Possible Projection of the First Military Survey of the Habsburg Empire in Lower Austria and Hungary (Late 18th Century)—An Improvement in Fitting Historical Topographic Maps to Modern Cartographic Systems

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The First Military Survey of the Habsburg Monarchy (Josephinische Landesaufnahmne) has been the subject of intensive editorial work and historical cartographic analysis in recent years. The problem addressed in this article fits well with current research trends. Unfortunately, the introduction lacks information on more recent publications on this map for the Polish and Czech lands. I propose a more precise presentation of the research objective (research hypothesis) in the introduction. It should be explained to what extent the presented research goes beyond the author's previous publications on the subject. Information on research on georeferencing of the map for other regions would be useful for better understanding of the originality of the presented results. 

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestions and ideas you gave to my work. According to your opinion, the manuscript has been modified in three points (of course, in more points, according to other reviews, and with accordance to each others):

• Short overview and references are added concerning to the georeferencing works, applied to Czech and Polish parts of the survey. What made it easier is that Reviewer #3 asked similar improvement with a very comprehensive list of Czech works.
• The research hypothesis was somewhat outlined in the last paragraph of the original introduction, it is now made more focused.
• My own previous works are now mentioned in context with the present work int he Introduction.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments

Some more information about the survey in the context of French and Prussian maps could be given (in the introduction).

Adding dates of living in the first mention of each person would be a nice addon.

I would also add a graphical workflow combining what you know from the archival records and geodetic analysis.

Could you clearly state the results of the "new" method of georeferencing vs the "old" method? What are the differences? 

Minor suggestions:

I would delete "now freely available in Google Books" in l. 148-149

I would delete "The English version of this paper was translated by the help of deepl.com online service, with review by the author." in l. 344-345

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestions and ideas you gave to my work. According to your opinion, the manuscript has been modified in three points (of course, in more points, according to other reviews, and with accordance to each others):

• Short overview about the predecessing and cotemporal survey works is added as a new paragraph of the Introducion.
• Living dates of all mentioned historical scholars are added at their first occurrence in text.
• Conclusions has a new closing part, according to your last suggestion.
• A new figure with your proposed workflow has been created. I’m very grateful for this idea.
• Your suggested minor revisions were applied to the text systematically.

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very interesting article that shows a new approach to georeferencing the First Military Survey maps. Very interesting is the description of the history of Triangulation networks before and during the First Military Survey. Slightly lacking is any mention of other methods of georeferencing, such as the use of polynomial transformations or the Thin Plate Spline method. These obviously require a larger number of Ground Control points, but it would be good to mention that there have been successful attempts at georeferencing in Czechia with mean errors of small hundreds of meters. i.e.:

Janata, T.; Cajthaml, J.
Georeferencing of Multi-Sheet Maps Based on Least Squares with Constraints—First Military Mapping Survey Maps in the Area of Czechia
Applied Sciences. 2021, 11(1), ISSN 2076-3417.

Cajthaml, J.; Janata, T.
Georeferencing of First Military Mapping survey maps in the area of Bohemia using polynomial method e-Perimetron. 2017, 12(4), 181-188. ISSN 1790-3769.

Molnár, G. (2010) Making a georeferenced mosaic of historical map series using constrained polynomial fit. Acta Geodaetica et Geophysica Hungarica, 45 (1). pp. 24-30. ISSN 1217-8977

Brovelli, M.A.; Minghini, M. Georeferencing old maps: A polynomial-based approach for Como historical cadastres. E-Perimetron 2012, 7, 97–110.

Beineke, D. Verfahren zur Genauigkeitsanalyse für Altkarten. Ph.D. Thesis, Universität der Bundeswehr, München, Germany, 2000

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestions and ideas you gave to my work. According to your opinion, the manuscript has been modified in three points (of course, in more points, according to other reviews, and with accordance to each others):

• The suggested references are all pasted (hm, except Beineke, 2000/2001 – I know this work of course, however such a systematic error analysis would require a month of extra work and especially a new method invention to „MAPIRE-type” georeferred products. We are definitely applying it at the moment for the Schmitt map of South Germany, to develop a standard quality assessment method for old map georeference. In another paper, of course)
• As required, the Thin Plate Spline method has been highlighted in the Introduction, both with original reference and its application to the Czech part of the survey.

Reviewer 4 Report

The article is very well written and illustrates a very extensive georeferencing experience of historical cartography

Just a few details:

I would enlarge, where possible, all the figures. They are very beautiful and the current resolution does not do them justice. Alternatively, may I suggest adding a higher resolution copy among the additional materials.

I would better explain how many and which GCPs were used and whether a separate estimate was made on the CPs to assess accuracy and precision separately.

In other respects, congratulations on the work

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestions and ideas you gave to my work.

You suggest to enlarge all the illustrations. According to this requirement, I completely enlarged and redesigned Figure 1. Now the resolution is the double of the previous version. Also I add the outlines of the two stury area.

Also – because of your request for GCP list – I placed all applied GCPs to this figure, changing the figure caption according to this. Numerical data of the two GCP sets are available in Supplementary data (as it was already in first version).

Enlargements for other illustrations seem to be not possible or not worth to do it. Figs. 2, 6 & 7 are the scanned originals for the digital archives, moreover they are in quite high resolution (perhaps it is not seen in PDF). I do the same comment to Fig. 8. Fig. 3 seems to be the only problem, however there are no larger available versions of the sketches than these ones, captured from Wikimedia. Figs. 4 & 5 (the old book pages) can be enlarged during the editing process, however they are from Google Books and raising of pixel size would not increase the information content.

Concerning the Supplementary Data: D3, D4, D5 and D6 are the resolution of (more or less) the originals. The only ones, where increase can be applied, are D1 and D2 (the real results of the work). In present form, they are enough to illustrate the general fit and the local errors. Further increasement are limited by two things: (1) the 120 MB overall limit of the Supplementary Data, and (2) the copyright of the original document owners. However, if MDPI approves a raise of the data size limit to cca. 400 MB, the pixel size can be halved with no danger of copyright infringement.