Historical Building References using GERS ?

[Richard (atiro)]

I think this is well out of scope of the problems you are working on, but I thought would try anyway.

The GERS/overture plans are interesting from a cultural heritage view for giving a possible way to refer to buildings which are not currently identified through any existing schema used, such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Especially now with the cataloguing of photographic archives there are photographs available of every structure ever, so having a common identifier for any structures shown in photograph would be very useful to be able to filter them (browse photographs of building X, whereas at the moment we can only catalogue down to the level of place, so https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O157687/the-arch-of-janus-quadriffons-picture-raffaelli-giacomo/ indicates it depicts Rome, not specifically The Arch of Janus Quadriffons).

But the schema's plan for referencing buildings brings up the question (noted already in discussion https://github.com/OvertureMaps/schema/discussions/10) of what happens when a building changes location, e.g. the Temple of Dendur had a very long time at an location in Egypt before moving to New York. There is also the more common issue of the difference between the concept/purpose of the building and its various physical manifestations over time (e.g. the HQ of a company will change location & buildings over time).

Something like FRBR modelling (in its more generic form) to allow these things to be separated out might work, or looking at Pleiades modelling (https://pleiades.stoa.org/help/conceptual-overview) of differences between Place/Location/Name. But these problems may be way beyond what you are trying to solve, so I'll stop there!