Olomouc - Possibilities of Geovisualization of the Historical City

Olomouc, nowadays a city with 100,000 inhabitants, has always been considered as one of the most prominent Czech cities. It is a social and economical centre, which history started just about the 11th century. The present appearance of the city has its roots in the 18th century, when the city was almost razed to the ground after the Thirty years’war and a great fire in 1709. After that, the city was rebuilt to a baroque military fortress against Prussia army. At the beginning of the 20th century the majority of the fortress was demolished. Character of the town is dominated by the large number of churches, burgher’s houses and other architecturally significant buildings, like a Holy Trinity Column, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Aim of this project was to state the most suitable methods of visualization of spatio-temporal change in historical build-up area from the tourist’s point of view, and to design and evaluate possibilities of spatial data acquisition. There are many methods of 2D and 3D visualization which are suitable for depiction of historical and contemporary situation. In the article four approaches are discussed comparison of historical and recent pictures or photos, overlaying historical maps over the orthophoto, enhanced visualization of historical map in large scale using the third dimension and photorealistic 3D models of the same area in different ages. All mentioned methods were geolocalizated using the Google Earth environment and multimedia features were added to enhance the impression of perception. Possibilities of visualization, which were outlined above, were realized on a case study of the Olomouc city. As a source of historical data were used rapport plans of the bastion fortress from the 17th century. The accuracy of historical maps was confirmed by cartometric methods with use of the MapAnalyst software. Registration of the spatio-temporal changes information has a great potential in urban planning or realization of reconstruction and particularly in the propagation of the region and increasing the knowledge of citizens about the history of Olomouc.