Thematic Panoramas of Warsaw

The interdisciplinary programme PANORAMAS OF WARSAW, created by Dr. Marek Ostrowski, which is of a scientific, educational and social nature, embraces the construction of an image data base (all material and institutional objects and their attributes, contents of documents, biographies, historical events, processes etc.) combined with space and analysed in, for instance, temporal relations. The data base, which links objects, their attributes and location with accuracy between ten and twenty meters, simultaneously combined with temporal space (with accuracy down to one year, beginning with the end of the 12th century and in each current year with accuracy down to one day) is being initially created for the city of Warsaw.

The Logo of the Programme is the Panorama of Warsaw - one of the largest urban space images in the world.

The programme of the PANORAMA OF WARSAW predicts the successive adding of individual thematic layers, superimposed on geographical space. This space will be expressed in the form of plans and maps, photoplans, aerial photography, satellite images and in the future by virtual 3D models. The outcome of this work will be a city space data base, which successively implemented in public life, will play the role of a modern, multi-disciplinary guide to the history of the city, cognitive methods and based on merits problem structures found in the individual thematic layers.

In his lecture at the Auditorium Maximum, Warsaw University, in January of 2002, Dr Ostrowski presented his idea in public for the first time and demonstrated exemplary fragments of ready elaborations, involving aerial photography and invited all those interested to join in expanding the contents of the thematic panoramas by additional information. The result is a unprecedented continuum of 17 interdisciplinary scientific sessions and their scope. The Program is available on-line a week in advance. The individual sessions will take place in select assembly and lecture halls throughout the city from February to June, 2003. If there is interest in the programme, 20 further sessions for a further 5 months in the 2003/2004 season will be considered.

Each of the scientific sessions or meetings is in the form of developed consecutive stages of presentation.

Each Wednesday at 6 pm lectures consisting of several presentations, with simultaneous multimedia presentation, will begin. Sessions on additional dates are also planned: on March 22 (first day of spring) and on May 3 - Constitution Day. Some of the lectures will be accompanied by concerts. The day after each session there will be relations from the sessions in the form of press, radio and television journalist commentaries, which will thus to some extent broaden the range of the lecture. The material presented in the course of the lecture, as well as the objective of the lecture and presented messages conveyed by it in many cases, will be subjected to social analysis, evaluation and verification. The declared participation in the co-realisation of the Programme PANORAMAS OF WARSAW by active journalist teams from Gazeta Wyborcza and Radio BIS should be mentioned.

On the day following the lecture the next stage in each session will take place - an internet page will be activated to enable the presentation of materials relating to a given problem to a far broader extent than possible in the course of a lecture. To this end the author of the Programme will activate a separate portal VARSOVIA.PL . The successive opening of consecutive layers on the Internet pages will increase accessibility for a considerable number of recipients from all over the world. The internet materials will be successively presented also in the English version.

The choice of materials and their quality will be supervised by a team of outstanding specialists in a particular field, invited to co-operate with Dr. Ostrowski. At the same time they will act as reviewers of the contents and consultants. Moreover, the Internet presentations will constantly be verified a broad audience of internauts - this mechanism will efficiently ensure even higher level, trustworthiness and credibility of the data base PANORAMAS OF WARSAW -all remarks will immediately be taken into account. Information and scientific publications presented on the internet pages will be supplemented or linked by consecutive authors, which will allow further expansion of the data base.

The number of thematic layers, forms and scope of the presentation is limited by intelligence alone.

I cordially invite you to co-operate in the joint creation of new thematic layers and adding on to the already existing ones: samper@samper.pl