Frequently Asked Questions
The historic environment record is a detailed and nuanced repository of information, and this viewer attempts to ease the first steps of exploring it. It is not a full-featured, semantic search engine, but provides quick lookup functionality for casual users. Here, we answer some key questions.
What is the purpose of this viewer?
To make public historic environment information quick and easy to access on a range of devices for a range of stakeholders, as a gateway to more powerful research tools.
What are the different dots on the map?
When zoomed close in, blue map markers point to any search results.
When zoomed out, large, red circles indicate search matches instead. When you have a selected record type (e.g. Historic Buildings), the small, grey circles represent the entries that do not match your search, to help contextualize.
While the blue markers are preferred by most casual map users and clearly indicate a precise location, they are confusing and slow to load when large numbers of them appear at once. When zoomed out, the map may show hundreds of visible search matches, so the red dots are required for performance and clarity, even though they are too large to show an exact location. Clicking a red or grey dot will cause the map to zoom close in to that location, and blue markers will replace the red dots (if there are matches near the click). The meaning of markers and red dots is the same: there is a match at that location.
For ease of understanding, this tool does not show different types of markers for different types of assets or entries.
What data does this contain?
This viewer contains a slice of HERoNI data. Much more is available to discover. For a more powerful GIS-driven exploration tool, try the Historic Environment Map Viewer.
Why can I not see all entries from all records on the map at once?
This service aims to be quick, robust and as simple as possible. Rather than risking poor performance on older devices, it requires some filtering - by text, by record type and/or by zooming. This ensures we do not load large amounts of data unexpectedly.
Try the Historic Environment Map Viewer to do powerful map-based searches.
Why does this map not use a specific other mapping service?
This service is not used to manage reference records directly, and providing a fully-static, unrestricted service with the types of layers we show would not otherwise be possible. For full official maps and layers, please see the Historic Environment Map Viewer.
What technologies does this use?
A number of tools from the Arches Project ecosystem are used. The specific, alpha-level platform here is an AGPL-licensed tool called Starches, which combines Hugo, Pagefind, Alizarin, Flatgeobuf and OpenFreeMap to create a performant, fully-static map service. As it is static, we can serve large amounts of traffic with simple caching, the possibility of edge-caching and virtually no service-side processing. For technical users who are interested, you can explore each historic asset’s data as a self-contained static JSON in Arches’ resource format, which is rendered on its viewer page with Alizarin - check your browser’s web inspector.
Can I contribute?
If you are interested in contributing as a volunteer to the underlying data and work of the Historic Environment Division, you can find more information on the HERoNI site.
If you are a technologist who is interested in collaborating or contributing to the underlying code, please take a look at the projects listed above. We are fortunate to have already had public contributions and are excited to build links with others interested in cultural heritage web services! As with all open source contribution, to ensure your work is ultimately mergeable, please do take note of license requirements in advance and reach out before spending significant time on pull requests to ensure they are aligned with the style, standards and direction of the project.
To start with, opening an asset’s detail page and running (await window.alizarinAsset.asset.forJson(true)).root in your Dev Tools console might give some ideas!