Possibilities for recreating the Itiner-e Roman Roads map in CC3+ or other software?
Wyvern
🖼️ 269 images Cartographer
Ralf posted on the PF Blog earlier today about the Itiner-e website, which allows the viewing of an interactive map showing many of the archaeologically-recovered ancient roadways across the Roman Empire.
A colleague on an ancient history forum had also seen this site, and posted about it today as well. Later, another commentator on the same forum asked whether it would be possible to recreate parts of the map separately, with the same kind of 3D (so with topographic information) appearance as the Itiner-e maps.
While the Itiner-e site allows free download of the JSON files, I think that only covers the road network, not the geomorphology as well (judging by a quick check-through the download file). Said commentator had also tried importing it into a free GIS program, but was only able to see the roads after doing so, which tends to confirm that.
I know we've had discussions that have mentioned GIS here before, mostly in regard to FT3 (e.g. parts of this discussion from 2023), which have largely highlighted the problems of getting GIS data to work usefully with CC3+ or FT3, without conversion and probable tracing.
I did wonder though if anyone here had suggestions that would allow the recreation of parts of the Roman Roads map using the JSON data, with some workaround for any suitable GIS data for the regions involved (as a non-expert, I'm guessing that some of the GIS programs must come with a topographic input built-in - given that's what some of them show in their advertising images, which are commonly Google Earth-like), either in suitable GIS software (suggestions would help!) or CC3+?
Comments
An XP could certainly read the JSON road data and then pull in geographical data from somewhere else. MapTiler seems to output TopoJSON, so there's a start. I think that might be a relatively easy XP to write.
There's also the old Orbis-GIS.
Animated zooming gives me migraines, so I can't use most gis systems. I wonder if it's possible to import gis data into CC3+ or FT, and export to static maps.
The problem my colleague was having after importing the JSON file into QGIS (free software) was that just the roads showed up. I was vaguely assuming that at least some of the available GIS software would have the topographical geoid data pre-loaded, but maybe that's not the case? I'm approaching this from the perspective of having no idea about GIS software in general though! Is there, for instance, a set of said topographical data available that could be imported into a program such as QGIS, over which the roads could then be overlaid?
In answer to Marja's point, judging by the discussion from 2023 on this Forum my first post here linked to, GIS data can't be directly imported into CC3+ or FT3, so could only be imported as an image that would then have to be traced.
Incidentally, a further colleague commented on that ancient history forum that it seems for Britannia, the Itiner-e map has used only the roads known and suspected from the original 1955 version of Ivan Margary's monumental work "The Roman Roads of Britain". This is odd, because there was an updated version published that expanded and corrected the earlier edition in 1973. I'd already expressed concern on that other forum, because I'd found at least two roads known to exist in Scotland that aren't on the Itiner-e map. In addition, it seems the Itiner-e map has excluded at least some British Roman Roads that don't connect into the rest of the network, despite the fact they're archaeologically attested. This could mean there are similar problems elsewhere, of course, for all it remains a fascinating resource map.