[open-history] Domesday Book online

[Jo Walsh]

On 13/05/2011 12:13, Anna Powell-Smith wrote:
 > This may be of interest to some people on this list - the first copy
 > of Domesday Book online: http://www.domesdaymap.co.uk
> I'd like to make this dataset more freely available, both as an API
> and raw data.

I would love to see the data.

We have here at EDINA a dataset covering historic placenames from 
Domesday Book era up to modern day - only for Cheshire so far - created 
by text mining the English Place Name Survey.

So for Domesday's Bosley:
http://www.domesdaymap.co.uk/place/SJ9165/bosley/

We have this sort of metadata (where the abbreviations are documents)
Boselega	DB	1086
-leg(h)	Ipm	1275
-le(e)	Court	1286
-ley(e)	Plea	1314
Bozeley	Ipm	1275
Bothis-, le Botesleg'	Eyre	1286
Botesle	Cl	1322
Boslee	Plea	1305
-ley(e)	ChF	1306
-legh'	Eyre	1337
-le	Plea	1396
Beselee	Pat	1382
Baseley	MinAcct	1471

More at http://chalice.blogs.edina.ac.uk/
And hope to publish this as Linked Open Data (pending EPNS approval)
Our partners at Informatics did a little widget for the Archaeology Data 
Service to search on a historic name and return the variants,
wonder if this could be useful?

And does your AHRC data actually have the DB-era names or only the 
modern equivalents?

> The underlying data comes from a 1980s dataset that was funded by the
> AHRC - I probably need someone with more knowledge of licences than me
> to look at whether it can be added to CKAN!

I imagine in this case the university/ies that did the digitisation / 
transcription will maintain that it holds copyright, and one will have 
to make the case to open license there. Which in theory shouldn't be 
hard if the university has no plans to make commercial use of the data - 
what frustrates me is institutions sitting on copyright by default, 
despite the lack of such plans...


-- 
Jo Walsh

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