出版社：National Centre for Maps and Cartographic Heritage
摘要：The Behaim Globe of 1492 is the oldest extant globe of the earth. It is an early masterpiece of various scientific and technological achievements; nowadays it is a famous exhibit of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. Its map image is primarily Ptole-maic, including elements of medieval universal cartography and of portulans. Its luxurious decoration shows 100 pictorial illustrations plus 60 banners and coats of arms, more than 2000 place names, and more than 50 long legends. The Behaim Globe is one of the very few existing cartographical works where different traditions of late medieval mapmaking are bound together. This paper reports on an ongoing research project, aiming at a digital as well as a printed edition of the globe. In 2011, high-resolution digital photographs have been taken and a new 3D model is under construction. Furthermore, there is a database of digitized analog images of its surface taken in 1990 and black-and-white images from 1940. Based on these image data, a comprehensive catalogue of all visually relevant places including text fields is built up by means of a domain ontology for medieval cartography in description logics (OWL-DL). Up to now, nearly 3000 instances (catalogue entries and comments) have been created. These instances are the core of the planned edition. Regarding its digital part, it is a com-mon practice nowadays to unite generic concepts and properties for objects, time and space, events, actors, processes, etc., in a reference ontology such that domain specific concepts are derived from the generic ones. The CIDOC CRM is such a reference ontology; our im-plementation, the Erlangen CRM, provides a semantic base for the cartographic domain on-tology, suitable for automatic reasoning. Furthermore, the globe provides a georeferential organization of information which opens up a new dimension for semantic indexing. Histor-ical maps are cognitive maps in the first place, which require a formal qualitative represen-tation of (abstract) regions, their relative positions, but also direction, orientation, and dis-tance. Represented by specific datatypes with constraint solvers, their integration with a log-ical representation framework leads to a system of hybrid reasoning for processing complex spatial queries over the Behaim globe instance base.
