OHM Data Index
After a few months of silence, here we are again, with an update for a project that was a very central side project for our activities…
OHM Data Index
After a few months of silence, here we are again, with an update for a project that was a very central side project for our activities. Based on the great work Open Knowledge Foundation put into the amazing Open Data Index, we wanted to start collecting the various data sources we were using and we wanted our users to be able to see them as well as potential users to inform us about new datasets that can be integrated into the platform.
For this reason we started working on https://index.openhistorymap.org our collection of datasets and research sources, so that users who want to look at the dataset and the papers or the researches published around those datasets can connect and make the data even better. The index is based on a Zotero public collection and a set of custom tags that our API writes and our Pandas based backend (source code in the end) transforms into the various indexing modes we are using. For now this level of “hand made indexing” is enough, but as soon as the project grows we will most likely change it into at least sqlite.
The result is an overview where all the main dimenisons (time and main topic) are visible and the user can explore the single sources that are relevant for that specific topic. The geographical dimension is already covered as “general area” but is not yet filterable (we are working on that).
As of now the topics we cover, as described in the Methodology page, are of three main types:
- antropical physical aspects, where the human being acted on nature to change it and evolve; in this macro-category we find Agriculture, Climate, Economy, Entertainment, Industry, Infrastructures (roads, water and, for the modern times, air), Politics, Religion, Urban,
- ephemeral aspects, like movement of a specific famous person for some reason or movement of specific groups where we find Ephemeral and War (war has its own category as some sources cover specific wars or specific moments or phases of wars in depth)
- natural physical aspects, where we find Geography, tracking the changes in nature, the quakes and natural events that occurred over time.
For all of these topics we track a group of sub-topics:
- For the map, we have Localization, Structure and Model, meaning datasets that give us the point location of specific items, the detailed structure and the 3D model of the elements
- For quantitative analysis we have Indexes, where many indexes can be defined for various topics (the collection about indexes is starting and is very promising)
- For contextualization, we have Events, logging where and when events happened that can help us understand the changes to the analyzed topic or to the world around that event
- For non-datadriven research we have finally Usage and General, that help us give context to the numeric parts, showing how in a given timeframe the structures or the specifica aspects were used or more in general how life was around these elements.
The most interesting aspect, in our opinion, is that with this approach the single datasets to import into the map are visible for the user and can be filters that we will add to the map.
On the other hand not only strictly datadriven research must be used, we can also list non-quantitative research and give a more and more complete overview of starting points for further works in specific areas, on specific topics or on specifc periods.
In addition to that, we are already defining an importing tool that, given the single Zotero ID enables us to define the import script to be run once/if the dataset is updated or changed somehow. This will also give researchers the possibility to understand how much of their data is connected/connectable to the rest of the collected and hopefully normalized data.
If you want to contribute with additional researches, at the moment we are doing the insertion and classification by hand. So, please drop us a mail at index@openhistorymap.org with some info about the research you want to list and a few links to understand the context and we will add the items as soon as possible in order to fill the (many) blanks in the index.
As always, everything is completely open source, so the code for front and backend is here:
메타데이터
- post_id
- 2bb0d2f998a0
- slug
- ohm-data-index-2bb0d2f998a0
- url
- https://blog.openhistorymap.org/ohm-data-index-2bb0d2f998a0
- canonical_url
- https://blog.openhistorymap.org/ohm-data-index-2bb0d2f998a0
- author_url
- https://medium.com/@ingmmo
- status
- ok
- fetched_at
- 2026-06-13 12:55:53
