Hi,

we used it to build a land-slides database from on-site observations.

F

The key word in your question is "still"... I certainly owned and made extensive use of a large digitizer to take points from a map that had been marked up with some points of interest by a colleague in the retail sector (e.g. competitor store locations), That was a difficult job to do precisely because the maps with the notations were folded or often "messy" and the necessity (as I'm sure you know) to geo-reference the map by finding some selected points with known coordinates. This was a point layer, obviously. I'd say the precision of such an exercise was extremely poor. Store locations transferred to a GIS by this method would often be misplaced, for example, on the wrong side of the street. Is this the kind of statistical accuracy you are thinking of reporting? It could be a useful report,

Anyway, that was many years ago -- now, the best way to do something like this is to purchase retail sector data in bulk (InfoUSA for example) or to geo-code by address. I'd estimate that very few people in my department have done a large amount of production geo-coding for probably 10 years (or more)! It could well be still useful as a part of a GIS fundamentals class. Do you have a different experience?

Morton O'Kelly, Dept. of Geography; Ohio State Univ.

Hi Morton, I still use it for historical maps. For example I recently needed the differing boundaries of Bulgaria from about 1000 CE so I ended up digitizing the boundaries as no paper > raster > vector method could obtain the polygons (each map was different). I know geologists still use it much as Francesco states above. I have gotten some interesting responses from the link below.  Archaeologists I know still use it as well.

I do give it a session in my GIS fundamentals class. I was hoping someone give me some VGIS examples.

http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/130664/in-what-real-world-examples-do-users-still-digitize-features-from-a-map

Hi,

If you still trying to develop a method for digitizing the data from map or historical map, please see this link, you may be interested to submit your work.

http://communications.elsevier.com/nl/jsp/m.jsp?c=%40aWcbjj3AS7H6PXwKBqBsydOqsXnteiDfBZsaJe28WYo%3D

The 2015 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences

Deadline extended to 14 February 2015

Thanks Arkoprovo

I use a verity of historic maps, topos, charts and geology maps in my work and find myself digitizing maps all the time.  I am a marine archaeologist and specialist in geophysical prospecting.

Dear Stuart,

in the archaeological domain this kind of operational approach is "still" very diffuse, due to enormous amount of archives material items, such as paper maps, radex and similar data recording supports, furthermore still too much employed in current field excavations and analysis.

Within our SITAR Project (see at http://sitar.archeoroma.beniculturali.it/ and some other resources at my RG profile), digitization activities represent the most important aspect for the first phase of our geo-data bank implementation, necessary for extracting above all polygonal archaeological features, altimetric points and related geospatial informations for mapping archaeological sites, monuments and complexes, and their fragmental partitions.

By the way, more generally such a necessary approach to data "distillation" implies some issues with regard to data heterogeneity, their completeness and final use and re-use. In this sense, this native heterogeneity generates, more or less deeply and distinctly, some questions on precision/completeness both at topographical and descriptive level, for old and also new data, motivating the implementation of semi-automated workflows in order to compare and re-align fragmentary different analogic source data.

Hi,

I think that (unfortunately) manual digitizing is very far from dead, and this, in my opinion, will be the case for quite a while longer in developing countries (ex. Macedonia, where I come from). I believe it is related to several conditions, like low availability of vector GIS data in the country/region, low cost of labor (country/region dependent) and low budgets for projects.

Additionally, I believe manual digitizing will remain the (globally) preferable method in small scale projects/tasks that require analysis of small areas and high precision GIS data that is unavailable and difficult to automatically process.

In other words, it all comes down to the expected conditions of time (digitizing vs. processing imagery) and cost (labor cost vs. price of imagery) optimization.

As an example, I think that, on average, I spend about 20% of the "GIS analysis" time for manual digitizing, however my colleague spends up to 50%. Most of our projects and tasks are related to biodiversity conservation/protected area management/environment protection etc. Project areas are usually 10 - 5000 km2.

Thanks Vasko for the great answer. Yes, I could see situations in developing countries that would require digitization of datasets that some other countries may take for granted.

Thanks Andrea, Historical digitizing (old maps, plans etc) seems like it is one of the primary uses. I tried the website but it wanted a password.

Dear stuart,

I just use it for some old paper images that show the changes of the area.

sincerely.

I've used the manual editing of vector data from georeferenced maps to reconstruct the historical evolution of urban drainage network of the city of Como (IT), as over the centuries many rivers were buried to make roads and for sanitary issues. Moreover it was helpfull for another project which purpose was to rediscover historical mountain paths... So the main use of this strategy i think is the historical data analysis!

Daniele, Excellent of course. Rivers from historical maps now buried. Someone did this for london I think now you have jogged my memory.

I assume line features.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterranean_rivers_of_London

Milad, What features interest you. Do you just overlay images or do you convert some features to vector?

I do this when a project requires participatory mapping in the field with no computers around.

Dear stuart,

i convert all the features that were important to our pupose to vector, and then with comparing to the new vector images, we show the changes of area.

i hope it was helpful.

Milad,

Thank you the additional details sent via email.

Stu

Documents can be really important to digitize. We have seen many times that documents that have not been digitized stand a risk of getting destroyed due to human actions or natural calamities.

Storing and digitizing documents is one thing and privately and securely storing them on the blockchain to actually claim ownership and prove them is another thing.

Such actions can be facilitated by new generation Enterprise Blockchains like Concordium which have Identity verification at a protocol level and also use Zero-Knowledge proofs to enable privacy.

Since it is a public chain everything can be publicly verified but at the same time revealing only essential information such that privacy is upheld.