OpenStreetMap
On the 23rd September 2019, OSM Ireland formally signed the agreement with the OSM Foundation and official became an official chapter. You can read more about the event here
I’d like to thank all the people who have worked so hard over the past few years in putting together the necessary paperwork and jumping the many hurdles in setting up the OSM Ireland local chapter. I wish it all the best in the future and hope I can contribute in making it a roaring success!
This past few months I have been noticing the erection of road name signs in the South of Fermanagh, which is great progress if you ignore the outrageous costs involved!
So I decided to ask my Council (Fermanagh and Omagh District Council or FODC for short) if they would consider allowing me access to the list of Roadnames so I could try and improve them on OSM. Needless to say I was shocked and stunned by their offer to release the data under an Open Licence for everyone to use!!
Although this is only the first phase of the project working along A and B class roads in Fermanagh, I am assured that once the next phase is complete they will publish these as well.
I would like to thanks SK53 for his work on converting the Irish grid co-ordinates and displaying the sign data on uMap. You can see his map here.
Last week while at a meeting we got an update on the First Responders operating in the area.
The First Responders are a group of local people who are trained on the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) and are on 24-hour call. They make use of a mobile AED which they pass between themselves depending who is “on call”.
According to the report the quickest turn-around was just two and a half minutes, however, the ambulance service took 20 minutes to respond. Unfortunately, ambulance response times are between 20-30mins and sometimes more in this area. Access to essential public and private services is a serious disadvantage of living / working in a rural community.
The family in question said they’d barely put down the phone! In my eyes this is proof the project is working and shows the importance of a service like this.
Following the death of a man in Maguiresbridge the following week, there was questions asked on how this could have happened, given that there are AED devices located at the primary school and also in a cabinet outside the chemist shop in the village. The location of both devices was news to me. Being interested in the topic, I looked online for the location of static defibrillator cabinets in the area and found that there was quite a lot of inaccurate or non-existent information. Here are a few of my findings:
http://defibsni.com - This site has great potential, however the map is not working and any emails to the mapping@defibsni.com have not been answered.
http://www.heartsafe.org.uk/AED-Locations - Another website with great potential, but using Google Maps and absolutely no information on AED’s in County Fermanagh
So I decided to make a few phone calls and fire off a few emails. Basically I am trying to locate as many defibrillators in the county as possible and put them into the OSM database. I have created a uMap in order to view the data. Please see the following link - http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/defibrillator-locations-in-county-fermanagh_56527
The map is very much a work in progress and any help, feedback or suggestions would be gratefully received.
Unfortunately, my diary entry about two weeks ago regarding the release of townlands and other so called “Open Data” by the OSNI/LPS was premature. Over the weekend the datasets have been removed from ArcGIS.
Very disappointing news but at least it seems that they are “thinking” about the whole idea of Open Data. Hopefully it is a sign of things to come.
On the 22 September 2015, the Northern Ireland Ordinance Survey (OSNI) which is now part of the Land and Property Services (LPS) released the OSNI Largescale Boundaries - Townlands dataset for Northern Ireland under a UK Open Government Licence
This comes 15 days AFTER OpenStreetMap user Stephen_Co_Antrim completed Syunshin, the last townland to be mapped in Northern Ireland!
Many thanks to Stephen_Co_Antrim for completing the townlands in Northern Ireland. The last townland Syunshin was added to the database on Monday, 7 Sep 2015 at 6:13pm
Rory has recently moved his project to a new domain name ( http://www.townlands.ie/ ) and has invested a lot of time streamlining the code and adding features which mappers and non-mappers can make use of. Id like to thank Rory for his time and effort.
In true Open Source spirit, Rory has released the code to the community. The source code is on github: https://github.com/rory/osm-irish-townlands/ Should you wish to get involved, please request new features or report problems via github’s ‘issues’: https://github.com/rory/osm-irish-townlands/issues?state=open