Open History Map – Status of the Project

Abstract

Open History Map, an open map of the past that was already presented as a
concept a few years ago, is now in its first year of functioning infrastructure
and collects around 150GB of data from around 90 sources. The platform is
open in all of its aspects and enables research groups to create new importers
for their own open datasets. In addition to that, OHM enables the visualization
of "ephemeral" datasets, i.e. representation of vicinity for historical
characters and vehicles, battles and events. The present work will analyze
the status of the project and the contributions it is doing to the general DH
and PH sector, specifically on source quality management and general cloud
first architectures.
OHM is based on the collection of open datasets available online. The geographic
precision as well as the informational quality varies a lot between
sources, research teams, projects. These factors higlight the need of a tool
to manage the data quality, which we called OHM Open Data Index, (https://
index.openhistorymap.org) where we collect all sources we find and all datasets
we import in order to analyze and display the general quality and/or
lack of data.
The complexity of the infrastructure behind a project such as Open History
Map required an original and cloud-first approach, enabling the optimization
of every single aspect of the development as well as the deployment and the
usage of the system. For this reason a cloud-first approach was used, trying
to harness all the features of the most common FLOS software platforms in
order to maximize the quality of the final product.