This is awesome, I love that osm is, for the moment, the only place where everything is recorded. I also wouldn’t discount how capturing these features is a huge step forward in conserving them against destruction.

In terms of what caused you to see these needs to be said (apart from osm and a campaign passing through rural and urban Ireland mapping buildings #osmIRL_buildings) the background is two record breaking dry summers in 2020 and 2021, off which the ESRI and Bing imagery is based.

It has been separately reported by the Irish Times that the NMS is dealing with a large number of reports, including on the ground visual sightings that might be archaeologically significant. Very sudden drying out of soil shifts things around, some of which you and others now see.

Well done on this. I hope you keep finding things.

Super work, but in the rest of the country the same lag would be more significant. Its good that you discovered 100 extra buildings, but all the same look at how many were added after the task was conplete with the 2017 imagery, and you see them being added throughout that time. The tagging changes are just as important as the location of a building too, as they give a much richer consequent picture of landuse.

Well done, long live the private task because it makes for consistency.

I’m glad that our efforts to engage caused the server to be rebooted and the issues cleared up.

I think that while fieldpapers is not an editor as such, mappers need to have a diversity of such tools in place to encourage craft-mappers. I used fieldpapers several times in the #MapLesotho with groups of 12 mappers who walked all over a village called Lencer’s Gap outside the capital city in 2016.

The benefits of the tool are that it allows a group of surveyors to split up and cover ground and meet in the middle somewhere when finished. The group agreed a shorthand before going out, H=house, S=shed, Sh=shop, and L1 for a one story building etc… that shorthand is flexible which is a positive because it allows those who don’t know the tagging schema to participate.

I am adding my voice in a request to the osmf to rescue this tool from the difficulties that it experienced in the last few years that mean it was down more often than available.

I wouldn’t deign to say this applies everywhere but the thought some of us in Ireland have had is that we have passed some critical mass point in the developed countries for people who are going to make accounts and start editing.

We have a welcome tool set up detecting our new mappers for around a year now, and I think 2022 saw 432 new signups on our island, which is basically one per day and two at weekends. This sounds great but a big amount of these are “one-node adders”, usually their own business. Others would be just checking it out and realising they couldn’t sustain interest once they add a few features. Some of the other chapters and countries are set up on this and it might be useful to draw comparisons. Nigeria for example had 500 signups in two months, and nothing for the rest of the year - which goes to show that promotional or event driven effort makes this rise and fall.

Interesting, well maybe look at it this way. In big organised pushes for mapping a particular theme like all roads or all buildings those mappers can say the area is mapped (in the strict context of doing their task). They aren’t wrong in that context, but of course more can be mapped.

Indeed every map is out of date, as would be the case with anything that tries to represent reality. If you accept that maps are representations then this isn’t a problem. There is no omnipresent force, or canonical reality possible in a map, however, electronic maps are miles more useful to end users, than paper ones. All the same we all work with 1-3 year old, often badly rectified Bing, Maxar and ESRI so, without loads of regular surveying and GPS capture this will always be a limitation somewhere.

Thanks for your diary post though.

First of all, what an awesome diary post. There are lots of educational take-aways in it from a point view of the locations, materials and information resources.

Of course #osmIRL_buldings will have missed new buildings, but if it has missed older buildings it is due to mistakes by the mappers or poor clarity.

As regards the NIAH source thank heavens someone has the engagement to challenge the received mapping in it, which I know isnt wrong, but may not be detailed or accurate as you say.

Great diary post AKDemon!

