The newest research initiative at the School of Information has already been active for thirteen years. The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), founded in 1997, will make its home at the School of Information beginning this month.
ECAI promotes and develops standards for interoperability for geotagged cultural and historical information; the project is working toward the creation of "a distributed virtual library of cultural information with a time and place interface," according to co-director Michael Buckland, professor emeritus in the School of Information.
Because the project focuses on interoperability, it is inherently decentralized and interdisciplinary. ECAI counts over 1000 institutions worldwide among its affiliates.
ECAI was founded in 1997 by director Lewis R. Lancaster, professor emeritus of east Asian languages and cultures. Lancaster was preparing to write up his life’s work, charting the spread of Buddhism north out of India into the Himalayas; he discovered that the project required maps and diagrams that didn't exist, tracking events and artifacts geographically as well as mapping change over time. Discussions with colleagues showed that many disciplines shared the need to track history over both space and time.
The ECAI project has been working toward this goal since 1997. ECAI has sponsored dozens of international conferences to bring together interested scholars and developers. As part of the project, they have assembled a global clearinghouse of downloadable georeferenced, tagged data from institutions across the world. ECAI also partnered with the University of Sydney to develop the TimeMap software, which displays data from multiple sources in a dynamic geographic display with a dynamic timeline.
Before joining the School of Information, ECAI was part of the division of International and Area Studies.