ICA-Adv Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the ICA ICA-Adv Adv. Cartogr. GIScience Int. Cartogr. Assoc. 2570-2084 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/ica-adv-5-19-2025 The concept of the Historical Geographic Information System for the settlements of Transylvania Magyari Mátyás https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0712-4987 1 Bartos-Elekes Zsombor 2 Reyes Nuñez José Jesús 1 Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Department of Geography in Hungarian, Faculty of Geography, Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 20 10 2025 5 19 Copyright: © 2025 Mátyás Magyari et al. 2025 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://ica-adv.copernicus.org/articles/5/19/2025/ica-adv-5-19-2025.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://ica-adv.copernicus.org/articles/5/19/2025/ica-adv-5-19-2025.pdf

Historical geographic information systems are becoming more and more common in historical research, because of their ability to emphasise the role of space in understanding historical events. Researchers concerned with the history of the settlement network of Transylvania would undoubtedly benefit from such a historical geographic information system, as it could shed a completely new light on the evolution of the settlements in this diverse, multilingual and multicultural region of Romania. Changes in the name, legal status, administrative role and affiliation of the settlements of the last one thousand years could all be integrated and even visualised in space and time in a similar system, using current webcartographic solutions. This paper explores the issues motivating the need to set up the Historical Geographic Information System for the settlements of Transylvania and examines the possibilities for its implementation.