[OHM] Mapping what's on the ground and other good practices

[Sean Gillies]

Hi all,

I'm very excited about OHM developments, there's enormous potential
here. I manage a site and dataset about places in the Greek and Roman
world (plus some older Ancient Near East places, some Byzantine
places) called Pleiades. Users continually ask me about adding
detailed map data to Pleiades – locations of monuments, buildings,
walls, and streets – but this is really outside the scope of my
project. I think that OHM is possibly the better destination for such
detailed data. And I think getting archaeologists and other
researchers involved here could be good for OHM. Imagine the Penn
Museum's maps of Ur
(http://www.penn.museum/blog/museum/ur-digitization-project-february-2013/)
in OHM. Or Eric Poehler's maps of Pompeii (http://www.pompeiana.org/).

A major question for me: will OHM reflect past reality on the ground?
And if so, what will the standards be? For example, say I create in
OSM (the current OSM) a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean and name
it "Atlantis." This is fiction, of course, but only determinable as
fiction because we can visit that part of the ocean today by boat or
plane, or virtually by satellite and falsify the assertion of its
existence. Past features aren't so easily verified or falsified and
their nature is essentially hypothetical, only approaching the
factuality of existing features after much study. To restate my
question: how good must a hypothesis about an ancient feature be to
warrant its inclusion in OHM? Hypothetical lost civilizations of
Atlantis abound despite lack of evidence – including these in OHM
would be a departure from OSM's principle of reality on the ground, at
least in my view.

I've assumed that OHM would adopt and adapt OSM's best practice
rubrics. Looking at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice,
I think it would be worth amending (for OHM)  "Map what's on the
ground" to "Map strong and falsifiable hypotheses about what was on
the ground" and develop a practice of citing research and historical
documents. Nodes and ways of
Old Babylonian Ur can cite published work. If I trace the hypothetical
trail over the Alps that Hannibal's army left in its wake, I feel like
I ought to cite evidence supporting it.

I realize that showing is better than telling, and I'll try to do some
leading by example when the OHM database is ready to go.

-- 
Sean Gillies