In 2009, the Saga-lasun project took off. The aim of this project is to create awareness about the cultural and natural resources of Ağlasun and how they can be used to promote sustainable economic development. Much like an accurate topographic map is needed by the archaeologists working in the field, a project like Saga-lasun requires a town map of the center of Ağlasun and if possible, interesting areas in its vicinity.

At the end of the 2009 campaign, the municipal council of Ağlasun kindly offered us their cadastral plans to be used as a start to create such a map. These plans were scanned images, not vectorised and georeferenced drawings. Not much was done with these plans for about 2 years due to other priorities.

In the spring of 2011, Joeri Theelen digitized all features on these cadastral plans such as roads, houses and waterways in an area of about 2 by 2 km² covering the center of Ağlasun. It was clear that much of the information shown on these plans was outdated. Many houses were not indicated (for instance, the excavation house located in the north-east part of the map and many newer houses in its vicinity were missing) and some local roads had been relocated. To cope with this, the digital drawings were fit on top of a Quickbird satellite image (taken in 2008) and corrections were made. Finally, even newer parts were added doing a survey in the covered area of the town (a town in development like Ağlasun tends to change quite a bit over a few years time).

During the campaign of 2011, geography student Marijke Verhasselt surveyed the town to find as many streetnames as possible. She could link about 50% of all roads in Ağlasun with their names.

This campaign, having a town map of Ağlasun, we decided to make things public. ICT students Jeroen Dejonghe and Lorenzo Vercruysse, under the supervision of Jelle Vanderhauwaert, have uploaded the vector drawings on the OpenStreetMap project. They used the freeware JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) to interact with the OpenStreetMap server database. OpenStreetMap is the community variant of Google Maps or Microsoft Bing Maps. Its content is 100% public domain and cannot be claimed by any organisation or individual. OpenStreetMap is for mapping what Wikipedia is for knowledge in general.

The result can be seen on-line here (click on the map):

At last, the little town of Ağlasun has the map it deserves, probably more accurate than most other towns and villages in Turkey. It's a result the Sagalassos project and the people of Ağlasun can be proud of, and it certainly is a valuable asset within the scope of our Community Archaeology project.

Many thanks to the council of Ağlasun, Marijke Varhasselt, Jeroen Dejonghe, Lorenzo Vercruysse and Jelle Vanderhauwaert.