The integration of 1457 World map and Bing maps in Wordpress

Abstract

The world map dated 1457, which is held in the National Library of Florence (Italy), has textual units in the form of toponyms and cartouches. The textual units are related to a collection of iconographic elements. Individuals who are interested in the map and wish to either identify the location of the toponyms in today’s world or read the cartouches written in Latin would require a significant amount of research. Hence, the purpose of this project is to help them enrich their research on the map by providing the efficiency of identifying the textual units’ location, as well as additional related information. Research was carried out to find a suitable solution for integrating the map data and Bing Maps. The technique incorporated MapZoom script to the map and used client-side scripting based on JavaScript for the communication between the map and Bing Maps. Subsequently, the solution was developed as a WordPress plugin to achieve good maintainability. As a result, it enables users to quickly identify the textual unit’s location by highlighting the area when their mouse hovers over the textual unit or the pushpin on Bing Maps. Additional information will also be loaded on the two window panels when it is clicked. However, the plugin is developed solely for Engineering Historical Memory and this specific map. Other WordPress might not be able to use this plugin as it might not have the dependency installed. In addition, integrating other historical maps with Bing Maps would require developing a new plugin for each of them, which is impractical. Lastly, the usage of a high-resolution image lowers the zoom performance of MapZoom. Hence, future developments include enhancing the plugin as a general form instead of a map-specific form and re-developing a new zoom script that can handle such high-resolution images.