Articles by Alain Dallo

Alpage program, based on a collaboration between historians, geographers and computer researchers, aims to build a historical GIS of Paris. First, we reconstructed the pre-Haussmannian plan of Paris by georeferencing and vectorizing the survey of the cadastre made by P. Vasserot (1810-1836). Then, on these fundamental layers, historical information layers, like medieval and modern ones, will be built by different researchers according to their specific interests (churches, town walls, fiefs, parishes, etc.). Since this tool is technologically complex and since it is intended to be a reference work for further historical studies about Paris, we must immediately take into consideration the organization of further collaborative work. Accessing the GIS data, both to share them with different types of users and to edit new data in it, is an essential question, although it is often considered a trivial one. The issue of the use of a tool by the researchers seems nevertheless to be decisive and intrinsically linked to the success of a GIS. Meeting the needs and expectations of the users, webmapping might be a good solution for editing the geometric and attribute data in a GIS. But today, setting up this kind of platform for collaborative work is still difficult and time consuming. That is why, for Alpage, a temporary solution was found, revealing what organization theorists call a “community of practice”: it combines a centralized management of the references and object identifiers via the web and an independent edition of the objects by thematicians on their own computers. For this reason the DBMS ALPAGE-References has been adapted and posted on the website of the LAMOP.