Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Unraveling these changes to map the pre-1876 parish geography then
involved a project member spending two years in the National Archives
using a range of cartographic sources.
33
The resulting vector boundaries,
with some further enhancements, have been licensed to Pinpoint Chan-
cel Search Ltd.
34
Creating a commercial product involved our linking
the boundaries to a digitized version of another source in the National
Archives, the Record of Ascertainments (class IR 104), which identifies
the actual liabilities. This linkage involved extensive use of our histori-
cal gazeteers.
Chancel repair liability is financially important to the Great Britain
HGIS but is obviously a somewhat special case, especially as after 2013
the liability exists only if it forms part of the registered title. The market
for liability searches is presumably disappearing; fortunately, advertis-
ing income from our website is now sufficient to cover its running costs.
However, the system built by Landmark Information clearly dwarfs any-
thing built by an academic HGIS project. The challenge is to unlock the
analytic potential such systems clearly contain. W hile the government
agencies discussed in the previous section actively supported our pub-
lishing the raster LUSGB data, licensing data to commercial companies
obviously stops it being made available to everyone and has arguably in-
hibited academic use. Issues of “commercial confidence” have certainly
inhibited the account given here, so, for example, nothing has been said
about the two occasions when we needed to formally respond to hints
of possible legal action against us.
Conclusions
This chapter has shown both how GIS techniques can be applied to a
range of broadly historical challenges outside the accepted realm of
HGIS and how our approach has had to adapt to meet the needs of work-
ers in other fields. One general comment is that although many of our
collaborators have had limited actual knowledge of the practicalities of
GIS, there is a high level of general awareness of GIS and enthusiasm for
its potential.
One final large question needs to be answered: W hy bother with
the kinds of activities described here? One obvious answer is to make