You invited me specifically to say what was going on with buildings as we found them. First of all there were buildings mapped, but they had the following kind of issues (I don’t think these issues are unique to Bangor): * Overall we found the town centre missed about 50% of its buildings while the whole area and surrounds probably had 10% of its buildings (these are estimates of course)

• We could find no big local mapper in our inspection of the changesets. The largest two we found seem to be French. The third biggest a non-local. In my opinion when a town hasn’t got a local big mapper it suffers from not having someone who irons out inconsistencies between other mappers, and over time. We left lots of changeset comments to wake up the extant larger contributors and encourage them start mapping around Bangor again

• The town has a series of contour differences, it seems like it is in on two hills, with two long valleys. This made for curved streets, and with the commercial areas the buildings follow these curves and are built irregularly. This threw confusion into the mix, and so mappers attempting buildings just drew “blob” shapes

• inexperienced mappers mapped buildings by their roof location, instead of where they arise from the ground. We found a lot of this on at this location and fixed it

• Once the buildings were tidied up it was easier to fix issues with the landuses, especially as they sliced through read gardens or back yards of shops.

We left an email with the local University, which has a Geography Department (forever optimists). We suggested engagement with OSMUK.

I think this is doing a huge service to the state, and that you discovered it while adding buildings to OpenStreetMap is yet another example of how much the project contributes to heritage.

This is amazing work, in my GIS days I had a project looking at this in a place called Blanchardstown, in Ireland. Many of the same features of walkways that you describe prevailed there. Certainly there would be grafitti, and some of them were not lit well enough to be safe to use at night. The temptation is for signs to get covered or taken down, as “locals only” starts to be the expectations.

While researching this area I came across an Urban Planner in Ontario Canada (Todd Randall) who imposed some mathematics into understanding the value of permeability. In his papers he stated that the ratio between a direct route and an indirect route had an influence on walkability, and could be a huge determinant on modal choice. We applied this thinking directly to scenarios in our project and came up with natty finding like this, where there was a scenario to re-open an alleyway that skirts around a school campus.

Anyway keep this up, some communities react to suburban crime by seeking legal extinguishments of these rights of way. The evidence usually missing from those conversations are the value of keeping these ways open.

1. Randall and Baetz article

2. Some projects slides from myself and a colleague

Awesome idea! I had heard of such places, but I was sure we learned in school that they were remnants of old structures which didn’t have any available heritage back story, so mythology made up the gap for locals.

Our primary teacher once did this as our Irish reading, and there was an animated book we had in school. The story seemed to be like Romeo and Juliet, or at least repeat the motif of wrong love and outcast lovers, not supposed to be together and staying ahead of the jealousy revenge and resting hither and thither… but ending in tragedy.

Thanks for using the original spelling here #Diarmuid&Grainne

Mappers don’t talk about their Geographic connections as much as they should. I went around the world mapping every place I lived, realising that before age 30 I travelled a lot! I love Luxembourg City, though I was only ever in the centre twice by night and it struck me as a good spot for nightlife.

In Ireland there is another building boom going on because there are huge differences in the present and previous Bings. When we had Maxar, (all too briefly) there was even more evidence of it. I hope that another Bing comes soon, because some new buildings, ways and landuse developments still don’t show on the imagery most of us use. Also, somebody should engage on a quality basis with ESRI about the way they stitch their tiles together, and the weird way they dont make the datelines very clear for each tile.

I agree with your main point, that OpenStreetMap has a superior potential for update cycles, with many more eyes on the records of disused and abandoned buildings.

However, this entire area is fraught with difficulties. There are more campaigner motives than citizen science motives in the #Derelict projects, I even have evidence on my twitter feed that shows expressed skepticism about measuring the extent of the problem over the desire to get shouting at politicians on twitter. There is a populist slogan “we all know where they are”, which will make its way into the conversation pretty quick when someone suggests adding them to a map.

Other problems of definition exist, like for example the absolute lack of clarity about what people mean by derelict, V vacant V disused, and the further issue that it is impossible to know the full facts without some local knowledge.

OpenStreetMap is not set up philosophically to deal with populism, and mappers should tread carefully in the above environment.

@SimonPoole “Definitely you shouldn’t be basing your mapping on how a specific map rendering looks.” That’s not at all what I am doing. I am mapping based on the confluence of contradictory pieces of information, old businesses/services that are gone or renamed where every new POI placed in the same location is placed there without review of what is also there.

