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gmahia/africa-historical-maps-pd

Africa Historical Maps — Public Domain Metadata Catalog of public domain historical maps of Africa and East Africa, with metadata structured for AI tools and GIS applications. All maps listed are in the public domain (published before 1928 or government-authored works with expired copyright). Coverage Continental Africa maps (1600s-1920s) East Africa survey maps (1895-1925) Urban/town plans (Nairobi 1908, Mombasa 1910) Hydrological maps (Nile basin, river… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/gmahia/africa-historical-maps-pd.

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Africa Historical Maps — Public Domain Metadata

Catalog of public domain historical maps of Africa and East Africa, with metadata structured for AI tools and GIS applications.

All maps listed are in the public domain (published before 1928 or government-authored works with expired copyright).

Coverage

  • —Continental Africa maps (1600s-1920s)
  • —East Africa survey maps (1895-1925)
  • —Urban/town plans (Nairobi 1908, Mombasa 1910)
  • —Hydrological maps (Nile basin, river systems)
  • —Vegetation/botanical surveys
  • —Geological surveys (soil, groundwater)
  • —Missionary network maps (language boundaries)

Structure

Each record includes:

  • —Title, cartographer, date, region
  • —Repository and access information
  • —Features listed
  • —Coordination value for AI tools
  • —Public domain basis

Why Historical Maps Matter for Coordination Infrastructure

Historical maps provide:

  1. 1.Baseline data — pre-development vegetation, watershed boundaries
  2. 2.Trade route archaeology — where commerce naturally moved
  3. 3.Language territory boundaries — NLP scope definitions
  4. 4.Administrative history — how districts formed and changed
  5. 5.Water resource baselines — rivers, aquifers, flood zones before modification

Related

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Use this dataset with the coordination stack

  • —Evaluate any model on Swahili agent tasks: kipimo — pip install kipimo · leaderboard
  • —Run the MCP servers this data serves: pip install reli-cli && reli list — 33 servers on the official MCP Registry under io.github.gabrielmahia
  • —Route tasks across servers: africa-coord-bus — offline-first event bus with a built-in Kenya routing table
  • —All East Africa datasets: huggingface.co/gmahia

Open weights welcome: these resources are model-agnostic by design — closed APIs, open-weight models (Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, Nemotron, Llama), and small distilled models score on equal terms. <!-- /interconnect:v1 -->