[OHM] Connecting building histories with OSM

[Laurence Penney]

I wonder if anyone knows of projects that link building histories with OSM.

A friend recently told me he’d done a fair bit of research into his house in Bristol, built around 1670. I wanted to recommend an OSM-related project that he could contribute to, but was sad I could not.

A fine example of what I am talking about is Julie Myerson’s “Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House”, published 2004.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Home-Story-Everyone-Lived-House/dp/0007148224

The address is 34 Lillieshall Road in Clapham. If the houses were in OSM already I’d be tempted to add building:history=<that URL>

To be clear, I’m talking about stories (and maybe also photos and plans). This is not about structured data.

Of course most of this social, urban history research about individual buildings is done by amateurs, unpublished, and probably dies with the researcher. Even if not, it’s likely very inaccessible. Some is published by local history societies. I would love to capture it all and prevent it being lost, so that others can use it and add to it. Whether it is published under copyright or under an open license, it would still be great to aggregate the info.

A reasonable tag from OSM might be building:history=<url>. This works for Amazon links; but personal websites, which one might like to link to, die too. I’m not sure what the best methods might be. Many buildings whose history one might like to record are no longer standing, of course. And there might be conflicting accounts from various competing sources, e.g. in Cyprus or Israel.

Maybe I’m overplaying a potential OSM angle, since the way people tell stories about buildings is not tightly related to entities in OSM. They will talk about the development of a whole row of buildings, stray into the social history of the whole area, etc. Wikipedia does well for famous buildings – but it wouldn’t accept histories of arbitrary buildings, and it’s not famous buildings whose histories are being lost. Yet maybe Wikia, with latlongs, would be a good home for this kind of project.

Any thoughts?

Some links on researching ones house appended below.

- Laurence


http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/21/how-research-history-your-home-nick-barratt
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/looking-for-place/houses.htm
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/your-home/your-homes-history/
http://www.ipl.org/div/pf/entry/76687