I don’t mean to hijack your thread but on the first part, what is it that makes so many of the useful apps collapse? This was one of my favourites and isn’t maintained anymore. Maps.me is turning to mulch too, and StreetComplete, while fun will only ever be android.

I don’t like POIs because sometimes you have POI measles, which is when a building changes use, and nobody takes responsibility for cleaning up the item that should be retired. I prefer to place businesses into the available building tags. I even convert the POI measles into building tags. I think we should regard POIs as a temporary thing, with the business details placed into the building where it belongs.

@Nick, thanks indeed for that feedback. The trick (for me) is terracing buildings, you get loads of nodes in one step. I won’t be doing another 200 K in a short period though :)

There are 2 or 3 individuals, each with a slightly different focus, mapping, tagging species. This tends to be street trees and not the vast swathes of trees out in Ireland’s rural places, national parks and mountains.

Firstly, a big and warm well done to everyone who went on the journey you describe. I think maybe you want to get to the anomalies and find the missing schools. This would deserve formal communication to your Government, since this is as far as remote citizen science can go, and maybe they have the original data, or they have a way of funding you to go and capture the missing ones.

Secondly, I have a suggestion. I hope you like it. Now in the advent of the world sharing 17 Sustainable development goals I want to bring up something that is a big strategic issue for The Philippines - deforestation. It is estimated that your country has lost 3% of its tree cover in 18 years. That’s easy to remember, and I read that here. If you guys started a mapping project for trees and forests it would definitely have potential for getting lots of people involved, including other schools.

Why would you do this?

1. Trees are carbon reducers, and your islands need these as it develops to keep to its targets. This is in two of the Sustainable Development Goals.

2. Trees support biodiversity, and this is its own separate goal within the international goals. Trees ensure that species, especially rare and unique ones, are protected away from human behaviours.

3. Human health, - trees help to keep air, water and land free of pollutants that can harm humans.

Well, I hope you discuss this, and I hope you choose it. Lots of OSM people are interested in this topic, and it would connect you to them, their help, their expertise. Good luck, whatever you choose to do mapping will help.

Firstly, a big and warm well done to everyone who went on the journey you describe. I think maybe you want to get to the anomalies and find the missing schools and this would deserve formal communication to your Government, since this is as far as remote citizen science can go.

Secondly, I have a suggestion. I hope you like it. Now in the advent of the world sharing 17 Sustainable development goals I want to bring up something that is a big strategic issue for The Philippines - deforestation.

It is estimated that your country has lost 3% of its tree cover in 18 years. That’s easy to remember, and I read that here.

If you guys started a mapping project for trees and forests it would definitely have potential for getting lots of people involved, including other schools.

Why would you do this? 1. Trees are carbon reducers, and your islands need these as it develops to keep to its targets 2. Trees support biodiversity, and this is its own separate goal within the international goals. Trees ensure that species, especially rare and unique ones, are protected away from human behaviours 3. Human health, trees help to keep air, water and land free of pollutants that can harm humans.

Well I hope you discuss this, and I hope you choose it. Lots of OSM people are interested in this topic, and it would connect you to them, their help, their expertise.

Have you looked at the GPS outputs of all your friends on somewhere low, flat and with a lot of clear sky? There is a lot of tinkering around you should do for group GPS projects, assuming you want to do it that way.

Hi There- Hope you don’t mind a post several years late. Sorry for the years late reply :)

What should you map? We have given more thought to Tourism, what with the routes mostly well done around the country, and with your great work on visitor amenities, the next thing they want to know is places to stay, and amenities. Since Covid has now disrupted which businesses are still open this is the right time to start that. To do that it helps to add the buildings in each town. Look at how we are doing that using a co-ordinated task, this aims to populate the wild atlantic way: https://tasks.openstreetmap.ie/project/84

Let me know if there is anything I can assist with.

Gemerally there are two good things to do - reach out to local people already mapping and organise a party to train new mappers (all said above) > https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?shiftee