Swiss Historical Maps Allow Journey Through Time In Your Browser

An anonymous reader writes "The Swiss Federal Office of Topography has published a complete set of digitized historical maps from 1938 to 2011. The twist: a browser application allows you to create a time travel movie at any place in Switzerland for any zoom level. As an example, you can see the recession of Europe's biggest glacier over the last 75 years. The application is the most recent effort of the Swiss Government to make geodata freely available to the public at no cost using open source software and will include maps dating as far back as 1838."

A glass darkly

[Shamanin]

EOM

Google Maps

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wished Google Maps would add another slider that lets you scroll back to previous satellite images of the same area.

Re:Google Maps

[hammeraxe]

This is possible in Google Earth, it is a really neat feature. For some areas they have imagery that dates back to the 80s.

For instance, you can check naval bases and see which aircraft carriers have been in at certain times. Or, more mundane, just look at how your neighbourhood/city has expanded/changed over the years.

Re:Google Maps

[mikael]

Extend that to photographs and postcards. I've seen postcards of villages from 90 years ago, and they haven't changed. The most haunting one was to see pictures of the shop-owners and their children. The shops and homes were the same with minor modifications. But it was so strange to realize that none of those people were around any more.

Fantastic Idea

[Unknown1337]

The implications this could have for history records and documenting future changing is amazing. The idea of making this information public domain and easily accessible could drive both knowledge of the country and maybe broaden the understanding of time's effect on landscape, etc. with a huge visual impact.

Old

[sycodon]

You know you are getting old when records from 1938 are "Historical".

Historical, that's from the 1800s...not a mere lifetime ago.

Re:

[Unknown1337]

Historical by definition is "concerning history; belonging to the past, not the present." which would make anything that happened yesterday (or even an hour ago for that matter) historical. Obviously the longer the range, the more useful/applicable this information becomes, but even this initial availability will be able to teach many people new things. To put a finer point on it, many things have happened more recently than 1938 that are considered to be 'historical'. For example: World War II, Sputnik Sat

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

Mod parent +1: Humbug

1838? 1938? Which is it?

[fotoguzzi]

1838 would seem to be wrong, but maybe someone should check the article and write a summary on it.

Re:1838? 1938? Which is it?

[athmanb]

It's 1938 so far, they have much older maps that they're still working on. 1838 was the year the first full-country map of Switzerland was published.

Re:

[fotoguzzi]

Thanks. That would have been a better summary than what we have, I think.

Re:

[NemoinSpace]

look asshole, if the editor can't even edit numbers, I'm sure not going to trust his .html abilities.

CERN Evolving

[Roger W Moore]

IF you want to see the evolution of the CERN particle physics lab this this link [admin.ch]. You can see the construction of some of the early accelerators (PS and ISR) which were in buildings (PS) or a large circular raised embankment (ISR). However the more modern accelerators you can only detect by the construction of new surface buildings (look for the ATLAS and LHC magnet assembly buildings appearing across the road from the main site towards the end.

Re:

[denvergeek]

Or if you're a geology nerd. Glaciers are cool on many levels, not all of them involving hippies.

I have an idea

[Tokolosh]

Can this system be patented: Not criminalizing people for liberating data because is it already free?

I know that Switzerland has very clever patent clerks.

They tried this in Japan once

[Dwedit]

They tried showing historical maps in Japan once. They overlaid them on top of current maps.
It only led to people attempting to revive a caste system and discrimination.

Bah developers suck

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't work in IE 6. Can they fix it by the end of the day?

Sincerely, PHB

Re:

[uglyMood]

Whoosh!

Re:

[uglyMood]

Perhaps I was too harsh. PHB is an acronym for "Pointy Haired Boss." Although someone reading Slashdot and not getting a Dilbert reference...

Whoosh!

Re:

[Pascal Sartoretti]

No, make it an ActiveX, so that it also works in IE 5.5

Re:

[hduff]

This capability is going to be fantastic when applied to Slashdot so we can see it when it was good and compare it to now.

I must conclude

[SpaghettiPattern]

I must conclude that I live in the most boring place on earth. In a radius of 5km from my house, not a single dot changed since 1938. (And no, transitions from monochrome to colour don't really count.)