GeoCambodia: A web application to visualize Cambodia Then and Now through aerial photographs and satellite images.
The French National Geographic Institute (IGN) came to Cambodia between 1952 and 1954 to carry out a large-scale photographic project, taking around 11,000 aerial images over a large part of the country.
Today, this collection represents an exceptional archive that takes us back 70 years to the urban and rural landscapes of the time. In addition to these early aerial photographs, there is a higher resolution shot of Phnom Penh in 1993, with incredible details of life in the streets of the capital. This archive is of great interest in many fields, including history, geography, archaeology, urban planning, and ecology. The purpose of the project is to dematerialize this archive and make it accessible and usable free of charge in Cambodia.
All the images were digitized and supplied to the KHmer Earth OBServation (KHEOBS) laboratory to create orthophotographs. Processing has been completed for the municipality of Phnom Penh, for the years 1953 and 1993. In order to make these images viewable by anyone, a web application, GeoCambodia, was developed to visualize Cambodia then (past) and now (present). The user-friendly interface includes an interactive slider to navigate and compare the old 1953 and 1993 aerial orthophotographs with the recent Google Earth images. Also, vector outlines of buildings from 1993, produced by the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR), have been integrated to enable visitors to click on a building and view the APUR’s descriptive architectural sheets. Other functions and the extension of the aerial images to the whole of Cambodia are still to come in this interface.
GeoCambodia.org targets anyone who is interested in aerial and satellite imagery and how Cambodia evolves through time and space, especially geography enthusiasts.