Vimy Ridge

On April 9th, 1917 the Canadian Corps attacked the German positions on Vimy Ridge. In honour of the 101st anniversary, here is a short roundup of WW1 projects and efforts that are ongoing. 

1. Bert V. de Bruijn of wikiwar.net fame is still working on making a ridiculously detailed map of the battle of Vimy Ridge and has setup a task manager for Open Historical Map to digitize the trench maps from the McMaster Trench Map Collection. 
2. Erik Hellstedt in Belgium is working on animating the First World War using Commonwealth War Graves Commission data. 
3. Heather Pretty from Memorial University has been working on generating more linked open data for the Royal Newfoundland Regiment during the war, including personnel data.
4. Stan Hebben and Dries Chaerle at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Belgium are running a project "The Names List"  to collect information about victims – both military and civilian – which died in Belgium during the course of (and due to) the First World War. 
5. Warren Lewington has been working on artillery logistics on the Western Front (2 Minute Video here, PDF Project Description).
6. Bill Frost has built an awesome Trench Mapping application for tracking events on the Western front. 

Aware of another project? Please reach out to @muninn_project!

The Muninn Project aims to programmatically recreate scenes of historical events using Linked Open Data - and with the ever-increasing availability of high-quality 3D printers, we are motivated to 3D-print these scenes. In this particular post, we will talk about how to 3D-print a battlefield: the trenches of Vimy Ridge. We believe that 3D-printed models of battlefields, such as the trenches of Vimy Ridge, could be quite useful to archeologists & other individuals studying past historical events, namely the Battle of Vimy Ridge. We will discuss how to retrieve 90m-resolution elevation data inside a bounding box from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), how to scale & project it with the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) and also how to convert it to an STL file that can be 3D-printed; we will also discuss how to retrieve lists of trench coordinates from the Muninn Project's SPARQL server, and how to extrude trenches on our model of Vimy Ridge before 3D-printing it. Lastly, we will discuss issues regarding the size & resolution of our model of Vimy Ridge and suggest how we might improve the quality of our model in the future. Thanks to Lawrence Willett for letting us use his 3D printer.