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openhistorymap/cliwoc — historical sea lanes as HGTFS

A maritime HGTFS feed built from CLIWOC, the Climatological Database for the World's Oceans — ~287,000 dated ship-logbook positions, 1662–1855. It renders as animated sea lanes in the HGTFS viewer, alongside the railway feeds.

The feed (hgtfs/)

file rows
agency.txt 8 flag nations (NL, UK, ES, FR, SE, US, DE, DK)
routes.txt 8 one water route per flag (route_type = 1000)
stops.txt 14,656 1° grid nodes (sea-lane waypoints)
network_edges.txt 111,985 dated sea-lane segments
route_operators.txt, historical_sources.txt, events.txt, feed_info.txt operators, provenance, context

Model — grid-snapped sea lanes

  • A voyage is one contiguous run of CLIWOC's ID column (each ID is one voyage).
  • Every fix is snapped to a 1° grid cell, so waypoints shared between voyages merge into reusable nodes (this is the "sea-lanes" density view).
  • Consecutive distinct cells within a voyage become an edge, keyed by (cellA, cellB, flag) and dated to the earliest observed traversal — date_opened is a lower bound (open_by_<year>), the same HGTFS uncertainty model the rail feeds use.
  • Flag nationality (C1) → agency/operator; edges are coloured by flag.
  • Segments longer than 10° (logbook gaps / jumps) are dropped, not drawn.

Load it

<viewer-url>?repo=openhistorymap/cliwoc

It is also merged into the global feed at hgtfs/aggregate (?repo=hgtfs/aggregate).

Regenerate

The 160 MB source TSV is not committed. Download it, then rebuild:

wget https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/stvno/stvno.github.io/master/page/cliwoc/CLIWOC21.tsv
python3 build_cliwoc_hgtfs.py CLIWOC21.tsv     # writes hgtfs/ + hgtfs.zip  (stdlib only)

Tunables at the top of build_cliwoc_hgtfs.py: GRID_DEG (cell size), MAX_EDGE_DEG (max drawn segment).

Caveats

  • This is the coded (ICOADS/IMMA) CLIWOC variant: positions + flag, but no ship names or named ports, so nodes are grid coordinates, not harbours.
  • Coverage is dominated by Dutch, British and Spanish logs; it reflects what was digitised, not all historical traffic.
  • Edges are observed traversals, dated by first sighting — a lane's true first use predates the log.

Source & credit

CLIWOC — García-Herrera, Können, Wheeler, Prieto, Jones, Koek et al. (2005), https://cliwoc.org/. TSV mirror: stvno/stvno.github.io.

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Historical sea lanes as HGTFS — built from CLIWOC ship logbooks (1662-1855).

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