[OHM] Connecting building histories with OSM

[Laurence Penney]

Thanks for the feedback, Susanna and Lester.

I think on the one hand, it would not be a very interesting project if its focus was changes to buildings: damage, repairs, alterations. This would be a rather dry list of planning applications and receipts from builders and architects, and their older equivalents or guesses. What I am trying to get at is the kind of (locally, personally or more widely) significant events that happened in or near the building, as exemplified by Myerson’s book. The danger on the other hand is that this easily veers into “social history with geotags”. The latter’s not a bad thing, of course, as long as the famous notability criteria are relaxed. Is there a middle ground which could capture particular types of research – of the type that the links in my previous mail try to help people with – that currently goes unaggregated and (therefore) gets thrown away?

In the end it’s all about what kinds of data is out there waiting to be released, and a successful project will have to adapt to follow the data rather than dictate too strongly what it accepts.

Could you, S, say a bit more about the WikiMaps project. I tried the Dresden map listed in “recent layers” and found a kml that looked properly referenced but did not point to any map images.[1]

Good luck with your efforts, and please keep the list posted with progress!

- Laurence

[1] http://warper.wmflabs.org/layers/1.kml

On 31 Aug 2014, at 07:16, Susanna Ånäs <susanna.anas at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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