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

[Brad Thompson]

Sean, I really like your proposed best practices '"Map strong and
falsifiable hypotheses about what was on the ground', and completely agree
that a structure for citation will be critical because of the nature of the
subject matter.

I also agree that lack of consensus will be a more likely scenario than
real controversy, but the if the point of OHM will be to allow those
conflicts to be stored and managed easily (dare I hijack the phrase 'Teach
the Controversy'?), then the mechanics of presenting the differing
positions should be the same, right? In any case, I would imagine that most
conflict would be related to these three questions:


   - How the thing existed / changed (e.g., the shapes of river alignments,
   sizes of buildings, pioneer land claims)
   - Whether the thing existed / changed at all (e.g., Dolores Lagoon, El
   Dorado)
   - When the thing existed / changed (e.g., Sarah Ann Island, Beringia)


One way or another, multiple versions of spatial 'fact' will need to be
addressed. On one hand, as Mikel has pointed out, we have a clear need for
the same kind of localization as the current, temporally static OSM, albeit
on a larger scale, (imagine the whole world as Kashmir). But in addition to
that, there's the issue of speculative maps and configurations of the
physical world that *didn't happen*. Specifically, I'm thinking of all of
the urban planning proposals from the 1960s that never saw the light of
day, but there are applications for older eras too (for instance,
unrealized territorial aspirations during the Napoleonic or World Wars).

This image keeps coming to my mind as I think through this --
http://i.imgur.com/3702A.jpg

Could the current OSM capacity for displaying multiple disputed boundaries
be modified to present multiple scenarios? Or is this all too complicated
to be contained by it?

- Brad
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