A possible larger OHM event tagging scheme?

General
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heya! i’ve recently had some interest in mapping events on OHM. however, the current scheme isn’t much, so i figured i should draft ideas for a possible tagging scheme!

despite my time on OSM and OHM, i have a lot less experience with tagging, so these may not be the best, but i think improving them as a community is great!

i’ve included categories for some not nearly as notable things, like a lot of sports games or community events aren’t exactly on the same caliber as wars or things of that sort, and i did this because i think it could provide an interesting window into the life of communities that goes beyond just the roads, buildings, and international borders! i’d love to see some discussion about these and people give their thoughts.

here’s the tagging scheme i’ve drafted:

event:mil= for military events that happen, such as battles (preexisting tag)

event:disaster= for natural and manmade disasters (both disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, as well as disasters like oil spills, nuclear reactor incidents, etc)

event:sports= a sport event or game

event:ceremony= an event commemorating something, such as weddings, funerals, coronations, awards ceremonies, etc

event:party= a social or career-related gathering. things like balls, birthday parties, banquets, dinners, block parties, etc

event:conference= an event intended to discuss bureaucratic, governmental, business, topics etc. includes things like meetings and city council sessions.

event:religious= events of worship or ritual, such as pilgrimage, mass.

event:fair= a gathering of people for entertainment or commercial purposes, things like career fairs, conventions, exhibitions, art fairs, science fairs, etc

event:speech= a speech intended to speak to the public from a figure like a politician or celebrity

event:festival= a community event oftentimes reoccurring and hitching on a theme

event:crime= for singular criminal acts such as murders, assassinations, shootings, heists, etc

event:judicial= for legal or judicial events, such as decisions in courts and major sentences

event:political= for political events, such as elections, coups, not counting political summits or meetings as those fit better under event:conference=

event:technological= first uses or launches of tech such as the first use of a technology or inventions

event:performance= for concerts, theatre, dance, staged events, and major movie airings

event:demonstration= for protests, rallies, and strikes.

event:accident= for smaller scale accidents like car accidents, industrial accidents, etc

event:education= for educational events with the intent to educate, such as health workshops, seminars

event:recreation= for leisure focused events such as air shows, fireworks shows, etc.

event:volunteer= for events which are people volunteering to clean, or do some other sort of activity

i hope you have a great day!

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Seems you misunderstood it. event:mil:*= was proposed as a namespace to contain domain-specific attributes, eg event:mil:deployment=column for a marching column. The event:*= isn’t the focus, or used directly. It is the event:mil:*= structuring underneath that matters.
It would be wise and convenient to avoid categorizing events in OHM unless necessary. Naming it, and linking to wikidata= is sufficient. The latter is more suitable and developed to handle these complexity. Eg a car crash or industrial incident (“accident” itself is a debated term) could be a crime, so both?
OHM is valued as a geographical aspect. As eg performances simply happen somewhere, there’s not much to add, except any short-term stages and sets. As for fairs and expos, the emphasis is on the campus. If some event simply happened in a fixed facility, it’s more outside OHM’s specialization.

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Geographical info is certainly the core and bulk of our content, but I’m not sure if it’s the only content we should map here.

Events may yet belong in a different, as yet to be identified, data store, but for now, I like to experiment with what could be done in our somewhat free for all environment.

@maplemoths - howdy & glad to see you here! :cowboy_hat_face: Welcome to OHM!! @Kovoschiz has added some wise thoughts to consider, but I’d encourage you to read up on past discussions here in the forum (E.g., https://forum.openhistoricalmap.org/t/event-tagging-battlefields-campaigns-explorer-routes/104/4 ) and the wiki, as well as looking at items tagged with event already in OHM.

As for general tagging, in general, I think putting data (e.g. mil, party, recreation, etc.) in the namespace is to be avoided. All data should be put in the value part of a tag (key=value), so a system like event:type=party might be better.

