A century in Beijing

The map.

Using this map by France's Service Géographique de l'Armée from 1900 we will follow the evolution of the urban landscape of the central part of China's capital at several milestones through the decline of Qing dynasty, the birth of a republic, the establishment communism to the modern times. The city grew vey quickly over the last hundred years and is now way past its old borders. While some things in the downtown remained pretty unchanged like the Tiananmen Imperial Palace, numerous old constructions were demolished in an effort to modernize the town.

The goals

The Beijing City Wall that is now demolished.

• To align maps from different time periods and see how the landscape changed. The town's straightforward rectangular planning will allow us to make matches more easily.
• Incorporating the geodata for finding places.
• The map has a rich legend with toponymic information in French and the dated French system of transliteration of Mandarin. The plan is to extract and match these place names with their modern counterparts.
• Add the old pictures of significant buildings that are no longer there if it's possible to find them.
• To present the results as a web resource.

project plan

• Find a proper map that can be used to align and containing enough information.
• Align the old map with the mordern one.
• Compar these two maps and extract the area where building changed.
• Extract the coordinates of the old building.
• Creat a database to record the name, function of the old building and the name and function of the current one.
• Compar these two maps and extract the area where the function of building was changed.
• Extract the coordinates
• Creat a database to record the name, function of the old building and the address of the appartment currently.
• Crea a website which can display the difference of two maps in an interactive way.
  • high light all the areas which were rebuilt or function have been changed in different colors.
  • For the area which were rebuilt:When putting cursor on this area,pop up window to show the instruction of old buildings and the current one.
  • For the buildings which function were changed:When putting cursor on this area,pop up window to show the function of these departments and hight light the area where the current dapartment is.

mile stones

Week 8:

• Learning the tools that canbe used to align maps.
• Align the old maps
• Applying the DH segment to extract street and building's shape automatically.
• Tried to use OCR to extract word description.
• Evaluation of the result.
• Selection of new proper old maps.

Week 9:

• Aligning the map (100%).
• Extracting the building in old map(10%).
• Finalisation of milestones
• selection of the proper database
• Preparation of the midterm presentation

Week 10:

• Extracting the building in old map(80%)
• Adding the data to the database.
• Planning for the creation of a website

Week 11:

• Finishing extracting.
• Finishing the database.
• Creation of the first version of website to display these maps

Week 12:

• Finishing the website and the interactive function.
• Doing the improvement of the website.
• Refacting the github repository to subbmit.

Week 13:

• Final presenting.
• Writting the report.

See also

• Projects