Maps of the WorldView educational platform blend cutting-edge technology with millennia-old history and modern cartography
A Journey Through Time and Space
In the WorldView you can embark on a journey from the 4th millennium BC up to the early 20th century, crossing the borders of around three hundred historical countries and “visiting” hundreds of locations such as cities, fortresses, castles, ancient sites, sacred places, and more.
With maps organized through a timeline and interactive system, you can swiftly travel to 4500 BC, explore the Middle Ages, and reach the eve of the First World War, with future updates extending to the present day.
The historical and geographical changes over millennia can also be explored by combining physical, political, and satellite base maps.
Why Maps
The need identified during the fieldwork phase of developing the WorldView platform was best articulated by teachers themselves – “The few maps we have at hand, which we have to move from classroom to classroom, are so old, worn-out, and unattractive that they hardly catch the attention of the students. Moreover, the map content, such as names and symbols, are often unreadable due to wear or poor print quality.”
How WorldView Maps Are Created
The solution provided by WorldView is not just simple digitization of existing maps. The team has created a special environment, developed a unique logic and methodology to produce highly accurate usable maps employing the latest available technologies in the cartographic field.
The scientific foundation of the maps is built on the study and comparison of dozens of maps, available watersheds essential for map-making, and consultations from leading experts in the field.
What Maps Can Be Found and What You Can Do With WorldView Platform Maps
The platform’s toolkit is rich and diverse. We not only emphasize the opportunity to explore the cartographic database from different angles, but also impart crucial skills for “reading” maps, aided by the legends designed specifically for the platform. These legends reflect the cartographic content visible on the map and are interactive, changing according to the topographic content of the platform’s map.
For the first time in the map database, you can find a comprehensive, high-precision digital map depicting the 15 provinces and approximately 200 districts of Greater Armenia, which completely changes the level of historical understanding and allows learners to grasp historical facts more vividly.
Some features of our maps include:
- The ability to move any area of interest through time and study it,
- A full toolkit to highlight and observe boundary changes of countries on the maps,
- Custom-developed cartographic symbols for the platform based on academic maps’ logic,
- Dynamic maps where symbols change with the zoom level,
- High-precision representation of the settlements.
Beyond Schools
A professional team is creating a unique cartographic database of countries and locations, which can serve not only students and teachers but any citizen interested in getting accurate, reliable, and readily available information about the world and the millennia-old history of Armenia within it.
What Makes Our Maps Unique
WorldView maps offer a unique opportunity to travel through time and space, transforming the general educational environment by providing learners and educators with an innovative and efficient environment for teaching and learning.
This platform, unique in its kind in Armenia, helps students and teachers view Armenian history in the context of world history, visually see border changes, study interactions between countries, and get answers to many “why” and “how” questions.
On the map, you can mark the current border of any country and take it through time to see all the territorial changes the state has undergone over millennia. The learner not only abstractly but also tangibly sees and feels the journey of ancient Armenian civilization.
To date, the cartography team of the Visual Armenia Development Foundation has compiled and developed around a thousand locations (cities, fortresses, churches, etc.), 950 polygon layers, collectively expressing the territorial changes in the historical paths of around three hundred states.
“Through our developed maps and technology, it is possible to see, study, and understand how, for instance, places have evolved since their creation – a fortress becoming a city, the changing of a site’s name, or other changes. On the platform, you can also see what settlements, religious sites, and educational centers existed in a specific area during a particular year, helping researchers better conceive the historical context characteristic of that time, aided by other historical facts and knowledge,” notes David Shindyans, the cartography team leader.