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

[Sean Gillies]

Brad,

I admit that I don't know the disputed borders in OSM well enough to
judge whether the same conventions would work for uncertain historical
data. Can you you point me to a map region that has overlapping
national borders? I'd like to look at their tags and try to understand
how Chinese and Indian maps would get their preferred boundaries.

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Brad Thompson <brad at pastmapper.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Sean Gillies