Cartesius.be is a geographic portal for old maps, plans, landscapes, and aerial images, featuring a search functionality based on geographic footprints and through keywords, scale, and time. It includes the digitized collections of the Royal Library, the State Archives, the Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the National Geographic Institute (NGI). The NGI manages the central portal.

The platform is set up as a catalog in which the four partners upload their metadata. It contains a viewer for georeferenced maps and aerial images and a search functionality (by geographic footprint and keywords, scale, time). Images that are not georeferenced are available via viewers of the four institutions.

The components comprising the current Cartesius.be platform are outdated. There is a desire to build a new version of the current Cartesius.be platform in the short term, while retaining the catalog function. The assignment consists of drafting a functional analysis for a renewed platform. The following aspects need to be examined:

• With which modern components can a new Cartesius.be be built (current or new ESRI components) versus alternatives such as GeoNetwork?
• How can the multilingual metadata be reused, ensuring that the existing metadata does not need to be modified or only minimally?
• How can the partners independently upload metadata to the portal?
• How can end users search and visualize the collection?
• What infrastructure and architecture are required for the possible solution scenarios, with an indication of the cost of licenses, development, and maintenance?
• After choosing the scenario/solution, it is expected that the solution will be detailed in a functional analysis and presented to the partners

A prototype is expected to be built for a limited part of the desired functionality, mainly demonstrating a user-friendly interface and allowing multilingual metadata to be uploaded.