[open-history] Domesday Book online

[Rufus Pollock]

[cc'ing open-humanities in case people interested!]

On 13 May 2011 12:35, Jo Walsh <jo.walsh at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Ditto here!

> 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

Fantastic.

> More at http://chalice.blogs.edina.ac.uk/

Can you register this on CKAN Jo? (Even if it isn't yet online in bulk
knowing it exists is useful!)

> 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?

I think so.

> 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!

@Anna:  CKAN isn't restricted to fully-open datasets (there are lots
of datasets where license isn't yet clear, where data may be one day
open etc) so please go ahead and register it.

> 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...

Well at the very least we can try and track down original creators and
do an http://isitopendata.org/ request to clarify matters :-)

rufus