BeCarto14-18 is an app developed by the Belgian National Geographic Institute (NGI) and the private company Geolives for the commemoration of WW1. This App allows you to access spatial and historical information about the 1st World War in Belgium.
The spatial background of the app is CartoWeb.be, the NGI’s viewing service equipped with a zooming tool that makes it possible to view on screen the whole of Belgium or a very detailed picture of a small area.
We put above this topographic base the information from the map “14-18 The Great War from Liège to the Yser and the Somme” for the whole Belgian territory. You can locate museums, military cemeteries, forts and trenches... that you still may visit today, but also have an overview of the large troops moves and concentrations between 1914 and 1918.
And that is where the historical information comes in. The app gives you access to two timelines. The first one runs from 1914 till 1919 and gives you information about what happened on the Belgian territory during that time. The second one goes from 2014 to 2019 and gives you information about all events organized during that time as part of the commemoration. You also find a series of links to interesting websites, pictures and movies.
Last but not least, beCarto14-18 provides you with a lot of practical information such as museum opening times and addresses, place and time of events, etc.
The National Geographic Institute of Belgium cooperated at the creation of this app with the Department of Defense and various institutions, each of them possessing plenty of information about the 1st World War according to their specific activity. Other databases are expected to be made available via the app, like the one of the Institute for the Veterans, which will allow you to search information (like the day of death or the place where they were buried) about the Belgian soldiers that were killed during the 1st World War.