A tool for historical cartography about natural hazards P-A Davoine, A.Arnaud, J. Gensel and H. Martin Laboratory LSR-IMAG, BP 72, 38 400 Saint-Martin dHLres, France email : {nom.prenom}@imag.fr, tØl : + 33 4 76 82 72 57, Fax: + 33 4 76 82 72 87 Abstract: Historical information for natural hazards can be seen as multi-dimensional geographical information. The classical cartographic language and the usual techniques and tools which consist in displaying several layers of information do not handle properly the complexity and the multidimensional aspect of this kind of information. This problem becomes more crucial when one wishes to represent temporal and historical dimensions about risk and vulnerability concepts. It is thus necessary to propose new mapping approaches, to design and develop new kind of geographical information systems. Today, web and multimedia information system technologies offer new possibility to take into account multi dimensional and heterogeneous geographical information. The aim of the paper is to present a new mapping approach about historical cartography for natural hazards integrating at the same time the rules of the cartographic language and the new forms of cartography and to specify the characteristics of an interactive tool based on the web and multimedia information system technologies. 1 Introduction Using information for natural hazards management presents several problems. The visualization and more particularly the cartographical representation is one of these problems. Usually, information for the natural risks is better known in its space dimension (location of an avalanche, area reached by a flood...), and in its phenomenological dimension (elevation and type of avalanche, damage caused ...), than it is in its temporal and historical dimensions. The classical cartographic language and the usual techniques and tools which consist in displaying several layers of information do not handle properly the complexity and the multidimensional aspect of this kind of information. This problem becomes more crucial when one wishes to represent temporal and historical dimensions about risk and vulnerability concepts. It is thus necessary to propose new mapping approaches, to design and develop new kind of geographical information systems. Today, web and multimedia information system technologies offer new possibility to take into account multi dimensional and heterogeneous geographical information. This contributes to change the nature of cartography: Maps become interactive, multimedia and dynamic. More and more cartography applications make use of these technologies,