EHRI Geospatial Repository
Introduction
The Geospatial Repository was developed within the EHRI-3 project in response to user requirements which we identified: our survey and focus groups indicated a strong need for a better access to standardised geospatial information. It showed that researchers, projects and institutions struggle in getting access to historical data making it possible to build maps, enrich datasets with place information and more.
- The EHRI Geospatial Repository offers researchers, projects and organisations to
store and share geodata in a standard compliant, reusable way
search and explore datasets based on their metadata
use, download and combine datasets for mapping, data enrichment or spatial analysis
We also aim to avoid duplicating efforts when different institutions or projects gather similar types of spatial information, for instance, when cataloging archival collections or tracking the movements of Holocaust victims.
What data is collected?
The Geospatial Repository aims to provide access to any geospatial data which can be relevant for the research about the Holocaust. This includes, but is not limited to the EHRI taxonomy used for cataloguing data in Holocaust Geographies which is developed here. Examples include historical borders, places of persecution such as ghettos and camps, data related to local history of the Holocaust and to history of refugees during the Holocaust or sites of remembrance.
The data can be provided both in vector data (consisting of points, lines and polygons) and raster data (made up of pixels; images).
How to contribute data
Even though EHRI creates some datasets of its own, it relies on the research community to contribute. The Geospatial Repository serves as a repository for data developed by projects, institutions and individual researchers. We are interested in collecting and storing all kinds of spatial data useful for Holocaust-related research.
We require contributors to submit a minimum of standardised metadata describing the dataset. This will facilitate discovery and provide users with a understanding of the (often complex) data.
The datasets can be uploaded and saved in a variety of formats (such as shapefiles, CSV, GeoTIFF, etc.). EHRI’s staff will check the data, standardise it if needed and internally store it as a GeoPackage. In a next step, the dataset will be pushed into the EHRI Geoserver (providing standardised services such as WMS, WFS, etc.) and linked to the Geospatial Repository which serves as a metadata store. Please refer to the documentation and provide information about the data via this form. You can also contact us via email at geodata@ehri-project.eu. The EHRI staff will be happy to assist you in the process of uploading and describing datasets.
Contribute to the EHRI Document Blog
EHRI provides a space to discuss and present datasets in detail via the EHRI Document Blog which is specifically designed to share ideas about Holocaust-related archival documentation, its presentation and interpretation using digital tools. We encourage contributors and users of the Geospatial Repository to share their knowledge and experience, maps and scripts (including Jupyter notebooks and similar) in the Blog. The blog is open to contributions reflecting on your experience with geospatial data as well.
In the near future, we plan to enhance the usage of the Geospatial Repository by different forms of training. To stay informed, we recommend subscribing to the EHRI newsletter (https://www.ehri-project.eu/ehri-newsletter).