What is Gutenkarte?

FOSS4G2006: A presentation on Gutenkarte was made at FOSS4G 2006. The presentation is available in S5 format.

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta's GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map. Ultimately, Gutenkarte will offer the ability to annotate and correct the places in the database, so that the community will be able construct and share rich geographic views of Project Gutenberg's enormous body of literary classics.

Gutenkarte accomplishes all this with the help of several notable pieces of Free and Open Source software, including PostGIS, MapServer, GDAL/OGR, and Python.

Gutenkarte was developed by MetaCarta Labs. If you find Gutenkarte interesting, and would like to be notified when updates and new features are available, please drop an email to .