Itiner-e Ancient Roman Road Dataset (CC-BY-4.0)

General
, , ,
1

I’m not sure if this will be of much use here, but as the current OHM copyright page on the wiki does specifically reference CC-BY-4.0 sources I thought it would be worth a mention.

The itiner-e dataset has recently been released both as an online map and as a bulk download in GeoJSON format[1]. The coverage area is the roughly the extents of the Roman Empire in 150CE. They indicate that in the future “Itiner-e will serve as a platform for an open community of editors, and the next phase of development will include a process to join this community”, so I guess it could be described as a newly formed competitor to OHM.

It is apparently derived from a number of historical sources and archaeological records and is meant to be higher resolution than previous efforts. Individual road segments are tagged with a level of certainty and sources and classified into main and secondary roads according to criteria on their documentation page.

As far as accuracy is concerned they consider their “certain” road segments to have “less than 50 m deviation in mountainous terrain, less than 200 m in the plains”.

They have a more detailed description of how the data was created here.

  1. although the Nature “scientific data” article linked below also links to other formats for the version discussed there including SHP and GeoPackage. ↩︎

1 Like
2

Howdy @InsertUser !! Welcome back.

Apologies for the late reply, but I was curious how others might weigh in.

I love the itiner-e project, as I imagine most of you do, as well. And, I do not consider it competitive at all. In fact, my only two personal investments in OHM are: 1) that some sort of freely-accessible database of the world’s human history exists somewhere. If that’s OHM, great; and 2) that that place serve the community that OHM is currently serving. IMO, if other places figure out a way to take our data and make it easier to work with and add to, that’s totally in line with our goals.

Regarding the CC-BY-4.0 limitations, I get it. While we really push for CC0 or public domain contributions to OHM, in the cases of important collections like itiner-e, we should make exceptions, clearly label, and attribute all of their data, etc.

My take next steps would be to arrange a call or meeting with the itiner-e team, get their thoughts or concerns about an OHM importing of their data, and see where the conversation leads us.

Would anyone in the community like to take the lead on these discussions and a possible import? I’m sure Minh and I would both love to be part of any calls and to assist in the import process.

1 Like