[Data-modeling] Events

[Ryan Shaw]

>  > One thing I found when populating some data in event and
>  > historic period was that it starts to run into problems of
>  > dated locations, too.  What was the location of the
>  > historical period "Classical Antiquity"?  Is "Italy" a
>  > sensible location to list there, given that Italy didn't
>  > exist as such until quite recently?  If, instead, we list
>  > locations as they were at the time, then it becomes very
>  > difficult to eg. search for events occuring in any given Balkan state.
>
>
> Of course, since political boundaries are shifting constantly, would it even
>  make sense to try to use only current locations for events? If Kosovo
>  secedes from Serbia, would we have to go into all the events, no matter how
>  ancient,  that we claim occurred in Serbia, and figure out which ones should
>  be in modern Kosovo instead?

I agree, using contemporary political boundaries to geocode things
seems kind of short-sighted to me. What if setting a location using a
place name was just considered to be shorthand for easier input, and
locations were actually stored as geospatial points or regions? In
theory these could then be reverse geocoded on the fly using a
temporally indexed gazetteer, so that you could say things like "X
happened at these approximate coordinates, in what was then known as Y
but is currently known as Z."