[Historic] Hello list & tagging historical details

[Christian Quest]

I subscribed today to this list after seing some mention of Historical
OSM in one of Jeff message on another OSM list.

I'm also interested in that area, keeping track of data from the past
if possible directly in OSM.

Who am I ?

My french accent is hidden by the internet (so far) but, yes, I'm from
Paris area (this will help understand my strange english sometime).

I've been mapping my home town extensively over the past years after
discovering OSM because of genealogy (looking for place names, and
people names in toponyms*). I'm involved in OpenStreetMap France board
(secretary of our non profit association).

On the french OSM forum, we had a recent talk about historical details
in OSM. I started drafting some tagging scheme that would not collide
with present tags.

I've only tried to deal with tags, the semantic part of OSM, not the
geometry part that may also depend on the time.

The idea is to add a time range to a tag, example:

The current name is "Place Charles de Gaulle", but until 1970 it was
"Place de l'Etoile" (located on the upper end of Champ Elysée in
Paris).
name[:1970]=Place de l'Etoile
name=Place Charles de Gaulle

A building was a court house until 1927 and is not a shoe shop (at my
street corner):
building=yes
shop=shoes
amenity[1905:1927]=court_house


Dates can be formatted to deal with different calendars, BC dates, fuzzy dates.
Data users that do not want to keep these details from the past can
simply trash any tag containing brackets.
If you want to deal with these details, extraction of the date range
can then be stored in additional "start/end" fields the database
schema you're using.

Well, this is more a brainstorming that actually a draft of some proposal.

* about toponyms, I've recently added a proposal for wikipedia:name
tags to link a name to a wikipedia article... but this is another
topic.
-- 
Christian Quest - OpenStreetMap France - http://openstreetmap.fr/u/cquest