Nice to see this here! I'm Sanjay Bhangar - I recently gave a talk about some of the history of the project and the technical architecture / setup at State of the Map, US (talk should be online soon).

This is essentially a long-running experiment in repurposing the OpenStreetMap software and architecture to map historical objects, with some modifications to handle dates: essentially, we generate vector tiles for the data and then use client-side filtering of the vector tiles to enable the time slider you see on the site.

Recently, we've been getting quite a lot of usage, and some folks mapping some areas really deeply, which is fantastic to see - of course, it all throws up very interesting questions, some of which are going to be harder to solve than others: we use OpenStreetMap's free tagging system, so a lot of these things would have to evolve as community consensus on tag usage, as OSM has.

As @nfgusedautopart says, it really is a big experiment .. all our code and discussions are open of course, and would love for you to contribute / jump in. This is the Github org: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/

Fork of openstreetmap-website code-base: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/ohm-website

Code for our deploy process to deploy the website code as well as associated services like Overpass (query tool), Tasking Manager (tasking tool), etc: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/ohm-deploy/ (uses Helm + Kubernetes for the deploy).

Consolidated issues: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/issues/issues

There's definitely some wild, fun problems in there - dealing with fuzzy dates, disputed historical facts, events .. though my favourite is likely the coastline problem: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/issues/issues/329

Thanks for posting this here, and super happy to answer any questions if I'm able to.

user:	batpad
created:	August 16, 2011
karma:	15