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Comment by tda | Hacker News Reader

If this gets enough traction this could make historical maps so much more accessible. Instead of every historian writing their own magnum opus of a particular area and timespan, all the geographical information can be combined in a single system. Is there a system built in for keeping track of annotations/sources? How are debated topics/unresolved locations dealt with?

What if different schools of thought exist for where something was in the past, could multiple hypothesized locations exist for a single object? Direct link with Wikipedia would also be useful

Very nice project, hope it becomes as useful and detailed as the present day OSM

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There is already a super accessible presentation of history maps: Paradox games like Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, etc. The games achieved what you’re talking about already, there’s already an old, large and very active community of modders across their games that make historical accuracy (or gameplay-favorable inaccuracy) changes. It’s possible the mean Europa player, over all the games, individually spent more hours looking and interpreting the historical map in those games than anyone has ever spent looking at any Open Street Map property ever.

If you’re thinking about contributing to OSM History maybe consider EU4 instead. Maybe you think these are different things. I don’t. One satisfies your curiosity (ie entertains you) a lot better than the other.

Maybe though OSM History could be a place, like Wikipedia, where people could settle “territorial disputes.” I don’t know, that shit, wherever it appears, is a pretty toxic part of any community. I’m not 100% sure how Europa deals with it - you can download whatever mod you want, after all, it’s your game. But my feeling is, most of this territorial dispute shit hardly affects the people talking about it at all, and the feelings of playing a video game and all that entails - positive feelings - are better than the negative ones you feel when you’re pursuing what you believe is justice in a Wiki talk page or a Twitter flame war.

What API does Paradox offer for getting information out of their historical games?

I think this is a pretty key question that also applies to any effort by any other commercial provider. The detail in the historical models in EU4, any of Ubisoft's games, etc., is fantastic. I'd love to see any of them make stripped-down versions of their geodata available through open data licensing. Maybe there's something we've missed in the EU4 modding that could be of use? We'll take another look!

It would be fun if it had events/battles listed with dates.

> Instead of every historian writing their own magnum opus of a particular area and timespan, all the geographical information can be combined in a single system.

Isn't that true of all historical data? It seemed so obvious to me that professional historians would share data that I asked several professional historians what the standard format was. Nobody had even considered it, as of ~10 years ago.

Obviously you can't structure all historical information, but you can do a lot of it: Location & time, other things present at that spot in space-time (people, events, weather, diseases, governments, etc. etc.), and sources. And then some unstructured fields, including one for analysis.

I'm sure that's misguided, as I'm not an historian, but it sure seems like much more value could be extracted from research if it was accumulated and shared, and not stuck in someone's personal storage, and that it would save a lot of duplication of effort.

You're right on. I've asked many for shapefiles of the world's historical boundaries & some do exist, but are often encumbered by copyrights / licensing that add friction to sharing. Our goal is to have as much CC0 data as possible, although we have added some CC-BY-SA-NC data. All data is copyright / license marked at the object level, with no label defaulting to CC0.

"What if different schools of thought exist for where something was in the past, could multiple hypothesized locations exist for a single object?"

How to represent such things on a map can become quite complex very fast. A placename from an old document may refer to multiple locations, but these are mutually exclusive. The probability of attribution may vary in each case. Different scholars may disagree about these probabilities. Etc, etc.

> Instead of every historian writing their own magnum opus of a particular area and timespan, all the geographical information can be combined in a single system.

The two options are not mutually exclusive: Dr Shmoe and Dr Kroe can write fascinating books on the movement of the border between Hannover and Braunschweig that mostly agree but disagree on a couple of fundamental points; both could be represented, and perhaps compared, via different views.

For an existence proof: Wikipedia is able to have decent articles about (some) subjects where strong consensus does not exist.

Thanks, @tda!! That's a very kind and optimistic post. I think everyone in the OHM community is working with good intents to create a rich resource available for easy reuse and download.

You hit the nail on the head about trying to combine various different geo/temporal efforts to provide greater context of world history.

Our tagging system is like OSM's - very flexible - with all the strengths and weaknesses that offers. And, the tagging system has limitations that we're currently working through & around.

One strength is that any object (node, way, relation in OSM-speak) can have multiple sources. e.g. source:1=url1, source:2=url2, etc.

And, tagging areas as disupted=yes is pretty straightforward. bit.ly/disputedUSA

We have yet to hit any sensitive areas of debate, but I imagine that will happen in the not too distant future. OHM's system is inherently vulnerable to vandalism, but the goal is to allow conflicting perspectives to coexist, as long as they are sourced.

Wikipedia tags are supported & perhaps more importantly, Wikidata. Wikidata also supports OHM references. See: https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/relation/266127 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q159631

The present-day map must have a system to deal with territorial disputes, maybe a similar system can be used.

The current system from e.g. Google is pretty weak IMO, it's made to not piss the sides off, so if you load up Google Maps in Pakistan you see the disputed territories belonging to Pakistan, and in India you see them belonging to India. But if it's the stuff of history it would be interesting to display the areas overlapping each other, or to mark that there was active conflict over the territory at that point in time.

> The current system from e.g. Google is pretty weak IMO, it's made to not piss the sides off,

It is mostly respecting local regulation on the topic. If you are in a country that does not regulate the area you see the disputed areas marked.

Just wait till the flame wars on Taiwan and the Nine Dash Line

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

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