For a start does it exist in any form?

If not I wanted to see whether there was anyone out there on the forums that might be interested in helping to put together the foundations of an online map of historic arms and armour around the world. Data entry would be up to the community. My GIS skills will only take me so far and it would be good to discuss ideas with anyone with GIS/programming/coding/hosting skills and knowledge.

Biting off more than I can chew,

Matt

I am not quite sure what you have in mind. Did you want a map that would show different swords and arms associated with different regions? One challenge is that many weapons cannot be conclusively demonstrated to be from a particular region. If a sword was made in Germany and found in England, where does it belong? What if we don't know who made it or if its find provenance is no longer attested? Many weapons could be nearly pan-European, and there will also be overlap in other countries, meaning that attributing the weapon as though it is specific to one area is misleading/problematic.

Another consideration is that you might need multiple maps for different time periods. Otherwise, a place like Europe will be very crowded with Celtic, Roman, Migration Era, High Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and 19th century swords all stuffed into a single map.

The beauty of using a GIS approach means that all those factors could be taken into account. There could be fields within the database for country of origin, current location, known previous locations, date of manufacture, etc. The user could choose what data is shown on the map using sliders/tick boxes for country of origin, date of manufacture, Oakeshott typology, etc. I hope that explains the potential a little more clearly.

I plan to create such a map for armourers. During the summer I will take a closer look at it and start doing the research. The general idea is that you have a map with a bunch of criteria at the sides. So you can search for something like: Armourer, 1350-1370, France
Or maybe you have a mark and want to know to whom it belongs. Text sources should be implemented as well and for every entry I shall add, I want a picture of the book page it is written in first. Including pictures of the extant pieces is not going to happen. Copyright issues would give me a hard time. The same could be done for weapons as well. But I lack the proper programming skills :/

Good idea.
I know such a map from a mineralogy forum because I want to find a piece of Pyrite or Marcasite for ´Stone Age experiments´.
This here shows the search results for Pyrite(But only forum user contributions). You can zoom in and click on these little flags for further information. For example what other minerals have been found at a certain location.
https://www.mineralienatlas.de/lexikon/gpsmap.php?mid=3163

I'm currently taking a GIS course focused on natural resource management, but having spent a decent amount of time looking at different maps with various levels of detail, as well as using the navigation tools that allow specific queries to be identified, I can say that this is a great idea! If it was done correctly this could turn out to be a very useful tool for research based on factors such as region, time period, and type of equipment.

Before starting such a project on a map surface, it will be necessary to compile the information for every artifact into spreadsheets, with all of the pertinent information clearly defined, and an approximate geographic coordinate for each entry.

This can be done by someone who can do something as simple as making an Excel document with tabs and columns, and by using Google Maps to discover coordinates.

-Gregory

Thanks for the feedback. Oskar's link is basically what I have in mind.

Yes, that's a good example of a format that should work for this task. I can't figure out of that one has stacked layers since I don't speak German, but it's also possible to provide layers that would help with sorting through the information.

For example, in ArcMap (or most other advanced GIS programs) one could view different layers corresponding to each type/style of armour, or to particular periods. When you choose to bring one of these layers to the fore then you would only be provided with information that is more specific to a query.

-Gregory

I think we're thinking along the same lines, i.e. the data can be all stored in a database (using PostGIS and Geoserver, or similar), a user can then query the database to return the data they're interested in, which can be done with tick boxes and sliders.

I'm going to make a start over the next week or so.