When you move to Ireland you will see a rich variety of hedgerows and stone walls, spread out like a lattice across the country. In the east the fertile lands taken by the conquest of Cromwell still today has the geometric regularity, whereas the internal displacement of people to the West has smaller, stone clearance based walls and field build up from seaweed as sharecroppers and crofters did their best with a limestone environment.

Like you explain here, much of this remains unmapped. But you might be very interested in how the mappers of Kilkenny and Wexford are adding field names to the map, (yes each field had a non-unique name sometimes describing an event that happened there, the owners, the flora, or the relative position to another field).

Dear ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️‍🌈

Thanks for doing all that work, right now you are involved in every layer of OSM organisation and without free communicators like yourself lots of people wouldn’t know what is going on.

If at all I can help the Ireland possibility let me know. It may have been decided against already due to the charities regulations here.

Also, next month, don’t forget to mention the SC extract you assisted me with!

@westernorst, that’s probably true as a causal factor, but then the usage in Ireland falls off regardless of the improvements(!), and I am trying to make that the focus of the conclusion. It definitely has become easier to use and thanks for doing that.

I think you make an excellent point about addresses, especially with regard to facilitating a low bar of entry and getting new users to contribute their personal knowledge to start populating gaps on the map.

Well done on reaching a benchmark. A great way to make an impact is to add all the buildings bear you, using satellite imagery, then go for a walk with StreetComplete or make a little fieldpapers project and populate the whole block with all of its addresses.

In regards to addresses generally lets call out some facts, until the last 8 years a large number of the original community had a real bias against even adding buildings, which is a hugely self defeating view, but is eroding gradually. My tip (challenge) to you is first add the entire built environment of your area, then add all the addresses, including number ranges for buildings tagged as “residential” or “apartment”.

@westnordost Thank you for you comments here today - I was thrilled to see you enjoyed the analysis. Back when you launched the app I was on the side of the argument that we need to change the hyper-local obsessions of mappers, and facilitate mappers who move around a bit and opportunistically can verify ground truth. Let’s face it, desktop mapping is fine but not the only way to do it.

The iOS point is one that several people in the community in Ireland will regularly raise. I don’t know about the commercial prospect of the app, but if you needed funding I would suggest osmf is asked about it. I do realise that there would be ongoing technical curation of it, much larger than you presently have to do.

Your stats for “Ireland” only show the Republic of Ireland. Our community on this island is unified into one, the only differences we have are slightly variant road signs, but we all know one another’s :). But seriously, Ireland is an osmf chapter encompassing the whole island.

It is awesome to see the growth in usage. I bet Covid-19 did that. I will do another post looking at the time-stamps on the edits and seeing if our trend for Ireland was upwards since last March when these lockdowns started.

Although I don’t think it arises in this case the principle of “latest is greatest” is a good one to adopt when copying GPS traces. You can’t ultimately rely on some GPS data, so I also use Mapillary, since the GPS on those are somewhat superior to what I see on the “early days” GPS traces laying around.

It is good that you did this. Navigators often go into a spin when a locations differ from the route data, you have ensured that the osm based ones will not, at least not in this location.

Hiya There are a few ways to do courtyards and multipolygons. I can show you that if you haven’t cracked it. DeBigC

Dónal this is a brilliant post and well done, well written and thanks for specifying lessons.

My main take-away from this are that I have heard in the established mapping community from contributors who have dashcams and don’t have the time to hack at them to make them mapillary friendly. This should be read by all them, and you could make a video about how you did it step by step.

On the Wild Atlantic Way there are still gaps at Kinsale, where the way officially ends/begins depending on whether you are a clockwise revolutionary, or a member of the chartered royal society of anti-clockwisers.

Thank you for that post, it is good to hear that StreetComplete is a gateway for you entering the wider world of desktop contribution.

Still today many towns in Europe still lack important details about their ways and the buildings in particular. Some of the original contributors had both a logic and a bias against buildings, which is very limiting if you want OSM to be a fully populated relational database of everything from history to architecture. OSM is much more, and will be much more than simply a navigation source. When the buildings are mapped out with a decent level of accuracy and consistency StreetComplete becomes a hungry beast, so I recommend you map all the building outlines and wait about a week, and walk to that place.

Anyway, good luck to you and keep on contributing ;)

Sono d’accordo con te. Sto mappando gli edifici nel nord di Dublino, ovunque siano scomparsi. Trovo che quando qualcuno ha messo l’edificio di base = yes tag StreetComplete è un ottimo strumento per blitz quelli e raccogliere 3-4 altri livelli di informazioni inclusi gli indirizzi.

Hi Are you based in Ireland at the moment? DeBigC

Geoffrey You have my support. Im in contact with some Sudanese doctors working overseas. The northern Sudan, not South Sudan. They asked me to provide a few lessons on mapping, which I am doing.

