Talk:OpenHistoricalMap

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Site Status

What is the status of this project? And why has the website been down? Cheers! –Todrobbins (talk) 14:28, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

The machine that was hosting OHM died and finding a new home has been trying. Should be up shortly. --Muninn project (talk) 13:29, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

For the latest information, see the OHM mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/historic/ Currently still down. --SomeoneElse (talk) 12:41, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Time/history/life cycle concepts

Was there any discussion regarding this? There is a pretty decent Comparison of life cycle concepts. The use of start_date and end_date that was suggested in the transcript ( http://www.slideshare.net/frankieroberto/mapp-history-on-open-street-map ) seems to be the worst choice for a rich historic map. RicoZ (talk) 12:38, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

After some thinking I think that in most case the date namespace suffix is the way to go for most historic features. It is already routinely used with name=*, fully compatible with all existing tags and does not break backward compatibility of anything. A slight disadvantage is moderate data duplication and not easy to search for keys marked this way (a regexp is needed). RicoZ (talk) 11:52, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

RicoZ - are you still looking at / interested in this topic? We're currently doing some dev work and could possibly switch conventions, but are currently still recommending basic start_date=* and end_date=* based tagging. It is cumbersome for some applications (e.g. changing names), but we'd need to do more active dev to help support rendering tools. --Jeffmeyer (talk) 20:27, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
Yes, still interested in the topic although in the next time I can not help with programming. Recently there were several discussions in mailing lists, one of them about "start_date variants" showed another interesting idea - using eg "building:start_date=". So you might keep start_date/end_date and use it either as main key if it applies to all properties of an element or namespaced if different dates apply to different properties/attributes of an element. The date namespace still has the more obvious solution if a property was valid during several distinct periods of times. RicoZ (talk) 19:47, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Update issues

Going to try and fix some bad links in section 4 that have suspicious extra characters at the end that are causing problems.

I've been trying to find links to OHM pages of documentation and support details after one account locked up for no clear reason and kept being sent via the links to OSM and OHM (update on migration failures). The link given when I was locked out was only for the OSM support and so they naturally couldn't help with a OHM based problem. If volunteers needed to fix port link fails or at least compile a list of them for others to work though let me know. {OHM - HGovanus/fgovanus} --Govanus (talk) 18:13, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Will this ever come back online? Is this a lost cause? Does anyone have a status report or a reboot timetable?

Govanus - it should be up now. --Jeffmeyer (talk) 20:28, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Old railways..

Way back in the mists of time, on a test server I traced out a good proportion of the Borders, Southern Scotland and Southern England, from a combination of background layers.

This project was later abandoned.

I propose to start adding these to OpenHistorical map if there is interest, as the interface is near identical to that I would have been using on the test server.

However, it wasn't clear if there was ever an agreed convention for making disused vs obliterated stations. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:01, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

I've added the Helston Branch in Cornwall, which if you adding much much older stuff I can remove. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 22:43, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
ShakespeareFan00 - yes, we'd love to have you add this information, if you still have it available. --Jeffmeyer (talk) 20:27, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Usage with Marble ?

Would be great to implement this in Marble and to be able to scroll through the wikipedia:Migration_Period or similar historical events. Are values planned which could enable this ? user:rtfm Rtfm (talk) 20:26, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Rtfm - Totally agree. I think we need to get some ambiguous border type of features and possibly some tool for overlays to treat the Migration Period well, but that's definitely what we have in mind. --Jeffmeyer (talk) 20:27, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

No access to the OHM-server with JOSM

Hi, with JOSM 13367, I get no access to the OHM-Server. I'm not able to make an access identifier. I tried to make a new one and logged in with my OHM user data (username and password), but it doesn't work. Can anyone help me? What am I doing wrong?

