Hi Kate,
We’re glad you found us, and your project in Charentes sounds wonderful.
As a heads-up, this mailing list goes mostly unused these days – it’s
historical, so to speak. OpenHistoricalMap
<https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/> has grown into a dedicated project
alongside OpenStreetMap. We have a much more active global forum
<https://forum.openhistoricalmap.org/> and a dedicated French forum
<https://forum.openstreetmap.fr/c/thematiques/ohm/69> that might be of
interest to you. I’ll try to give some answers (inline) from my
perspective, but please see our documentation
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenHistoricalMap> for more detail.
A broader discussion among the community would be great for getting more
help and ideas.
Vào lúc 14:11 1/19/26, Kate Alley đã viết:
I am totally new to this, exploring what platforms we could use to
build out the historical changes in our tiny village in Charentes,
France, which we have been mapping on paper in meetings with the
older members of the community. (I looked couldn't find any Mapping
Projects on the Wiki that seem to overlap for our Department in
France.) What we are mostly interested in being able to do is:
- adding information to tags (nodes or ways, open or closed) that are
already available on current day openstreetmap view to record the old
names of streets, the use of a building, the family that lived there,
from when to when;
OHM maintains a separate database from OSM. You can certainly record
former street names and building uses, but you’ll need to map those
things first. The good news is that you can sketch it in without getting
as detailed as you sometimes see in OSM.
- adding new nodes or ways, for example, a public water pump or pond
for watering animals that is no longer
Yes, OHM welcomes information about things that no longer exist, along
with things that still exist.
- linking old photographs of streets or houses
Yes, you can tag individual features with representative images
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:image>, although you have to
find a separate place to host them. Our image viewer is functional, but
if you want something more presentable, you might need to put together
your own mashup that includes OHM or use software that can do it for you
(see below).
- in all of this we sometimes have a specific date, sometimes a time
period.
That’s fine, you can record a date range or approximate date
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenHistoricalMap/Tags#Dates> if
you don’t know a more specific date.
Our main sources of information are a series of village meetings with
the older community, consulting and modifying current day maps, as
well as research in the village Mayor's records.
We then want to be able to print out different views/layers to share
with the village (our older community are not very tech comfortable).
Yes, there’s a variety of ways to create custom maps of OHM that you can
share and print. Admittedly some of it may be a little rough around the
edges, but I think we can help you get comfortable with the workflow so
you can do this for the residents.
So my questions are (1) Does this sound doable on OpenHistoricalMap
and (2) is it easy enough for a non-tech person to figure out (I have
started reading the Wiki pages but still find myself with really
stupid questions to even get started) and (3) would it be possible to
keep some information private (some participants are leery of sharing
information on the internet, e.g. family names, even if they are
publicly available in other sources.
It is possible to record the name of the owner or occupant of a
building, but privacy is a real issue. OHM is a publicly distributed,
open source dataset, so we can’t guarantee any privacy. As a result, we
steer clear of tracking recent owners and occupants. I recommend looking
into collaborative genealogy software like Gramps Web
<https://www.grampsweb.org/> to track this biographical information.
Gramps Web uses OHM as its basemap, so you can still record details
about old infrastructure for public viewing and have it complement the
biographical details. Gramps Web can also store photos so you don’t have
to track them in OHM – perfect for family photos that relatives might
not want to share publicly. The Gramps forum
<https://gramps.discourse.group/> is very helpful for getting started
with the software.
I hope this helps! Please consider following up on the forum so we can
bring in more perspectives and raise awareness about this important use
case for historical mapping.
--
Minh Nguyễn<[email protected]>
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