About this site

Welcome to our site, “Multi-layered Basemap System for Middle Eastern Cities”
The purposes of this system are the following:
1) To build integrated archives of knowledge and data on designated Middle Eastern cities, starting with Beirut, Aleppo, Tehran, and Istanbul.
2) To share the collection among concerned researchers for their research and studies by providing a platform for the exchange of new findings.
3) To contribute to the public by providing access to a section of the archives.

Several old maps of the cities are overlapped on Google Maps to compose multi-layered platforms on which researchers can input text, image, and audio data.
You can easily overlap the old maps on Google Maps, opening aerial pictures of the same place on the right half of the screen.
After registering your personal data and receiving our recognition, you can access the open data of the system.
This system is being developed and managed by a joint research project, “Human Mobility and Multiethnic Coexistence in Middle Eastern Urban Societies” (coordinator: Hidemitsu Kuroki) – MEIS2, a core research project of the ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, with technical support by Kokusai Kogyo Co.,Ltd.

Acknowledgement
Digital data of all the old maps of Beirut and Aleppo are from the collection of Cartothèques, Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO). We are deeply grateful to Dr. François Burgat (Director of IFPO) and Dr. Elisabeth Longuenesse (Head of the IFPO Beirut office) for their generous permission given to us in 2011 to use the maps’ data. Without IFPO’s kind cooperation, our system could not have been created.
Digital data of “Jerusalem Suburbs,” “City of Jerusalem,” and “Holy Land” of 1851/52 were provided in 2015 from the reproduction service of Bibliothèque nationale de France. We express our gratitude for the library’s service and permission to use the data.