I had the same problem. I only managed to make it work through remote control from the website. Try that. 7rst1 (talk) 21:33, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Hi 7rst1, oh interesting, thank you. I'll try it as soon as the queue at ohm.org isn't full anymore ;) Lukas458 (talk) 20:53, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
Unfortunately, that also did not work for me :/ Hmm, I think I'll have to edit further with iD... Lukas458 (talk) 18:44, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
Lukas458 - are you able to get up and running yet? I've been using it. Do you have an account on OHM & an account set up? --Jeffmeyer (talk) 20:27, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
Hi Jeffmeyer, thank's for your response, it works very well at the moment. I just forgot to post it here, the thing which caused my problem was, that I tried to use the "OAuth" software or whatever that is to log me in with JOSM accessing the OHM-server, but that was what didn't work. Now I use the "classic" basic legitimation with JOSM accessing the OHM-server, and everything works fine. Sorry I did not notice to write that here. There still are occasionally moments when the server seems not to be accessible, but then it seems to be not accessible at all, so also on the OHM-website not, but that has nothing to do with my originally problem. And it only appears some rarely times, so everything is ok ;) --Lukas458 (talk) 20:03, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Tagging subpage

I have added the missing page on Tags and provided for some verying categories based on status; discussion on whether i've gone the right way is welcome. I think the proposed tags on this page should move there, and I have some thoughts on them going forward, which I'll add later. Nfgusedautoparts (talk) 18:33, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Native vs. Indigenous vs. Aboriginal vs. First People nomenclature

Not sure this is the right page, but wanted to post it somewhere it wouldn't get lost. OSM has used "aboriginal", which doesn't seem right to me. My inclination is to use the term "indigenous".
Here's an article on topic: Why we say "Indigenous" instead of "Aboriginal", animiki.com, Orig. pub May 31, 2017 & updated Jun 17, 2020
Jeffmeyer (talk) 19:07, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Land aknoledgment

After translating the section of the same title to Italian (currently in my sandbox), I just whish to point out that e.g. what little we now about Etruscan history is through Roman sources, and of Minoan history through Greek sources, and so forth (however unfortunate this may be). Whoever approaches historical information, e.g. by reading a historical map such as OHM, should IMHO be aware of these limitations and biases. --Pegasovagante (talk) 09:25, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Lifecycle of Linear Features

Currently supported dates for OHM are recorded by start_date=* and end_date=*. This works well with nodes and relations, because both nodes and relations can be easily created/duplicated, points can be moved a distance in space, and relations can reuse ways. However, linear features are not so easy. If you duplicate a same way, selection becomes very difficult. At the same time, relations cannot be used to represent ways. For example, waterway=river in the form of a relation does not represent a river. There are also coastlines that will change, but OHM does not seem to support displaying coastlines based on time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lepus (talk • contribs) 11:54, 20 June 2022‎ (UTC)

A simple and effective solution is to add support for multilinestring, which will allow linear features to exist in a more easily editable form. --Lepus (talk) 12:47, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

@Lepus: By the way, a type=waterway waterway=river relation does represent a river. So far, I've been content to keep things simple: if a road changes its name, I do duplicate the roadway and share the nodes. Selection is less intuitive, but I think there's plenty of low-hanging fruit for improving the editors in that regard. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 23:48, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
@Minh Nguyen: I don't know if this combination is redefined in OHM, but it can be seen that type=waterway waterway=river does not render the name like a way. ——Lepus (talk) 10:43, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
@Lepus: Yes, I agree. All I mean is that there is a relation representation of a waterway, which could theoretically eliminate the need to tag individual ways, but there doesn't seem to be much traction to that idea yet. [1] In the meantime, as I mentioned, I just duplicate the geometry, since that approach seems to generalize the best across different feature types, despite the inconvenience of selecting the features sometimes. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 18:41, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Redesign

This article is getting rather disorganized. Mostly it serves to send readers to various subpages, but each link is surrounded by a lot of boilerplate that makes it difficult to find what you're looking for. The "Tracing a historic map in OHM" and "Bibliography" sections can be relegated to subpages as well. At this point, I think there are two different directions we could take this article:

