The spatial representation of the Croatian Encyclopedia of Technology: from idea to fruition

Abstract

Highly informative content, objectivity, credibility, and the organisation of knowledge are just some of the characteristics that make encyclopedias and online encyclopedic projects reliable works that provide users with efficient access to information related to their area of interest. As valuable sources for acquiring new knowledge, it is essential that they keep pace with today’s websites not only in terms of quality, but also in presentation. One form of presentation is spatial representation, which should be further explored in the encyclopedic context. This practice is already present in various projects, and such a new way of presenting online encyclopedic content would allow for more effective access to information and improved navigation when retrieving content. In encyclopedistics, spatial indicators, as the basis of spatial representation, are not in systematic use, and their full searching and browsing options are not fully enabled. Associating spatial indicators with encyclopedic content would make the creation of searchable and browsable virtual cartographic representations of encyclopedic knowledge possible. To this end, the content of the Croatian Technical Encyclopedia was used for a qualitative analysis of its articles, through which the types of data with spatial attributes typical for each article category were determined, followed by the identification of which types of data should be recorded for each category. The research established that article categories are indeed the key to creating a future model for spatial tagging and representation of encyclopedic knowledge. Based on the creation of unified spatial indicators (geotags) for individual article categories, a set of metadata was proposed, and a model for the spatial representation of encyclopedic knowledge was developed. Based on this model, the Atlas of Croatian Technology Heritage was created as a spatial representation of the knowledge found in the Croatian Encyclopedia of Technology.