Project Foreword
From 1937 until 1945, World War II raged throughout the world, and remains "the largest and deadliest conflict in human history." 1 Never before had a war been fought by so many soldiers, covered such a large area of the world's surface, targeted and killed so many civilians, or wrought such unparalleled destruction." 2 In the end, World War II resulted in over 62 million casualties 3 and left whole cities and countries in ruin.
Although a wealth of of data remains from World War II, geospatial and otherwise, much of these data are stored in analog (non-digital) formats. In addition, these data are scattered accross disparate medians (print sources, the web, etc.) and their discovery and acquisition require great investments of time and resources. With that in mind, the WWIIGIS project intends to accomplish the following goals:
- Collect and digitize geographic information (maps, plans, etc) pertaining to key World War II data themes. These include political and administrative boundaries, frontlines, troop locations/movements, battlefields, and selected areas of interest (esp. Holocaust-related data).
- Encourage the sharing and distribution of otherwise unavailable WWII geospatial-related materials.
- Present collected/project-related data through interactive, web-based, open maps.
- Freely disseminate collected/digitized project-related geospatial data as OGC-compliant Web services (WFS, WMS, KML) and as Shapefiles.