Sunday 25 October 2015

Urban Areas: a meditation on why simple global geographical datasets are so poor

Puerto-Vallarta
Puerto Vallarta, an aerial view of an urban area missing many roads on OpenStreetMap.
The area in the middle distance away from the sea was particularly lacking.
Fortunately the centre of the hurricane didn't pass over this area.
Source: Wikimedia Commons, (c) CC-BY-SA


The other night, as Hurricane 'Patricia' bore down on the Pacific coast of Mexico, I had a twitter conversation with Bill Morris and others regarding how well mapped Puerto Vallarta was on OpenStreetMap. (BTW: I'm sure it's much better mapped now).
Of course, OSM is about fixing things, so I carried out the conversation in between adding around a hundred streets to the city. However the really interesting question was this one:

Whilst at breakfast I thought a little more about this. I decided it ought to be possible to do something fairly simple with data which already exists.

Friday 16 October 2015

Irish Vice Counties : the creation of a specific dataset on OpenStreetMap

I've been meaning to write about OpenStreetMap Ireland's townland mapping project for some time.

It's a wonderful example of how historical maps are of significant value in creating really useful data on OpenStreetMap which is just as relevant as it today as was in the past.

The immediate reason for writing about them is that I have been creating vice county boundaries for Ireland. In doing so I have not just been using the data, but the fantastic range of resources made available through the activities of the townlands project.

Irish vice counties ex osm multicolour
The Vice Counties of Ireland
My first complete draft of the boundaries on OpenStreetMap