Hello,
I’m interested in the borders per 1947 UN plan, does OHM have this data somewhere?
Thanks!
It looks like OHM currently has data on the borders of Mandatory Palestine and the boundary of Israel in 1948, but not the UN Partition Plan. @UltraWorlds has been active in mapping de facto and de jure boundaries in the region. However, as far as I know, few if any unimplemented boundary proposals have been mapped so far anywhere in the world. The project is still quite young, so there are a lot of things we haven’t gotten around to yet.
If you come across this data or are able to piece it together based on other boundaries in OHM, I assume it wouldn’t be a problem to map it, since its contours are well known. Just make sure to explicitly tag it as a proposal rather than an official boundary.
Aside from the proposal never being implemented as mentioned above, the UN Partition Plan was, as the name implies, merely a plan. The boundaries, as I understand, were a fairly rough draft that was probably expected to be modified and delineate which settlement would go to which state through negotiations, should the plan have been approved by both parties. As the plan was ultimately never approved, we are left with vaguely-defined borders which would be difficult to portray properly on the map.
While personally I feel it would be a very good addition to showcase the partition plan on the map along with some other partition plans that were proposed such as the Peel Commission, they’re lacking sufficient information, and as proposals, they would be impossible to allocate a time slot for what is primarily a de facto map.
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If not for the ambiguity you mention (which I hadn’t considered), I wonder if a more well-defined plan could be mapped but tagged using the proposed:* lifecycle prefix and given dates corresponding to the time period when the proposal was on the table. But we can cross that bridge when we come across a better-defined plan.
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Thanks, even if lines are soft and theoretical I would be interested in seeing the boundaries applied to a map.
There likely aren’t perfectly defined theoretical borders. Would open historical maps host those boundaries if they were created, is there approval criteria that needs to be met for a border to be hosted?
There’s no approval process per se, but you should make sure to coordinate your mapping of the borders with other mappers in the area. I would take @UltraWorlds’ opinion into account because they’ve done the bulk of work on the boundaries in this region so far, and any boundary you add would need to coexist with that data.
We do have some crude boundaries elsewhere in the world, but it’s an open question as to how to render them. I would expect any boundary you add for this plan to go undepicted on the main map until we resolve the question of fuzzy borders and also figure out how to render proposals. (We don’t render proposed highways either, after all.) However, it would still be possible to view a boundary in an analysis tool such as Overpass even if it doesn’t render on the main map.
If you’re only looking for hosting of this data, there are many other options depending on the format you store the data in. For example, if you’ve traced the boundary from an out-of-copyright map, you can convert it to GeoJSON format and upload it to gist.github.com or to Wikimedia Commons as a map data file. These sites will let you visualize the data on a modern map rather than in a historical context. As long as you’ve chosen to license this file as CC0 (public domain), it’ll be available to add to OpenHistoricalMap whenever we’re ready for it.
Thanks, that sounds like what I’m hoping to accomplish, for the data to be available for others interested in what the 1947 UN plan might look like on a map. I’m new to OSM and need to spend some time learning, I appreciate the information.
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