[Talk-GB] Tagging Historic Features

[Graham Jones]

Hi All,
I am interested in creating maps of historical features (e.g all roman
remains, medieval things, World War 2 things etc.).
At the moment we have quite a lot of things tagged with 'historic=*' which I
can use to make a general 'Historical Britain' map (e.g. http://maps3.org.uk),
but I do not think that things are generally tagged with the historical
period etc, which we would need to produce more specific historical maps
(note that I am not on about creating a map of the uk in 1800 etc, but
showing which historical features are still visible today).

I have been trying to think of how to tag these historical things to make
this possible, and found a wiki page that I was not aware of before:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:historic:civilization.   This seems
to propose a hierarchy of tags:
   historic:civilisation = 'roman'
        historic:period='....'
              historic:era='....'

As far as I can tell these are hardly used in the uk (unfortunately my
database does not include them so I will have to re-import it...).

Although this scheme looks a bit complicated, I could see it working, but we
would have to define an appropriate set of 'civilisation' and 'period'
values etc. that are suitable for the UK (the examples on the wiki would not
span the range from prehistoric to cold war that I would like to see).

I will sit down for a while and try to think up something suitable, but
wondered if anyone had any better ideas - the above scheme seems little
used, so we could come up with something different if necessary.

Any suggestions would be appreciated - once we have an idea of what the
values should be there will only be the minor issue of updating the existing
historic features to include the date/period and I will be able to make a
multi layered historic map of the UK!

Regards


Graham.

-- 
Graham Jones
Hartlepool, UK.
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