[Talk-GB] Tagging Historic Features

[Mick]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:30:03 +0100
Graham Jones <grahamjones139 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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!
> 
I have been pondering this issue myself and have thought using a
combination of historic:era (Mesolithic | Neolithic | Bronze | Iron |
Roman | Saxon | Norman | Middle Ages | ...) for objects with era based
timing and/or more date specific where appropriate.

Another area that has been murdering grey-matter is change of function,
for example a Saxon Monastery, built say 6th Century, swallowed by
Glastonbury Abbey 11th Century, became a Manor in the dissolution
then a hospital/convalescence home for WW1, Military headquarters in
WW2, a hotel in the 1960s and now luxury apartments.

An unlikely sequence but not impossible, any of these usages would be
relevant to a number of researchers but far from easy to implement
neatly.

My personal interest is in how the natural and built landscapes
influenced my own ancestors.

I would definitely be interested in such a map, I would even be happy
to contribute my time to it's development

sparrowhawk