skybristol/indian_country_data

Getting the record straight on Indian Country information in Wikidata

indian_country_data's Issues

Add CN Districts

The Cherokee Nation elected legislature (CN Tribal Council) as 15 on-reservation seats and 2 at-large seats under the 1999 constitution. These will be instances of a new subclass of electoral district I created:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q122976289

Basic properties will include:

• country (P17)
• located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) (Cherokee Nation)

For the on-reservation districts I can include:

• coordinate location (P625) from the centroid of the area from the map service
• area (P2046) using geometry from the map service

I will also try to use Census data via the MPC to include links to municipalities within the districts. It could be interesting to incorporate 2020 Census details though I don't yet know how that breaks down and whether we could get anywhere close to CN or other Native citizens from those data.

There are also some interesting CN GIS data sources on the ArcGIS Enterprise instance that could be tapped to link things like schools and community buildings, but those are likely entities that would need to be tracked down and created first.

Model the relationship between fire stations in Wikidata and OSM and explore important planning details

Information about fire stations across the jurisdictional area of a reservation is an important aspect of community planning, public safety, and situational awareness for various kinds of emergency and non-emergency needs of communities. The Cherokee Nation has made significant investments in the community fire departments across the CN reservation. There is an ArcGIS layer on the CN's ArcGIS Server with point locations for over 300 fire stations, including some in communities just off the reservation but where there are likely mutual aid arrangements in place.

In OSM, there are point locations (nodes) and polygon features for buildings where there is an amenity=fire_station tag. In Wikidata, there are many instances of fire station. The CN Fire Departments layer has a schema that includes interesting details like the number of apparatus and personnel, many of which do not have data.

We need to track down whether anyone is doing work on this schema in the commons and explore any relationships to more formal documentation standards that might exist. Ideally, we want spatial location and representations in OSM linked to/from corresponding Wikidata entities. The OSM schema should be as fleshed out as possible within the expected tag structure there, and the Wikidata entities will likely have deeper level details that can be accommodated in its more robust set of properties. I'd also like to explore the linking model, particularly as it relates to funding support to a municipal entity on reservation by a Tribal Government. I also want to follow up further on the CN Government's use of these kinds of data and what they need or would like to have in place for planning purposes.

Once we work out the schema dynamics, it would be valuable to leverage the CN's dataset, that looks fairly comprehensive, to improve on what appears to be lacking in both OSM and Wikidata, but we need to work out the licensing on CN Government data. I anticipate that we can do work to at least stub out most fire station facilities and operators on the CN reservation and set things up in a way that this could serve as a place for community contributions. In addition to the basic facts recorded in Wikidata/OSM, there are Wikipedia articles dedicated to some fire stations around the world, particularly those with historic significance.

Work out which tribes have Wikidata items and fill in blanks

We can focus somewhat on federally recognized Tribes using the federally recognized Tribes in the US classifier. There should be overall alignment with the BIA list, but I also need to track down the Federal Register notices that serve as an official reference point on this recognition. Beyond U.S. recognition, there is State-level recognition and a number of other Tribes that are still struggling through this process.

My overall focus here is on Tribal governments as they are operating today. There might be some debate on how best to organize the data for Tribes, and there is some variability today with many items pointing to things like "ethnic group" as a classifier. However, we need to have some kind of persistent, resolvable identifier as a rallying point for all the other data we want to develop, some of which are already in existence but not linked to some central concept.

Explore adding Tribal Government political boundaries to OSM

A while ago, I created Wikidata items for the 15 Cherokee Nation Tribal Council districts. 13 of these are on the Cherokee Nation Reservation, and the CN Government maintains a geospatial service with the boundaries delineated. It would be nice to get these into the public domain on OSM and available for broader use and referral. I imagine the same is true for other Tribes who have organized in similar ways. The appropriate classification for these as relations would be boundary=political, but we'll have to look further at the schema to determine how best to associate them with the Tribal Government.

Discover existing Tribal reservation boundaries in OSM and link with Wikidata

There are some Tribal reservation boundaries in OSM like Cherokee Nation and Choctaw Nation, but there are many missing. These seem to be labeled as boundary=aboriginal_lands. Some of them are fairly nicely done, including language support such as name:chr and the Cherokee typeset. These should all be in place and appropriately linked to Wikidata items and Wikipedia pages.

We should develop a good relationship between rich linked data in Wikidata, explicit geospatial data in OSM, and visual derivatives such as locator images in Wikimedia commons. It is currently impossible to search for all OSM boundary=aboriginal_lands, even within a U.S. State, using purely geospatial methods because the areas are simply too large. This is a limitation we can readily overcome with linked data, of course, but linkages have to be developed. As I look at this issue, I need to be thinking about the tag schema in OSM toward what linked data we want to transform from of Wikidata to support increased usability in the OSM context.