  • A better organized, Wikipedia-like prose article along the lines of Public Domain Map, not too snazzy but gets the job done and creates room for future expansion. There would probably be fewer sections, but each section would summarize the linked subpage in more detail.
  • A portal page similar to various OSM WikiProject pages on this wiki, highlighting featured content alongside links to resources. I've mocked up what a portal might look like. The "Featured sites" and "News" sections would require ongoing maintenance, and the "On this day" section would require some upfront work to populate the list of events for each day of the year (and map some more dates that are underrepresented). But otherwise the design is technically feasible. The "Statistics" section would probably be updated only infrequently for now.

Which approach would folks prefer to take for this article? What would you like to see included in the article that isn't there today?

 – Minh Nguyễn 💬 10:55, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

@Minh Nguyen: I like both of these options, though slightly prefer the first mainly because of maintainence concerns. The first thing that comes to mind for what I would change though is to put some basic information about how tagging differs on the map first. Most times I go to the OHM page, it is for a reminder of what the start and end time tags are supposed to look like, then I click on the OHM Basics, then remember that the more complete explanation is on the detailed tagging page, then go there. A brief example of what the start/end date tags and license tags look like followed by links to full documentation at the top would be very helpful. A featured map element like the one in your portal draft would also be helpful to this end, since I think at the moment the information about "how can I use this?" feels a bit buried. --Bgo eiu (talk) 17:11, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
On second thought, I actually do prefer the portal. The "on this day" features and news do make for a more engaging page, and I think highlighting this information would be worth the additional maintenance burden.
A small nitpick is that I would change the name of the "featured sites" to something like "featured locations" or "featured on the map," only because "site" makes me think I might be taken to a (web)site external to OHM. --Bgo eiu (talk) 17:17, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
Fixed. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 07:28, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

License

What is the license of OHM data? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:14, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mateusz Konieczny: The default license of OHM data is a CC0 public domain dedication. [2] However, Open Historical Map/OHM Basics#License explains that the OpenHistoricalMap database as a whole is not under a single uniform license. Individual features and "projects" can be tagged with an explicit license=* that indicates a different license, such as CC BY-SA. This massively complicates reusing OHM data, though it slightly eases transferring historical data from OSM to OHM. (Also, "licence" would be the British English spelling.)

Personally, I want the project to phase out license=* and non–public domain data, especially ODbL data. Viral data licensing doesn't make any sense in the field of history, where the commercial incentives are nearly nonexistent but academic safeguards against plagiarism are much stronger than anything a data license could provide. Anything more restrictive than an attribution-required license stifles the project's uptake in academia and among genealogists. Now that the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries has been released into the public domain, non-CC0 data is only a tiny fraction of the database (0.004%), concentrated in a few locales. ODbL data is negligible (0.002%), limited to the Barcelona city center, the Andorra border (easily replaceable), and the location of a town in Switzerland (ditto). [3] tracks getting this data relicensed. It would remain possible for an OSM contributor to move their own contributions to OHM and dedicate it to the public domain, as long as those contributions aren't entangled with others' edits.

 – Minh Nguyễn 💬 21:34, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Rename to OpenHistoricalMap

Would there be any objections to renaming this page and its subpages to "OpenHistoricalMap" and also renaming Category:Open Historical Map to Category:OpenHistoricalMap?

Both "OpenHistoricalMap" and "Open Historical Map" used to be common, but I think the spelling without the spaces is much more common at this point. For one thing, that's what the main website says all over, so this wiki should be consistent.

