Map indexes of the Second Military Survey in 1:28,800 scale for Galicia and Austrian Silesia, mid-19th century.

The data set presents the map indexes of the Second Military Survey in 1:28,800 scale for Galicia and Austrian Silesia, two provinces of the Austrian Monarchy. Currently, Galicia belongs to Ukraine and Poland, and Austrian Silesia to the Czech Republic and Poland. The indexes, apart from the approximate geographical range, contain information about the authors and the years in which individual sheets were produced. The authors of the maps are distinguished as directors, surveyors and drafters, description writers, and reambulators. For each author, the name of the military unit to which he belonged is given. This is a unique set of data obtained from the map frames of 455 sheets held by the War Archives in Vienna.
The Second Austrian Military Survey in 1:28,800 scale was made for the province of Galicia in 1861-1864 and for Austrian Silesia in 1838-1841. In Galicia, the work on 413 sheets was led by thirteen cartographers, and the content and descriptions were prepared by 106 cartographic technicians. On the 42 sheets of Silesia, two directors and eleven technicians were recorded. The military cartographers who prepared the survey of each province belonged to 71 different multinational units of the army of the Austrian Monarchy.
These data can be useful for geographers and historians, especially for those researching the history of cartography. Knowing the diverse authorship of the map sheets is helpful in understanding the consistency of the data on maps and assessing their quality. This may help reduce the uncertainty of using historical data from these maps for a variety of long-term studies of nature and socio-economic studies.

Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Republic of Poland under the frame of “National Programme for the Development of Humanities” 2015–2020, as a part of the GASID project (Galicia and Austrian Silesia Interactive Database 1857–1910, 1aH 15 0324 83).