Loading
Life sciences · Preprint
arXiv · October 26, 2026
No summary has been generated for this record yet. What follows is drawn from its source metadata only.
Preprint.
No findings were extractable from the material analysed.
Safety was not reported in the material analysed. Check the source before drawing any conclusion about harm.
The source did not state who this applies to in practice.
Graded across the dimensions that decide whether you should act, each from what the source actually supports. There is no single score, and where a dimension was not assessed it says so.
This record has not been graded across any dimension yet. Treat the label above as provisional and read the source.
What is missing. This record has no bottom line, key findings, reported figures, evidence dimensions. That is a gap in the analysis, not a judgement about the study.
Historical maps contain dense morphological and semantic information about past urban environments, but many digitization workflows focus primarily on extracting geometry, and do not capture cartographic semantics such as building use and construction materials. This study introduces ArchiveLens, a generative spatial knowledge framework that operationalizes historical maps as entity-centric, machine-queryable geospatial databases. The pipeline decouples morphological and semantic reconstruction through three stages: tiled YOLOv11-seg instance segmentation for building footprint extraction; deterministic material classification via hue, saturation, and value (HSV)-based color thresholds; and localized attribute parsing using a quantized vision-language model constrained by domain-specific prompts. Extracted entities are integrated into a hybrid Spatial-Temporal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (ST-RAG) architecture that combines dense semantic retrieval with symbolic spatio-temporal filtering and mandatory provenance grounding. Applied to 445 georeferenced Sanborn map sheets of Chicago (1918-1950), the framework achieves high geometric and semantic accuracy. Beyond performance, ArchiveLens advances GIScience by formalizing historical cartography as structured spatial knowledge representation, allowing researchers to query building attributes and compare spatial patterns across map sheets and years.