The OSM community in Ireland is engaged in another multi-year mapping project, to map all the buildings in Ireland.

By March 2022, there were over 2,000,000 buildings. Which caused someone to ask “What was the 2,000,000th building?”. So who added #2,000,000? 🥁 drumroll…

The 2,000,000th Building was added by Boggedy on 1st March 2022, and is in An Bhealtaine Íochtarach, Gort a’ Choirce, Co. Dhún na nGall! Technical OSM details: It’s way 1,036,394,489, added in changeset 117,996,721.

Here’s other milestones:

datetime	rank	changeset_id	changeset_url	osmtype	osmid	object_url
2018-01-08 10:31:43	500000	55260556	https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/55260556	way	551628233	https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/551628233
2020-02-13 23:54:27	1000000	80979131	https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/80979131	way	772271829	https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/772271829
2021-02-14 22:04:19	1500000	99268589	https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/99268589	way	907155474	https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/907155474
2022-03-01 22:14:16	2000000	117996721	https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/117996721	way	1036394489	https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1036394489

Installation

If you want to calculate this data yourself:

• Download the latest full OSM history file from Geofabrik for Ireland (ireland-and-northern-ireland-internal.osh.pbf currently 381 MB).
• Create a local PostgreSQL database.
• Install the latest version of osm-tag-csv-history (technically ≥ v0.5).
• Download the code from Github amandasaurus/osm-two-million-buildings-in-ireland
• Run ./calculate.sh. results.csv has the output.

The second 2,000,000th building

Observant people might notice a strange way the 2,000,000th building was calculated. Because shortly after we hit 2,000,000, someone removed a building tag from something, bringing us under two mill. Within a few hours, Boggedy had continued mapping and added more buidlings, including another bringing our total above 2,000,000 again.

The progress aobve & below 2,000,000 is visible in the two-million-track.csv which calculate.sh generates.

Notes

• “Ireland” here refers to the island of Ireland
• Only OSM way & relations are analyzed, not nodes
• Sometime OSM data is “redacted”, and removed from the history, so it’s techncially possible for someone to have added some others. The goal of this is for fun, nothing too serious.
  • In Sept 2012 changed it’s licence to the current ODbL. Some people didn’t agree to this change (or were uncontactable)
  • Copyright infringing edits are also redacted (because OSM doesn’t have permission to distribute that data)
• This code in the github is copyright 2022 ©, released under the Affero GNU GPL v3+, cf. LICENCE
• This contains data © OpenStreetMap, released under the ODbL licence.

See also

• This code is hosted on Github: amandasaurus/osm-two-million-buildings-in-ireland
• I posted this on:
  • en.osm.town mastodon/fediverse server
  • twitter
  • OSM Ireland Telegram