

- Overlay the graph representation onto the historical map

- Letting a user select two nodes on the map, and displaying the shortest path between the two nodes

- Calculating and displaying the actual estimated distance between the two points

- Displaying the interactive graph on the website

- (Stretch goal) Allow a user to upload their own map which will be processed and displayed