[OHM] Connecting building histories with OSM

Sun Aug 31 19:24:50 UTC 2014

Hi Laurence,

The Wikimaps project is primarily an initiative to make available MapWarper
for georeferencing maps in Wikimedia Commons.

But the concept has been thought further: We are making an effort to
include the OHM iD in the same structure, and rework the warper user
interface to make switching from the Warper to iD a mouse's click.

What we hope to gain, but have no roadmap for that, is to bridge between
OHM and Wikidata, and create a historical gazetteer.

The project gets funding through Nordic Culture Fund and Wikimedia
Foundation. The Nordic funding is based on the activities we are making to
release Nordic cartographic materials to Wikimedia Commons.

Also, Wikimaps did a joint effort with OHM by having Jaime Lyn Schatz work
as a Wikimedia OPW FOSS intern, working to create temporal display for OHM.

We have all sorts of resources that are linked to
http://wikimaps.wikimedia.fi/ and
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikimaps. We also have the
monthly Hangouts on Tuesdays, this coming Tuesday will be the next one. At
the moment, we are concentrating on delivering rather than advocating, so
the meeting will be rather practical.

As for your test: The layers are being reworked, and it seems there are
discrepancies. We'll have a look at that! Thanks for reporting!

Cheers,
Susanna

Wikimaps

2014-08-31 18:28 GMT+03:00 Laurence Penney <lorp at lorp.org>:

> 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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>
>
>
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