OpenHistoricalMap/Projects/Evolution of the Mongol Empire

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Status: In progress, recruiting helpers & team members

About

Over the course of 200 years, the Mongol Empire spread swiftly throughout Asia, the Middle East, and into Europe. Along the way, it left a trail of decimated cities and millions of dead bodies. Eventually, it splintered apart and fell into decline, with several of its successor regimes lasting much longer.

The primary goal of this project is to create a high temporal and spatial resolution evolution of the growth, splintering, and decline of the Mongol Empire. As such, it needs to include the evolution of all of the Mongol Empire's bordering states, kingdoms, empires, and the like. It should also document important events that resulted in changes to the boundaries of the Mongol Empire.

The secondary goal of this project is to assemble a team of volunteers to work with a shared purpose and coordination on a large-area, boundary-focused mapping effort.

Approach

The general strategy here – which is open for discussion and adjustment – is this:

  1. Assume that this is just a first, high-level phase, and will serve as a framework for more detailed histories later. So, focus on events and boundaries now and layouts of decimated cities and reconstructions of ruins later. A rough rule of thumb is that we would like to have OHM elements related to all major Mongol-related Wikipedia and Wikidata entries.
  2. Create as many boundary relations for the Mongol Empire to show every incremental advance of the Mongol armies. Try to source boundary locations as best possible with minimal effort (see point #1).
  3. Follow the major categories of campaigns and Mongol Empire splinters identified on Wikipedia and Wikidata.
  4. Create event nodes for each battle / siege / conquest, tie these events into campaign relations.
  5. Create as many boundary relations for every country that is overrun by the Mongol Empire as possible. As the Mongols advance, these entities will recede.
  6. Create as many boundary relations for every major successor to the Mongol Empire.
  7. Ensure that all OHM elements – boundaries relations and campaign relations – are represented in associated Wikidata entries with OHM relation ID property (P8424) statements.

Tasks / Major Project Elements

Mongol conquests

Note that these Wikipedia-derived categories are potentially overlapping and duplicative and non-comprehensive (!):

Conquered states

Successor entities

Project Examples in OHM

Team Members

Requirements

  • A desire to learn how to work with borders and border relations.
  • Willingness to use / learn JOSM for editing in OHM. Nothing against iD, but JOSM is much better suited to work with large-area boundary mapping.
  • An interest in working with Wikidata.
  • Patience, patience, patience. We're likely to make mistakes, so we'll need to make many revisions.

Volunteers

To sign up, please just add your name here and start

Project Sources

Public domain maps

Old maps are often out of copyright and part of the public domain, so they can be a great source for tracing. A few examples are listed below.:

Wikimedia Commons SVG, PNG, JPEG maps

There are plenty of very interesting and detailed maps to be found of Wikimedia Commons. There are two key concerns with these maps that need to be considered when using these as a source for tracing:

  1. Copyright assertions. If you trace a vector map that includes a copyright mark, your derived trace should respect that copyright. You will also, however, need to make an evaluation of whether that stated copyright is valid or respects its sources. For example, a vector map based on an illustration from a book should respect the copyright of that book. Sometimes this is not the case on Wikimedia Commons.
  2. Source assertions. Very often on Wikimedia Commons, there are the following suspicious source claims:
    1. No source cited. Thus, there is no verifiability for the map.
    2. Own work. Thus, you'll find detailed maps of old boundaries with no source references.
    3. Ex-post sourcing. A source added after the creation of the map, sometimes by someone who didn't create the map. Again, it is unclear if this is a valid practice.
    4. Misattribution. Sources that bear no resemblance to the map depicted.

Examples:

Books & articles

Geometry Preparation

Boundary generation

How to mark indeterminate and vague boundaries.

Label point generation

Art and science.

Relation assembly

Boundary reuse.

Every boundary has two owners.

Tagging preparation

See also: Create a TagInfo project page & project file (TagInfo project file documentation).

Tagging dates: EDTF is your friend

Project-specific tagging

tbd 

project = mongol_empire

Source tagging

Appropriately identifying the sources and redistribution policies for OHM-hosted data is critical for its use as a distribution source for consolidated historical GIS information. As such, all ways and relations associated with this import should be marked with the following tags:

Tagging sources

Notes about:

  • Looking for CC0 maps to trace
  • Adding appropriate license tags where necessary & where

`license=CC-1.0` uses the SPDX abbreviation for the Creative Commons CC0 "No Rights Reserved" license.

OpenStreetMap/OHM-specific tagging

In addition to each county's historical metadata, each relation needs to be tagged with OSM/OHM-specific metadata used to let renderers and other systems know how to treat this entity. The admin_level=6 tag is part of OSM convention for counties in the United States. 

   <tag k='type' v='boundary' />
   <tag k='boundary' v='administrative' />
   <tag k='admin_level' v='2' />
   <tag k='place' v='country' />
   <tag k='country' v='empire' />

Wikimedia tagging

Linking objects in OHM to related entities in Wikidata and Wikipedia will enhance the richness of the data in both places and make OHM's data part of a wider fabric of Linked Open Data across the internet.

Wherever possible, objects have been tagged appropriately, such as: 

   <tag k='wikidata' v='Q12557' />
   <tag k='wikipedia' v='en:Mongol Empire' />

Notes:

  1. Not every Mongol-related entity or event has its own Wikidata entry or Wikipedia article. Where no appropriate entry can be identified, the fields should be left blank.
  2. All relations with Wikidata tags are meant to be 1-way references from OHM to Wikidata. Chronology relations and Campaign relations should be treated as 2-way references and users should add OpenHistoricalMap Relation ID (P8424) statements to associated Wikidata descriptions.

Source Data Errors

The source data is not 100% accurate. This is a known certainty. Hopefully, it is a "fairly" accurate dataset that can be used as a starting point – a basis – for further improvement.

Known error examples

tbd

Accuracy of various county boundary datasets

Project Impact Assessment

tbd

Post-Project Processing

tbd

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