[Historic] welcome Historic OpenStreetMap, introductions

[Michael Collinson]

Mikel asked:
 > And please do _introduce yourself_ and how you're interested in 
historic mapping

First, thank you to Mikel for taking the initiative to get this mailing 
list going. I was a keen local historian as a kid, a geophysicist in 
early career and  I've been an OSM contributor since 2005. I have long 
been looking forward to the day when the basic OSM database structure 
and supporting systems where stable enough to start thinking about 
offshoots for mapping the temporal in terms of history, prehistory, 
geomorphology and geology.

Sticking to history and prehistory, my long term big dream is to see a 
colour map of the world where I can drag a slider and see the spread and 
movement of cultures and civilisations as documented in the 
archeaological record and historic text. And then zoom down to the local 
level and see development and at any given time.


 > Also curious to hear about other projects out there that overlap, and 
what kind of data is out there.

Some information I and others have been working on:

- Historic railway map of the UK
- Historic mining map of the UK
- Roman road map of the UK

Data for all of the above is OSM and can be viewed by zooming in on 
http://maps.webhop.net/, kindly provided by Graham Jones.

Francesco de Virgilio  has done some nice work on historic tagging at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Fradeve11/prove2

In Sweden (hallo Lars), I have been mapping rune stones in the Stockholm 
area but the Riksantikvarieämbetet, RAÄ, (Swedish national heritage 
board)  have a superb on-line geo-database of 1.7 million remains at 
http://www.raa.se http://www.fmis.raa.se/cocoon/fornsok/search.html . I 
understand that they are interested in working with OSM and have a lead 
to follow up when the license change is through.

Something that I have not been involved in but  that we should perhaps 
be aware of and co-operate with is Wiki Loves Monuments. I only have a 
Swedish link http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Wiki_Loves_Monuments . 
Perhaps someone else know more about it?

Lastly, I am interested in preserving and keeping alive old local names 
for places and features. My pet project is to re-create an 1835 tithe 
award map of my home town, (basically a map of fields supporting on 
index of who should pay rent) re-projected on modern survey data in OSM. 
Every field has a name which preserves some facet of historic land 
usage, events, people.   I've traced the map and have been nearly 
finished mapping every single field and wall that can still be seen 
today (Otley 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.89852&lon=-1.69725&zoom=17&layers=M).

Mike

Michael Collinson