Web mapping application of Roman Catholic Church administration in the Czech lands in the early modern period

Abstract

Reconstruction of historical spatial relationships is still a topical issue in historical geography. In this respect, the Church history has not been well explored. The parish administration in the Czech lands is evolving since the advent of Christianity in 863, and a number of reforms have passed over the centuries. Significant changes in the administration also underwent during recatholisation of the Czech lands in the 17th and 18thcentury. From this Baroque era, there are written sources which have been preserved, so they can be utilized to reconstruct historical Church administration in the form of web mapping application. The paper briefly introduces methods which were used to build a spatial database filled with historical data. However, the main outcome of this paper is to describe the creation of the web mapping application that provides visualisation of this data. Discussed are topics like cartographic project, choice of map symbols, data generalization for different levels of detail and placement of annotations. Display of cartographic data were performed using the ArcGIS platform, through a combination of map tiles and feature services that are bundled into the application template created in Web AppBuilder.

Keywords

• Church administration
• Historical GIS
• Early modern period
• Web map
• Cartographic design