Hi folks.
I noticed that the boundaries of Northern Ireland’s 11 ‘super-councils’ were not mapped on OSM.
This seemed a pretty big omission, as these are the local government divisions used in NI since 2015 (see Local councils in Northern Ireland | nidirect ). These are the people who empty your bins
It was a fairly painless process that took me 3 or 4 days.
As I expect many of you know, nearly all boundaries on the island of Ireland use the historical townlands (Townland - Wikipedia) as the ultimate building block, and the Super-Councils are no expection. OSM already has pretty much all the townland boundaries already mapped, so this makes it fairly straightforward to create a new releation for a ‘super-council’, and add it to the various constituent ways that are already tagged with townland boundaries.
I wonder if any other mappers would be interested in mapping the remaining 10 super-councils?
However this legislation says the boundaries are those defined in “MAPS REFERRED TO IN THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT (BOUNDARIES) ORDER (NORTHERN IRELAND) 2012” and signed and sealed with reference to this Order and deposited at the office of the Department of the Environment at Goodwood House, 44-58 May Street, Belfast, BT1 4NN"
Obviously that not a very convenient reference source
As a more practical reference source, the supercouncils themselves usually have maps on their own websites, however these are of raster maps and can be a bit ambiguous on detail.
As a more hi-res source I took a peek at OSNI’s https://maps.spatialni.gov.uk/ which has layers showing townland boundaries and ‘Local Government Districts 2012’ (the latter being the 11 ‘super councils’). (I trust this is permissable, as I was not copying the shape files or anything like that, just using it to confirm which pre-existing ways and townland boundaries (that are already drawn on OSM) corresponded to which supercouncil? - in other words, just as an aid to labelling)
I opted to tag the supercouncil boundary relation as ‘boundary=administrative’ and ‘admin_level=6’.
This puts it on a par with local government authorities (country or city councils) in the rest of the UK, which is more or less the correct equivalent (albeit the demarcation of powers between NI local councils & Stormont isn’t quite the same as in other parts of the UK)
We happy with that?
(Note: in most renderers, this has the effect of it being labelled as a ‘County Boundary’. As we know, in Northern Ireland, the long-suffering ‘traditional counties’ have not served any official administrative function for many decades, despite being by far the most commonly used geographical devision for the man-in-the-street… These traditional counties are currently tagged as ‘admin_level=6’ but have ‘boundary=historic’ . I guess this is fair enough?)
other small quirks (which will be applicable to several of the other super-councils too):
a fair proportion of Newry, Mourne & Down District Council’s boundary is the international border between RoI & UK. I just used this as it stood. (I noticed it didn’t always 100% match where OSNI thinks the border is, but I didn’t fiddle with it )
sea boundaries: generally the supercouncil boundaries seem to stop at the shoreline (i.e. the don’t extend out into UK territorial waters. I therefore usually just tagged the ‘coastline’ ways with the super-council boundary.
The only exception to this was inside Strangford Lough, where I had to draw a new way to demarcate between Newry, Mourne & Down supercouncil and the Ards one.
i think we have always assumed that this is NOT a permissible source for OpenStreetMap which is why the boundaries have not been created, but I have not kept up-to-date with this.
In the past various people have had meetings with OSNI in the past. Various issues with persuading Land and Property Services as a whole to release open data were discussed at the OpenDataCamp held in Belfast back in 2017. Looking at various sites the actual licence under which the data are available is unclear: the UK Open Government Licence or the LPS version of the the OGL. Earlier versions of the LPS OGL were unsuitable.
One approximation can be made using the Food Hygiene Open Data as these have the local authority coded for each entry. I did this such a long time ago, I can’t recall where I put it.
Members of the OSM Ireland community seem to use Telegram these days, so you may get more current information via that channel.
Hmm … well, as I said, I wasn’t copying data from the OSNI: just using it to double check a few of the squigglier bits from the councils’ own maps. In 99% of cases, the Super Council boundaries are just following existing townland boundaries, which are all in OSM already and pre-date the creation of the OSNI by centuries, generally following field boundaries (hedges, rivers, tracks…) that are hundreds of years old and can clearly be seen on satellite imagery.
My recollection is that that’s an anti-spam measure, but my memory may be incorrect there (I’m an occasional visitor only, both to the Telegram channel and the island).
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