[OHM] report on OpenHistoricalMap Birds of a Feather at State of the Map

[Tim Waters]

Hi folks,

at the recent SOTM Conference in Milan last week, there was a Birds of a
Feather / Breakout session on OpenHistoricalMap and general history with
OSM.

I observed that there were no talks in the programme about history so I
felt obliged to do one! Here are some notes:

The session was attended by around 12 people, and we began by introducing
ourselves. Sorry to say, I didn't write down all the names, but there was a
mixture of people interested generally and from Wikimedia and who worked
with history.

The BoF began with me explaining what OHM was (most, but not all had heard
about it) and updating everyone as to the status. New servers, replication,
hosting and the exciting new vector tiles reboot was talked about. I also
echoed Rob's recent appeal for enthusiasts to contribute from tiles to
maintenance to code.

We recapped on how to map within OHM - start_date and end_date tags, and
the use of historical raster maps.

We talked about whether OHM could be used to store demolished features from
OSM  - to use OpenHistoricalMap to archive features which no longer exist
but which were once in OSM.  I have the opinion that this could drive
contributions up considerably, demonstrate it's usefulness and foster
closer links with the OSMF all ensuring sustainability.

We talked about the license, ODBL vs CC0 etc.

Petr introduced the Roman Roads project he worked on with the Pelagius
Project:
http://commons.pelagios.org/2017/11/building-the-roman-empire-vector-tile-map/
and suggested that the data could be added to OHM. There are some Roman
roads and places already in OHM.

We talked about using Wikimedia tools, Wikidata and in particular Wikibase
(which runs on top of wikidata) to store and query historical objects.  The
ability to find and query linked historical data was considered important.
This, naturally, lead to a discussion on "notability" for geographic
objects.

I also talked about the Wikimedia Warper project which has an embedded OHM
editor, and it was agreed that storing historical raster images within
Commons is A Good Idea.

We talked about the difference and (very interesting) challenge of
representing change in attributes vs just geometry over time.

That's all I can think of from my sparse notes!

Cheers,

Tim
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