There is no clear mapping objective, beyond the individual interests. Sudan’s political climate shows it to be difficult to adopt open philosophies that would drive open participation

Having done serious amounts of work in Africa it is evident that Sudan has a lot of missing placenames which could be fixed through out of copyright placename harvesting. This would be the best starting point, rather than diving into an emergency or a health appeal, as this will mean local people see and find their town/city.

Lets talk further.

Ciaran

You had one helluva month Rory! Anyway, to give you full credit you made several useful contributions to #osmIRL_buildings and helped your birth country’s mapping effort.

It is nice to see more chapters coming into effect, when normality eventually returns to this planet and we can meet face to face chapters are the way to go in terms of organizing meetings. I assume everyone is going to be sick of zooms and hangouts soon :)

@VictorIE I absolutely agree - I think that people from deprived neighbourhoods will not have the same opportunities, but my diary post wasn’t about that. I think there is a role for organisations that have access to such communities to ask experienced mappers to visit them. The fewer level 3 tags is also related to the low numbers of POI opportunities. I agree with you, poorer areas can be bland and devoid of street furniture, planting and infrastructure - creating the POI opportunity, and given what we know about tags those are more likely to be the item that attracts tagging depth.

@fpagenk I didn’t brushoff anything off actually, I went to extra lengths to count and write about things within the confines of a diary post - and I gave the tagging depth finding good coverage of the observed differences between deprived and affluent areas. By the way it is strange for you to suggest that I can compare things mapped against things that might exist in greater density when the map of Dublin is generally incomplete. I disagree with you about deprived areas drawing in more nodes due to density, the opposite is true since oftentimes public housing in Ireland is multi-level apartment based, which in most cases isn’t subdivided and mapped as a single building=residential. I wish you posted more because you don’t actually explain what you mean about this being insufficient proof/disproof. It almost sounds like you didn’t like that I did this diary.

@Smef09 I understand, there are many reasons why a mapper will not map what’s right in front of them, and I also think these maxims may have been things to do in the past, but as the map fills up more they become less relevant. I know mappers whose reach is vast within Ireland. You are right, trees are an item that can be vandalised, and oftentimes that is a feature of deprived neighbourhoods. Do you only map trees?

@FredrikC That maxim cannot possibly contain the motivations of every mapper who has mapped Dublin. People move around the city of Dublin everyday, they have several areas that they will know just as well as what is immediately around them.

The problem with the “findings” of the blogger were that once we examine at the volume of contributed geometry we found the deprived areas doing significantly better - see the results of the extracts above. The only thing there is less of in the deprived areas is tagging depth, which like your point may require opportunity, knowledge, community support and I would agree that there is likely to be a big gap there.

Having said all this, there are huge gaps all over Dublin, all sorts of areas are not mapped out to completion with landuses and buildings. We simply don’t have enough people mapping, or at least not enough yet to be able to make solid pronouncements like that blog.

Hi Harry - you already have some good comments there but a couple of things that struck me whilst reading this are as follows, in no particular order:

1. Other than tagging conventions and instructions there aren’t rules on what mappers should do, and there is no order set down anywhere of things that should be done first. Even experienced mappers in Ireland can’t agree on logical ways to go about mapping a town, and invariably will do different approaches of deep-dive or completeness, or things in between. We never would agree these things either. It should be a test of our creativity to work out how to complete landuses when we only have buildings, or to find missing highways when we only have landuses, and so on….

2. Individual mappers may map all that’s around where they presently live, or may at times map several places where they have an emotional attachment. I often hear the “map around me” model, but I reckon if a mapper is the second person and doesn’t have experience of adding extra detail they displace their mapping to elsewhere. Reason I raise this is that we (online, SOTM talks, Meetups) make a lot of assumptions about a cloud of detail containing a mapper’s home place and it isn’t always true in every case, neither is it as true as I think you said.

3. Related to the second, if mappers provide more detail on places near/dear to them then the job of chapters and communities is to try to join these detail gulfs up, and to take longer term approaches with community tasks that allow there be consistency.

4. The only time I ever feel frustration akin to yours is when I discover connected node pile ups. I found one with a historic boundary, a gate, a vertix on a barrier wall, a pathway all co-inciding and done by experienced mappers each leaving it for someone else to resolve, and not helped by the fact that each are taking a different priority.

5. Myself I feel that residential buildings are important, and I don’t understand why if we map service points to increase map use we don’t also think about delivery points as a map-use driver.

Anyway those were a bit random. I hope you support The Arsenal, with that being your near/dear place :P

I appreciate all you have on this map so far ar Your uMap could be more complete if you can negotiate release of the data collected in Meath and Westmeath Councils.

Well done @b-unicycling. It was nice to help you, and I love where you have gone with it.

Very interesting, you can see the bias of coastal places for golf and the specificity of Ireland’s largest sporting activity.

@Heather Leson Nice work parsing it out. I’m looking at this and it needs a lot more filtering. The tags arent sufficient, we need some extra ones like Governance, Branding, End-user X, and so on and that was before I got down to about 20 on the first tab.

@apm-wa I will think about it because I have zero time in the next 72 hours, happy if someone jumps ahead of me!