[OHM] Connecting building histories with OSM

[Susanna Ånäs]

Hi Laurence,

Though I am jumping ahead a couple of steps from where we are now with the
Wikimaps project, this is the direction I would like to see the work
evolve. Creating an environment, where material, strories, original
research, genealogists' and local historians' work collide.

The promise of the Wikimaps/OHM project is to connect geographical features
to knowledge about them in Wikimedia. But as the scope of knowledge in
WIkimedia is limited by practices of notability and limiting original
research, one would have to come up with a proposal to solve that.

We are considering starting a project from the beginning of next year to
investigate this, but we are still looking for the methods. Options are to
take a few local history wikis and work with them to research creating
another Wikimedia sister project for telltale knowledge. Another option is
to take an existing project/platform that links to Wikimedia and see if
that could be the way forward.

Most probably we will investigate this through a pilot project in a
locality in Finland. But it would be really exciting to start communicating
about this. Well, it's about structured data as well, but only underneath.
What interest me personally is to create the foundations for a
collaborative research and storytelling environment, and by storytelling I
mean all audiovisual and interactive kinds included, powered by structured
data.

We'll be seeking support from Wikimedia for this as well.

Cheers,
Susanna


2014-08-31 4:21 GMT+03:00 Laurence Penney <lorp at lorp.org>:

> 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 buildings is done by amateurs, unpublished, and probably dies with the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
>
>
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