🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of accessible tools for genealogists and local historians to contribute to and discover architectural historical data by proposing a fully client-side, open collaborative platform that requires no custom backend. The platform uniquely integrates Wikidata’s time-qualified property model with OpenHistoricalMap’s historical building footprints, enabling structured crowdsourcing through an interactive map interface. Leveraging public APIs from both services, it performs authentication and read/write operations entirely in the browser, storing all contributions under the CC0 license in a public database. The system supports visual editing and querying of genealogically relevant information—including building occupants, owners, and address changes—thereby significantly enhancing the accessibility of open historical data and fostering greater community engagement.
📝 Abstract
House history -- the record of who lived in a building, who owned it, and how its address changed over time -- is a central concern of genealogical and local history research. Wikidata and OpenHistoricalMap together provide an open-data infrastructure, CC0-licensed and capable of representing this data: Wikidata through its linked-data property model with temporal qualifiers, OpenHistoricalMap through historical building footprints with start and end dates. What has been missing is a domain-specific tool that makes contributing and discovering building history accessible to genealogists and local historians. Domus fills this role: a map-based web platform that guides users through structured, crowdsourced editing of building records in Wikidata and displays corresponding OpenHistoricalMap footprints. The application requires no custom backend -- authentication, data reading, and data writing all operate through public APIs in the browser, and all data are stored under CC0 in public collaborative databases. This paper describes the genealogical data model, the architecture, and key technical design decisions.