[OSM-talk] Historical Data in OSM database

[M∡rtin Koppenhoefer]

2010/11/10 Richard Weait <richard at weait.com>:
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Laurence Penney <lorp at lorp.org> wrote:
> By comparison, start_date, may well be used to note the construction
> date or commissioning date of a bridge, but might also define the
> seasonal hours of a tourist attraction only open during the summer.


IMHO the wiki is clear here: "start_date is the date the construction
of feature finished." It is not about the construction being
commissioned or started.


> That said, I find the idea of OpenHistoryMap to be a curious idea.  I
> think the idea has potential interest to historians, students,
> developers, genealogists and others.


not to forget archaeologists.


> But I also think it is
> orthogonal to OSM.


I'm not sure about this. May it be, that I live in Rome, where I can't
do a step without meeting history, I believe that there is a strong
link between the two. Often you find traces in the current city that
would be nice to be integrated with historic data (and not be just
parallel).  I also agree with most of the previous posts here, that we
shouldn't currently put historic geometry in our dataset, as we are
not at all prepared (even using a different tagging scheme the
geometry would clutter the editors and blow up API downloads). If we
really wanted to open up for historic mapping, the API would have to
change, as well as the db-scheme.

cheers,
Martin