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I understand that a company which has invested in these maps wants a ROI, but really, the polygons should be in the public domain and improved on accuracy. I can imagine a lot of people would be interested to work on this.

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Yes. Perhaps the next major Wikipedia - like project :-)

I once thought of such a project - a dynamic map of borders and battles/army movements through history. Perhaps crowdsourced ala Wikimapia/OpenStreetMap. But never tried to work on making this project reality. Could have even scientific value, but also high potential for quarells, and need to somehow represent uncertainty, probably.

An approach similar to Wikidata could be taken. "According yo Israel, the border changed like this". I.e. not a database of objective facts, but of statements.

It isn't moving very fast, but OpenHistoricalMap is an existing thing:

http://www.openhistoricalmap.org/

It is based on the OpenStreetMap tech stack.

I made https://histori.city to be a wikipedia + maps mashup. the novel feature was adding a time range control so you can navigate the map in both space and across time.

it's a work in progress, currently has a few tens of thousands of battles and city-foundings throughout history. it would be nice to remove google dependency and use OSM.

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