This change would require a corresponding change to several templates on this wiki, as well as some other software:

 – Minh Nguyễn 💬 19:04, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

  • I approve this proposal I approve this proposal. --Gnrc69 (talk) 19:39, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

There were six thumbs-ups in Slack as well and no opposition. I've gone ahead and renamed the category to Category:OpenHistoricalMap, but I'm going to hold off on renaming the article and its subpages until after the mapathon at State of the Map U.S. I expect some participants to need to access the OHM tagging pages from within iD, which is currently hard-coded to look for the current article title. Updating iD would require another deployment that's unlikely to occur before the mapathon. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 16:00, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Resolved: I've renamed this page and all its subpages and their talk pages. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 02:31, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Reorganization and redesign

Over the past few days, I did some spring cleaning of the various OpenHistoricalMap-related pages on this wiki[reorg 1] I had only intended to clean up start_date=* and end_date=*, but things just took off from there. Most of the contents of Open Historical Map have been moved to subpages, some redundant content has been removed, clearly historical pages have been archived as such, and there are new pages detailing various aspects of development and reuse. The bibliography and land acknowledgment have their own pages too.

It's my hope that this reorganization will make it easier for newcomers to find information they need at a glance and also give long-time contributors more obvious places to write down their institutional knowledge. Unfortunately, the main Open Historical Map page is looking rather sad after removing redundant and overly technical material.

The proposal looks like this today, but it will feature different content tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I've done my best to update and streamline the proposed main page redesign from last year so that it'll mostly run on its own without much long-term maintenance:

  • The "Featured sites" section is now "Then and now". Instead of a gallery of screenshots that we have to upload to Commons, it features an interactive OHM map based on the wiki's new vector maps capability. Drag the slider left and right to compare the past and present. The map rotates daily among the entries in Module:CarouselMap/config/OpenHistoricalMap (itself based on Open Historical Map/Quick OHM Map Links).
  • "On this day" automatically updates based on a series of subpages that contain simple lists of changes based on the provided Overpass query. I've completed the pages for the first half of June, but I'd welcome help from others to complete the full calendar. This would be a great way to dive into OHM and contribute to the wiki at the same time.
  • "Statistics" doesn't update automatically, but I came up with new Overpass queries that make it very easy to update the section manually. They even calculate the average age of every feature in years and the average year represented by all the features in the database.
  • "News" and "Events" still need to be updated manually, but I don't think they'll be much of a burden.

This design is akin to the portals that this wiki has for various countries in OSM. It still provides access to basic information, but I think the new sections rotating daily will keep people returning to the page to discover more about the project. OHM really isn't as blank as it sometimes seem! It'll also be easier to translate than the previous page. You'll be able to translate the main structure of the page upfront, then translate individual days' content more gradually as you find the time.

Try out the proposed redesign and let me know if anything seems amiss. What do you think about adopting this redesign? It would be really neat if we could put our best face forward as folks discover the project at State of the Map U.S. in a few days.


  1. ↑ Or fall cleaning, for those of you in the southern hemisphere.

 – Minh Nguyễn 💬 18:05, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Resolved: This proposal received six expressions of support in Slack and no concerns were raised. I've deployed the new portal. As speakers of other languages translate the portal, please let me know if there's anything that needs to be adjusted to better accommodate your language. Module:CarouselMap/config/OpenHistoricalMap has a space for each language's translation of the caption, but most other helper templates will need to be translated wholesale. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 23:45, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Warn openhistorymap vs. openhistoricalmap

Warn that

are two different organizations! Jidanni (talk) 06:56, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Localization

@Lepus, 快乐的老鼠宝宝, Hangukhistory, CuratorOfThPast, Parachute, and Selva: Thank you for translating the OHM portal into more languages! Now the whole portal can be translated, except for the "On this day" section. Just click the pencil icon at the bottom-right corner of each section to contribute a translation using one of our JSON or Lua modules.

I'm also really happy to see some of you contribute to the "On this day" section of the page. Over in DE talk:OpenHistoricalMap#Localization, we started to discuss what it would take to make this section translatable. But before we settle on an approach, I wanted to see if you think the section makes sense in its current form or if we should approach this section differently. I'd appreciate your feedback either here or in this forum thread. Thanks again for your help!

 – Minh Nguyễn 💬 02:34, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

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