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

[Ed Dykhuizen]

I can probably throw in some input here. I don't know if you'll be able to
construct standards for acceptability beforehand. Maybe there can be some
-- no Atlantises, for example -- but I imagine that there are going to be a
ton of disputes that won't get resolved, and in order to show something
coherent, you'll have to rely on the judgments of a bunch of qualified
editors. Sometimes you'll want to show both sides, like the possible routes
of Hannibal or the Kashmir dispute. Sometimes you'll have to just ignore
theories that have less traction in historical discourse. You could set up
methods for resolving disagreements beforehand, but probably can't start
out with many specific standards of what constitutes historical accuracy.

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Mikel Maron <mikel_maron at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Fascinating. One thing I love about OSM is the potential to represent the
> few multiple realities of place ... names can be localized, multiple
> overlapping political boundaries are allowed. If India wants to see Kashmir
> in India, so be it; Pakistan has equal opportunity.
>
> Guess we're opening a can of subjective worms opening up the past. As an
> amateur to historical study, it's easy to forget that there's much
> uncertainty in the past. In the Atlantis like cases, it's pretty clear. But
> with disagreement about where exactly Hannibal marched, well, I like the
> idea that multiple historic interpretations can be presented. Perhaps
> that's asking too much of us....
>
> But anyway, that's why we can start to experiment. Can't wait to see some
> examples.
>
> * Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* Sean Gillies <sean.gillies at gmail.com>
> *To:* historic at openstreetmap.org
> *Sent:* Friday, March 1, 2013 12:08 PM
> *Subject:* [OHM] Mapping what's on the ground and other good practices
>
> 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
>
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