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.