This project is conceived as a continuation of the Mercator-e Project, the actual project of the lead applicant, Pau de Soto. After storing and digitising all the available information about the historical roads of the Iberian Peninsula, an appropriate next step is to create new ways to share some of the newly produced data. At the same time, this project is conceived as a seed of a bigger project which will be focused in the creation of a digital resource of all the roads of the Roman Empire. The main roads of this future project will be uploaded to Itiner-e. Hence the proof-of-concept nature of this proposal. The final result of Itiner-e will be the creation of the biggest Historical Road Gazetteer where scholars and other audiences will benefit from this online resource.
From now on, after testing this methodology in a small territory, all the historical roads of the Iberian Peninsula recorded in historical sources will be uploaded into the system. The collaboration within the Institute for Catalan Studies and within the TIR-FOR project assures the continuity of the project and its maintenance online. In a future step, an open tool will be created to allow other researchers to easily upload their own roads and information.
All the information and code produced within this project will be hosted on Github and released under CC licenses.
The beneficiaries of this project will be researchers interested in historical places and roads. At the same time, the Open Data community will be benefited with this tool as they could link their project and information not only to some places but also to bigger entities, as in this case, big roads.