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

[mick]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2013 10:08:31 -0700
Sean Gillies <sean.gillies at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
My tuppence worth:
what is proven by accepted scientific investigation is a definite target for OHM.

scientifically valid projections should be flagged with a 'confidence value'.

Suppositions based on known principals are worth adding provided they are tagged as such. Example: Roman roads run in straight lines until they encounter obstacles like rivers, then deviate to a suitable crossing place, so could be added AND UPDATED as further evidence arises.

mick