About the World War 1 Atlas

About this site

There are plenty of excellent First World War sites (see my links page for some of them) . However, I have not found any that have dynamic maps that cover the span of the First World War. I started the World War 1 Atlas project in April 2006. The majority of time spent before this site came online was accumulating and digitizing the events of the First World War. Edward Gleichen's three-volume Chronology of the Great War (now out of copyright) was of great help.

Once the events were digitized I wrote special algorithms to extract place names and locations. Finding and extracting locations as well as inputing new events is still an ongoing process and I will be continuing to add more content. Warning: IANAH - I am not an historian, I am a professional software developer with who enjoys history.

My primary interest in World War I is in its political and social impacts. How could a war be fought so viciously for so long and for so much blood and treasure for essentially no reason? As a teenager in the 1980's I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet an American combat veteran of that conflict. Later on a family reunion trip I discovered I had an ancestor die in the war, on the Austrian side which furthered my interest in the Great War.

Technical

This site web site is running on Apache 2. It uses a MySql database to store the events and locations. The web pages are written in PHP5 and HTML. The data analysis tools for extracting and manipulating location information are written in Python.

Feel free to contact me with any comments, criticisms or corrections at: pklinker@gmail.com