[talk-au] History (Was: Re: [OpenStreetMap] Re: Hume and Hovell route)

[Andrew Harvey]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Ian Sergeant <inas66+osm at gmail.com> wrote:
> OSM (or a brother project) will need a specific framework for
> historical interest.
>
> Andrew has put a lot of work into going through the historical parish
> maps, and has added names and old_names to numerous streams, bays,
> etc, which is great stuff, and there is a fair bit of historical
> information captured in the old_name tags now.
>
> However, as an example, a year or so ago I removed the Ewey Bay name
> tag from Yowie Bay, and replaced it with Yowie Bay being the current
> name.  Andrew argued that I should have just moved Ewey Bay to old
> name, and I argued that OSM just can't support that kind of historical
> framework, currently.
>
> In this case, the area of Miranda and Yowie Bay was known as Yowie Bay
> since the earliest times of settlement.  Yowie Bay, Como, and the
> National Park were the destinations of choice for weekend day-trippers
> from Sydney.  It was later that the Government imposed the name of
> Ewey Bay on the area when they opened the first post office, and
> gazetted the name.  The post office wasn't in the current centre of
> Miranda, but probably serviced large parts of the area of the present
> day Miranda.  After considerable local protest, and refusal of the
> local community to use the name Ewey Bay, the name was changed (back)
> to Yowie Bay after a few years.  The railway came through, and later
> Miranda with its shopping monolith becomes the main settlement, and
> Yowie Bay a sleepy neighbourhood and associated bay.

Thank you for the history. To be honest, I didn't know this history at
all and the context sheds a lot of light.

The name/old_name tags are very basic and unfortunately can't retain all
that history you just described.

My rule of thumb is if someone sees this name perhaps in some official
historical document somewhere and does a search in OSM, if that feature
still exists currently, then they should find it.

Ideally OSM could (perhaps through API support) support historical items
and then a search for a feature that no longer exists would still show
up. But that is a much larger discussion, and is ongoing on the main
talk lists.

>
> The only remnant of Ewey Bay is Ewey Creek - which largely flows
> through some feral flora mess behind Miranda Fair into Yowie Bay.
>
> We know from the interest in historic maps, photos, etc, that this
> stuff is can be interesting.  If I was crossing the path of
> significant explorer, I'd like to stop and look around.   However the
> current framework doesn't cut it.   Capturing this historical
> information is probably a couple of complete new schemas.



On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I think there really needs to be some kind of proper layering
> system in place to cope with historical information, and other
> intangible data like names. Similarly, something to deal with
> information that lacks a single central authority.

Absolutely, I see a couple of different situations though.

The first is you have a feature which was there, but now isn't. i.e.
there was a building, but then it was demolished. What I've done in the
past is tagged (either the object or changeset) as being historical then
deleting it, so at least you can track it down later.

The second is a current feature that only had some attributes changed.
ie. the road was 2 lane, but then became 3 lane. When you update the
lanes tag to 3, at the moment you can't indicate that this change was
due to a mapping error, or the number of lanes really changed. Nor can
you record the dates/times of the changeover.

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