Oronce Fine is a platform for enhancing collections of digital documents whose content is based on spatio-temporal information (old maps and plans, postcards, land photos, satellite images, etc.) developed by the EHESS geomatics platform with PSL funding. The project is based on the Omeka-S platform. The latter allows content to be managed in the manner of a CMS. Unlike Omeka, the S version natively manages the semantic web, thus allowing specific vocabularies to be attached to the metadata fields of the content placed online.

The added value of the Oronce Fine project is to allow semantic annotation directly on digital documents of the image type, making it possible to describe or locate information within the document. In this way, it becomes possible to associate a specific vocabulary or external references (either geographical references such as GeoNames or TGN Getty or geo-historical references such as Pleïades) and also to directly specify the area of the map or the element to be specified on the document. Thus, the platform allows a semantic enrichment of the image data by annotations and then it is possible to visualise these annotations in the form of a network of annotations, allowing the exploration of the documents and to understand how they are linked together and in fact share information.

The collection of Albert Kahn’s Paris autochrome collection shows how it is possible to visualise and map the position of over 4000 documents.

Other collections exist, and it is possible to visualise the links between documents, providing another way of exploring the data in graph form.