Open Historical Map
Contents
Introduction
Open Historical Map (OHM) (https://www.openhistoricalmap.org) is a site that uses the OSM software stack as a foundation for building an open source, user-editable historical map. This project's goal is to create the world's most universal, detailed, and out-of-date map. OHM will focus on the mapping the geo-objects that OSM is great at mapping - shorelines, political boundaries, buildings, ways, and points of interest. Future and other efforts may engage in discussing historical actions, events, people, and movable items.
For First Time Visitors
(and anyone looking to refresh their memories)
Newcomers should visit the Open Historical Map/OHM Basics page first.
OHM resources
The new Open Historical Map/Resources page provides a place to list map, imagery and documentary sources that are appropriately licensed for use in the OHM project.
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Production OHM
- Dev / Staging OHM
- Historic@openstreetmap.org mail list
- Slack: #openhistoricalmap on OSM US Slack
- Github: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap
- Open Historical Map/Projects
- Open Historical Map Tasking Manager
- Open Historical Map Dev Roadmap
- Wikimaps Warper - the Wikimedia Foundation's map warper enables direct tracing of warped maps into OHM using the ID editor.
- OpenStreetBrowser Historical (no "historical" optimizations yet, but feel free to create own categories)
Editing Maps in OHM
This page of the OHM wiki is currently being revised. Much has been moved to Open Historical Map/OHM Basics. Look there for an introduction to OHM editing.
Information about using historic imagery and maps with OHM is being put in the new Open Historical Map/Imagery page.
How to map
A new Tagging page is under development.
Further notes
For further in depth tagging of features, you may consider Comparison of life cycle concepts, in particular the date namespace suffix and the lifecycle prefix.
Using the data
There are a variety of ways to use OpenHistoricalMap Data.
For smallish scale it is possible to download data using JOSM. Two alternatives now exist for larger volumes of data or larger areas:
- A weekly OHM planet file (see http://planet.openhistoricalmap.org/).
- A special Overpass instance at https://overpass-api.openhistoricalmap.org/api/interpreter. You can use it within Overpass Turbo by setting the server to
https://overpass-api.openhistoricalmap.org/api/(Settings -> Server).
See also these pages for the legal attributions:
- Open Historical Map/Copyright - to start documenting copyright-related issues for OHM
- Open Historical Map/Contributors
Short-term plans
Plans have been moved to the new planning document Open Historical Map/Plans.
Keys proposed
Related OSM Projects
- Map of Historical objects: historic.place- An atlas of historic sites based on OSM
- HistOSM - An atlas of historic sites based on OSM, out of the University of Heidelberg (HistOSM.org Paper (de) - paper by Michael Auer and Alexander Zipf)
- Historic - OSM Wiki page on Historic sites in general
- OSM-4D (see German version -translation link on top- as English version needs more translation)
- Proposed_features/historic_event - Failed proposal for including events in the OSM database
Conversations
The list of places to talk OHM has been moved to Open Historical Map/OHM Basics#Communities
References
- OHM: Vector Tiles & Other Updates Presentation Video, Jeff Meyer, SotM US 2019
- WikiWar: Historical Mapping Adventures, Bert deBruijn video presentation, SotM US 2017
- Tech Changes to the OpenStreetMap Stack, Tim Waters, SotM 2015
- City Stripping: building historical road layouts from todays data, Maps Matter blog post, 11 Dec 2014
- Curating a Historical Map, Living With Dragons blog post, 21 July 2014
- Wikimaps Expeditions, Susanna Anas video presentation, SotM 2014
- Historical maps, Jerry Clough video presentation, SotM 2014
- Open Historical Map reusing obsolete information, David Evans, SotM 2013
- Summary of Hangout December 2012
- OSM & Online Time Machines, Jeff Meyer, SotM 2012
- Mapping History on Open Street Map, Frankie Roberto, SotM 2009
