OpenAtlas

Context:
In OpenAtlas “Place’ is used as a label for a combination of multiple CRM entities. It is the “E18 Physical Thing” - that represents for example a settlement, a church or a castle - combined with an “E53 Place” entity that represents its space/location. The location is combined with a “E94 Space Primitive” and stored as a PostGIS geometry.

Issue:
Currently multiple geometries and toponyms can be assigned to a “Place”. However, temporally dating these geometries and toponyms is not possible. For example, it is not possible to say that New York was named “Nieuw Amsterdam” during the 17th century and "New York" during the 18th century. (This is possible in the ongoing GeoJSON-T format).

Proposal:
If possible, I would suggest adapting the current OpenAtlas/CIDOC CRM data model to incorporate temporally dating geometries and toponyms through the use of the “E92 Spacetime Volume” and its properties “P160_has_temporal_projection” and “P161_has_spatial_projection” (Schneider et al., 2019)

“E18 Physical Thing” is a subclass of E92 and inherits these properties. If my understanding is correct, a time-span can be assigned to an “E18 Physical Thing” during which a toponym and geometry is valid. Multiple E18s with a timespan can refer to the same place. For example, an E18 entity referring to a city during the 17th century and an E18 entity referring to the same city in the 18th century. These timed observations can be linked to a new E18 that refers to the city from it’s beginning to its end via the property “P10_falls_within”. As attachment, I have provided an UML representation of the CIDOC CRM Classes. If my reasoning is incorrect, I will try to adapt the model as soon as possible.

This addition to the model would be very beneficial for the development of historical gazetteers and the mapping to GeoJSON-T.