Linking past and present: augmenting historical municipality characteristics through harmonization and linkage with contemporary data

Goal: Setting up a pipeline for extending, improving and visualizing time series of municipality characteristics by means of data harmonization and linkage of historical and contemporary dataseries using Linked Data technologies (RDF). This project focused on increasing the data availability, data quality and visualization of characteristics of Dutch municipalities for the period 1795-2010. We did so by (1) combining data from historical and contemporary time series, (2) evaluating and improving on the quality of these time series, and (3) extending the availability of NLGIS maps for the last two decades in order to visualize municipality characteristics for two centuries.