[OHM] Advice on modelling historical boundaries & where to keep them?

[Jo Walsh]

Thank you for this Susanna, I am especially glad that you have put
Humphrey back on my radar :)

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015, at 06:58 PM, Susanna Ånäs wrote:
> Humphrey Southall has made an effort to test using Wikidata as a
> backend gazetteer for the PastPlace project. See this intro for
> example
> http://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/From_Wikidata_to_a_global_historical_gazetteer:_Pelagios_and_PastPlace

My previous connection to this domain was through Unlock, previously
GeoCrossWalk, a geodata service run by EDINA at the University of
Edinburgh which had two parts; one was a gazeeteer or place-name search
service, the other was a "geoparser" which does text mining to extract
and geocode place-name references from documents, which was developed
over the course of several archive projects. GeoCrossWalk started early
based on proprietary OS data under academic use only license which
hobbled its re-use potential. With Unlock we started incorporating OS
Open Data and geonames into the search. If i were asked to develop the
gazetteer search service now, I would refuse, and say put the effort
into helping to develop and run Nominatim instead. At the time we had
some polygon search features which Nominatim now has well developed. The
Edinburgh Geoparser was later work, can be accessed via a web service
here for experimental georeferencing of text against various gazetteers:
http://edina.ac.uk/unlock/texts/

So the geoparser is much less of a cracked problem, and also more
relevant to my current day-job, which is with Registers of Scotland. RoS
are sitting on a goldmine of narrative archives describing an unbroken
run of property transactions in Scotland going back to the 1200s. Many
are scanned, most are not yet transcribed, but the resource needs to be
tapped in order to complete Scotland's cadastral map; a task meant to be
completed within ten years. There's a lot of specialist research
knowledge in the organisation, but it's thus far been used responsively
- the narrative archives are searched when conditions are met, such as a
property changing hands. This has changed in law since the Land
Registration etc. (Scotland) Act 2012[1] and now RoS can be more
pro-active about what it puts in the modern land registry. The post-79
registry is tightly tied to Ordnance Survey data. There is potential for
use of other sources of "base mapping". The potential for using OSM more
for historical geocoding and georeferencing is probably much better. I
wish RoS could reach out more, but it is a relatively traditional civil
service organisation without much collaborative effort with the other
cultural archives in Scotland, as far as i'm aware, apart from NLS.

One interesting and somewhat unfulfilled project we did with Unlock was
called DEEP - it happened mostly after my time at EDINA but i was
involved in the setup project, which was called Chalice and produced a
proof of concept set of metadata extracted from the English Place Name
Survey and licensed under the OdBL. The intention was for all the DEEP
data to be OdBL licensed, but i'm not sure anyone pushed for that in the
end :/ You can query for the DEEP data by constructing URLs that look
like this:
http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/ws/search?name=Telford&format=json&gazetteer=deep
but it only covers England and Wales. This is georeferenced to point
data where that is available; the Survey are etymological scholars of
place-name history, not GIS people, they subsist on library sales of
their print volumes, and for them this stuff is a side-effect more than
a benefit.

There is a Scottish Place-Name Society but its survey is much less
fully developed than EPNS. And of course there is the background
collaboration with the Map Library at NLS, in the hands of its very
supportive and proactive Map Librarian, Chris Fleet, whose work on
providing historical OS data free to make derived works has already
been of such benefit to OSM.

In short, there's the usual untapped research potential for query of
historical boundaries but it's hard to get this across in applications
because the work is cross-domain and we're all critiquing our own
corners too hard. There are real and pressing requirements here in
Scotland for a usable vector editor bringing together the different data
sources to speed up the process of registration, but I'm not sure where
one would go to seek the cultural approval that a funded project would
offer. I had some good conversations with folks from Aberdeen city
council and Aberdeenshire county council about their archives at a
recent hackathon, they seem curious about and receptive to OSM, but
no-one in local government has any resource to spare.

> Bert Spaan from the Waag Society was presenting the Dutch historical
> geocoder project http://erfgoedenlocatie.nl/ (among other things) at
> the recent Wiki Loves Maps seminar in Helsinki
> http://wikilovesmaps.wikimedia.fi/.

Sorry, this has been a bit of a rambling braindump. This far down an
email may not be the place to ask, but is OHM still using the main
Nominatim rather than having its own, potentially customisable,
Nominatim instance in the way it already has its own instance of the OSM
UI and editing APIs?

cheers,


- Jo


Links:

  1. http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.legislation.gov.uk%2Fid%2Fasp%2F2012%2F5&ei=sZ7lVLCLPMmP7Aafq4GQAw&usg=AFQjCNEyHhnshJaVwSf1DNZLHYtmjaEgng&bvm=bv.85970519,d.ZGU
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