Hi all, I'm very excited about OHM developments, there's enormous potential here. I manage a site and dataset about places in the Greek and Roman world (plus some older Ancient Near East places, some Byzantine places) called Pleiades. Users continually ask me about adding detailed map data to Pleiades – locations of monuments, buildings, walls, and streets – but this is really outside the scope of my project. I think that OHM is possibly the better destination for such detailed data. And I think getting archaeologists and other researchers involved here could be good for OHM. Imagine the Penn Museum's maps of Ur (http://www.penn.museum/blog/museum/ur-digitization-project-february-2013/) in OHM. Or Eric Poehler's maps of Pompeii (http://www.pompeiana.org/).
A major question for me: will OHM reflect past reality on the ground? And if so, what will the standards be? For example, say I create in OSM (the current OSM) a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean and name it "Atlantis." This is fiction, of course, but only determinable as fiction because we can visit that part of the ocean today by boat or plane, or virtually by satellite and falsify the assertion of its existence. Past features aren't so easily verified or falsified and their nature is essentially hypothetical, only approaching the factuality of existing features after much study. To restate my question: how good must a hypothesis about an ancient feature be to warrant its inclusion in OHM? Hypothetical lost civilizations of Atlantis abound despite lack of evidence – including these in OHM would be a departure from OSM's principle of reality on the ground, at least in my view. I've assumed that OHM would adopt and adapt OSM's best practice rubrics. Looking at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice, I think it would be worth amending (for OHM) "Map what's on the ground" to "Map strong and falsifiable hypotheses about what was on the ground" and develop a practice of citing research and historical documents. Nodes and ways of Old Babylonian Ur can cite published work. If I trace the hypothetical trail over the Alps that Hannibal's army left in its wake, I feel like I ought to cite evidence supporting it. I realize that showing is better than telling, and I'll try to do some leading by example when the OHM database is ready to go. -- Sean Gillies _______________________________________________ Historic mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