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It mostly seems tedious and not advantageous for me to do it in OHM, if it’s only relating an event with its venue. So Wikidata is good enough, and can be more convenient and powerful.
Eg event=disaster could be used directly, as a few us has raised using at leastevent:name= , if not name= back then. What’s more undecided is the formal, how descriptive it should be, whether it should be a title, or proper names.
On this particular example, similar to “accident”, the terminology can be influential. As concepts of resilience and living with nature etc arise, flooding is no longer seen as purely disasters to be resisted, but also a mechanism to adjust and adapt to. The event= can be more neutral and scientific, not too anthropocentric, eg =meteorological + meteorological= (inspired by geological= from OSM). The classification could be as structured as =storm + storm=tropical_cyclone + tropical_cyclone=typhoon , as the classification can be quite complicated. (I’m battling with one now)

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100% agree with you here that using OHM has its limitations, and that Wikidata has many advantages for describing events. Having events in OHM, however, can illuminate the context of the event without requiring a separate tool / app / integration. I like to use events to help track expansions of empires, etc. Even with the advantages of other systems, I just didn’t want to discourage anyone from playing around with events in OHM if they were intrigued / wanted to experiment.

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I’ve mapped some temporary events such as artworks touring the world, neighborhood holiday displays, and staging centers for concentration camps. These kinds of events are fairly straightforward. You just ask yourself what OSM would map if the project existed at that precise moment and didn’t have to think about permanence. I use the same primary feature tags as when I map more permanent features, only occasionally stretching their meanings. I extend this approach to track movement over time, such as this tree’s whistle stop tour, mapped as a tree at each of the stops.

Decomposing some of the events you’ve listed into the physical locations of things would quickly become mapping individual people’s locations. We previously discussed this in the context of an expeditionary route. Other events don’t really have any physical component to tag; what you’re describing is an activity, which we don’t have the words to express yet.

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Maybe I was too preoccupied with the parties, conferences, performances, and educating events. What I thought is events happening at a significant fixed facility has little to add in terms of OHM, and can be represented by Wikidata satisfactorily. There are different levels of details that can be considered.
0. The meeting or show happened at an amenity=theatre , and a historical figure stayed at a certain place= : Totally doable in Wikidata?
0.5. The crew, and a person stayed at a tourism=hotel : Starts to be more detailed for OHM, but can still be accomplished in Wikidata?

  1. The exact building= the person lived at: Personally this is where OHM can start to shine
  2. The land used by a temporary stage, filming set, circus: Arbitrary locations that can only be represented by point coordinates in Wikidata, better in OHM
  3. The building= and man_made= structures erected for those events, similar to fairs: OHM geometry capability
  4. The transportation routes taken by them to different places: OHM-unique spatiotemporal ability
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@maplemoths - that’s a lot of response for a new poster… did the discussion help? I hope it wasn’t discouraging! There’s just a lot of experience and perspective to tap into here on the forum. :slight_smile:

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Oh, don’t worry, it’s been very interesting to read and see the perspectives here, I’ve just been busy lately. I’m still very enthusiastic about the idea of OHM event mapping but i do accept some of the limitations, makes perfect sense!

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The conversation that was had here has been bubbling around in my mind, and I’ve concentrated some of my thoughts here.

You see, the reason I think OHM should have events is because it

  1. May give further context to changes on the map
  2. May give a closer picture to the culture of a community that I don’t think has ever been done in map form
  3. Could provide interest into OHM from groups who otherwise wouldn’t have nearly as much to go off of (such as sports historians, music historians, etc)

I do think Wikidata is a more conventional way of doing this, but I think this would just provide so much interesting context on the history of our world to have a geodata database with events through history, even if it isn’t as physical as the towns and streets themselves.

I think both mapping super notable events, such as assassinations or important UN meetings are just as important as mapping less notable events, like a football game of a small league or a small town’s community events, because they both give a picture past the physical of what that place was like at the time of the map.

OpenHistoricalMap’s message on the Wiki is “OpenHistoricalMap goes beyond the present, mapping places throughout the world… throughout the ages.
No community is too small, no story too obscure to add to this map.
Everyone has something to contribute, including you!”, and I believe that events are just as much part of the story as the physical world.

Lastly, yes, I do think that if OHM does decide to map events, I do think the tagging should develop more naturally and logically than I had developed it initially.

Happy to hear what y’all think! I’m weirdly really invested into this concept.

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At today’s Philadelphia WikiSalon, after I presented on OSM and OHM (to a rapt audience), one of the first questions was to what extent we attempt to model events. Since we’re still figuring out the right ontology for events, one of the participants suggested we look at the following paper for inspiration, at least to ensure compatibility:

Piryani, Rajesh; Aussenac-Gilles, Nathalie; Hernandez, Nathalie (29 May 2023). “Comprehensive Survey on Ontologies about Event.” SEMMES’23: Semantic Methods for Events and Stories co-located with ESWC. Hersonissos, Greece. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings (19 July 2023). 3443. ISSN 1613-0073.

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