Best way to model historical point data in QGIS?
Hi everyone,
I’m working with historical geospatial data and I’m trying to choose the cleanest data model before building the map.
Example: nuclear power plants in Europe across different periods, such as 1970, 1980, 1990, etc. Some plants are built, some become active, some are shut down, and some attributes may change over time, such as operational status or installed capacity.
What would you recommend as the best structure in QGIS?
Option A: one feature per plant, with fields like opened_year, closed_year, status, capacity_mw.
Option B: one feature per plant per time interval, with fields like period_start, period_end, status, capacity_mw.
Option C: separate layers for each decade, such as plants_1970, plants_1980, plants_1990.
My goal is to make the data usable both for static historical maps and possibly for a temporal/interactive map later. I’d like to avoid a structure that works for a quick map but becomes hard to maintain as the project grows.
How would you model this kind of historical point data?