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amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️‍⚧️'s Diary

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Irish Traditional Boundaries

Posted by amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️‍⚧️ on 16 August 2012 in English. Last updated on 14 December 2015.

We in the OpenStreetMap Ireland community are trying to add some of Ireland’s smallest administrative units, townlands, aswell as other historically relevant boundaries like baronies and civil parishes.

I’ve made a site showing Irish Traditional Townland’s which shows the details of each townland and barony and civil parish in the country. We still have a lot to do. We focussed on the townlands, baronies and civil parishes of Co. Carlow first.

I also added a townland mapping progress, which shows how much we have mapped of each area. I also added some county by county data completeness checks, showing gaps and overlaps.

So, once again I'm trying to track down old maps of Ireland from the 19th centuary. They are still relevant to mapping in Ireland and would be a great benefit to OSM in Ireland.

The British Library has copies (You can see if you search their catalog for "[Townland Survey of the County of] Dublin. Surveyed in 1836-37. Corrected to 1843. Scale, six inches to one statute mile." ). I'm contacting them to find out about getting copies, prices, copyright status etc.

Has anyone talked to the British Library before about OSM? Has anyone traced anything from some maps that came from the British Library? Are they aware of OSM?

Where can I get the mapnik style file for the noname map?

I'm making a custom Irish language map (i.e. from "name:ga"), and I would like to make a noname map for name:ga, i.e. highlight all roads that don't have a name:ga tag. However I can't find out how to make a noname map anywhere. I've already got a mapnik rendering set up making a normal name:ga map, so that's fine.

I recently discovered the landuse=grass tag (osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Misc._urban_open_space) and I have started applying it to local areas around me, based on local knowledge.

I'm in two minds about this tag though. I think we should map these little grassy areas in these urban areas. I think anything landuse=grass means that people can walk over it, but their shoes might get a big muddy. In otherwords it's a step below highway=track. In fact most of the landuse=grass areas I've been mapping have had a highway=track way going through them. A area tagged with landuse=grass could be used for routing. It also makes the map look nicer and more accurate.

My only complaint is with the name. I don't like it. Should we tag the whole serengetti with landuse=grass? I don't like bringing in localized terms for things (eg landuse=village_green). I think tags should be understandable to what's on the ground ("Oh this bit of ground is used as a grassy area"). This makes mapping easier, since you don't have to have the Map Features page open.

Location: Shankill, Shankill-Rathmichael DED 1986, Shankill, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, County Dublin, Leinster, D18 XE76, Ireland

Well after a night on the town I thought I'd had enough to drink, so I ambled towards the night bus service (in Dublin it's called Nitelink). Luckily I was not drunk enough to forget about mapping, so I turned on my GPS (a wonderful little NaviGPS BGT-31) and fell asleep on the bus. Luckily I woke up before my stop and was able to get home. Hence I've added most of Dublin's Nitelink 7N service to OSM.

osm.org/browse/relation/17743

See also:
* osm.org/user/rorym/diary/4088
* osm.org/user/rorym/diary/2071

Location: North City ED, Dublin, County Dublin, Leinster, Ireland

I've discovered relations and am using them to map some of the public bus routes in my city, Dublin, Ireland.

I'm mapping them like this:
* Bus stops are nodes, with highway=bus_stop and operator="Dublin Bus".
* The relations are type=route route=bus ref=$BUSNUMBER operator="Dublin Bus"
* I'm then adding the bus stop nodes to the relation. Sometimes I make them have the 'stop' role, but I think it should be obvious when a node is a member of a bus route and it's a highway=bus_stop it should be obvious. :)
* I'm adding the ways. No need to mark them with a certain role. If a bus route splits, (because of oneway restrictions), I'm just adding them. It should be obvious when this happens (the route splits in 2 along two opposite oneway streets, then meets up later).

Any thoughts? It might be fun later to figure out how to get mapnik to render these as a separate later.

Location: North City Ward 1986, Dublin, County Dublin, Leinster, Ireland

Last weekend I walked around Killiney Hill Park. I brought my new NaviGPS BGT-31 and recorded some traces. I was then able to add the footpaths to the park. This is my first real contribution to OpenStreetMap because no-one had made traces there before and you can't see the paths from the aerial maps.

Location: Scalpwilliam, Dalkey Hill DED 1986, Killiney, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, County Dublin, Leinster, Ireland

I've finally figured out how to get my NaviGPS BGT-31 working and saving data. It's great! I can get a decent signal while it's in my pocket or in the top pocket of my bag. That should make it easier to record lots and lots of tracks. I've ordered a 1GB membory card. Although the inbuilt memory can store 20,000 points, it'll only really store 8,100 points as a 'trace', that you can download. That's about 2 hours mapping.

Anyways after a bit of fiddlying to clean up the GPX trace in JOSM () I've uploaded my first trace (). :D Yay! I can see what's addictive about mapping!

I love when you are looking around the far flung corners of the globe that you've traveled too and you see that there are high resolution Yahoo Images of the area. This means you can start tracing and getting some basic road layout of an area done.

I recently discovered that Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania (pop 2.5million) is almost completly unmapped but has high resolution Yahoo imagary available. :) Time to start tracing out some road networks!

Location: Morocco, Kinondoni, Kinondoni Municipal, Dar es-Salaam, Coastal Zone, 14110, Tanzania