Halloween Special: Geodata will outlast yourself!
October 31st, 2021 | by Andreas Richter
(3 min read)
This is a Halloween special not a Fools’ Day special. Thus, you can belief all the scary facts we are presenting here!
Digitalization is a mega-trend and without it, automated driving, integrated city planning and mobility as a service won’t work. For that, old paper plans and areal images were digitalized, new surveying methods such as mobile mapping are used and a lot of video and photo data is collected with panoramic cameras and drones. All these heterogeneous data (regarding spatial and temporal accuracy) is linked or fused to create a digital twin. For the automotive domain the traffic area is in focus. One issue with data is that if you have gathered them, they are more or less immediately outdated. OK, to be exact it depends on the type of the data. Road topology is not changing as fast as road infrastructure or as traffic conditions. But sometimes geodata can be very stable and outlast yourself.
Let’s get a little bit creepier. Let’s talk about death and have a look at cemeteries! The mega-trend digitalization is merciless and spares no one. Not even your death! We are not referring to the electronic medical report but to the final resting place…
Cemeteries are getting digitalized as well. With the help of old paper plans and modern surveying methods (drones and ground-penetrating radar) the site and the history of their “local residents” are gathered and stored in a digital database management system. In such a system you can link assets and search for specific attributes easily. Also planning and reserving of new plots is simply done online. Additionally, you can combine this asset management with the biodiversity management and connect or add vegetation cadaster.
One extraordinary example is the Highgate Cemetery in London using a Burial Ground Management System (BGMS). The cemetery itself is active since 1839, and serves 53,000 graves at an area of 150,000 m2. Famous persons including Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, Michael Faraday and Alexander Litwinenko are buried there. And also some rare species such as the spider species “Egyptian Avenue” can be found there.
But, setting up a database management system isn’t an end to itself. It’s also not done just for the purpose of operating the cemetery in a more modern way. It supports additional use cases such as data research for customers, too. Highgate Cemetery requests a fee of £40 for a “grave search”. Genealogy as business model is gaining more and more interest. It is the second most popular online hobby in the US!
Other cemeteries are using the Cemetery Information Management System (CIMS) with a freely accessible font end. Have a look at the Emanu El Memorial Park in Houston, TX or the Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City, IA. If you zoom in, you can access all the plots, see who is buried there and since when (or query birth date and sex) and find available spaces if interested.
Genealogy is such an interesting business case that it is possible to connect CIMS to Saleforce (provides a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development) for more serious Customer Relationship Management! Who would have thought that?
For “customers” you can add timelines for personalization of the entries of the buried persons or include an online condolence possibility. Especially in the times of traveling restriction this could be a good feature to alleviate mourning.
But also and not only on Halloween cemetery tourism is a growing activity. Often the cemetery grounds are beautiful parks and inviting to stroll and enjoy the peacefulness. It can be connected with digitally accessible information about nature and history, included in stories and guided tours! Cemeteries such as the Highgate Cemetery in London, Vienna Central Cemetery, Mirogoj in Zagreb, Ohlsdorfer Cemetery in Hamburg or Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris are definitely worth a visit!
What do you think? Is the digitalization of cemeteries and the creation of cemetery business cases trick or treat? GEONATIVES wish everybody a happy Halloween!
About The Author
I did enjoy reading your “Halloween Special” very much! From my point of view, digitizing cemeteries and creating cemetery business cases might be a very interesting and useful approach to create a long-term, easy to access documentation as well as to support future cemetery management. It might additionally support research on the cemetery’s history or probably even on the background of people being buried there. But I am very sure that a digital twin will not completely replace the research on historic issues using more traditional, “analog” methods. My position is mainly based upon my experiences during almost two years of research about the background of a person, on whose historic gravesite we have buried our mother at the “Suedwest-Kirchhof Stahnsdorf” in January 2020. The old Stahnsdorf cemetery just outside of Berlin allows the reuse of historic tombs after the prior rights of use have been expired– as many cemeteries do nowadays. As only an “old fashioned” paper map of the Stahnsdorf cemetery did exist, looking for an appropriate gravesite could only be done by walking around on the huge cemetery area for several hours. This “Cemetery Business Case #1” would have been much easier and less time consuming if a digital twin of the cemetery would have been available. Nevertheless, we finally could decide upon a wonderfully located, suitable gravesite with a historic tomb stone on it. This stone had to be preserved due to the regulations. There was the name Leonhard Paul Birnbaum on it, and a date of death in 1933. And we now wanted to figure out, who this Mr. Birnbaum might have been. Using the data on the tomb stone, I started by checking the cemetery’s burial database (“Cemetery Business Case #2”). This database still was nothing but a set of handwritten file cards, in our case about 90 years old and pretty hard to “decode”! Anyway, I found the date of birth, the former address, and the name of the wife from that file card. And then “Cemetery Business Case #3” started: investigating on the life, the profession, and the family of that Leonhard Birnbaum, who was born back in 1880. I spent weeks on the internet, in libraries and archives, checking historic documents, books, newspapers and many other information sources… until finally I was able to even publish a Wikipedia page about that former journalist, who has been a member of a huge and widespread family with several quite famous relatives. Figuring out where those relatives have been buried, is my “Cemetery Business Case #4”. By checking a lot of historic documents, I was able to find out, that several relatives have been buried in Stahnsdorf, as well. A few of them finally after a reburial from other cemeteries in Berlin in 1939. Trying to find the exact locations of their graves led back to my above-mentioned “Cemetery Business Case #2”. From looking back onto my very time-consuming research on Leonhard Birnbaum’s background, I am sure that it would have saved a lot of time for me, if a digital twin of the cemetery would have been available, including detailed information about the people buried there. On the other hand, I would have never met so many nice, interesting, and helpful people in the libraries, archives, and other organizations I have contacted to collect information. Many of those added important hints to the provided information – even without explicitly asking. These hints often opened new paths for further investigations. And finally, I would have never learned, that Leonhard Birnbaum’s nickname within his family has been “Loni”, as a still living relative from the UK told me in our recent email conversation. As a conclusion, I think both the availability of a well-prepared digital twin as well as the more traditional way to investigate into the history of someone being buried on a cemetery have their pros and cons. Therefore, the digitalization of cemeteries is both trick and treat!