This started with a single field find during testing of MOROW ( morow/morow: A gamified app to help maintain our rights of way. - Codeberg.org ), a walking app I’m building. A legally recorded Wiltshire
right of way (way 31642593, path CHIP108) was mapped with a generic ref= tag instead of the semantically correct prow_ref=, and no designation= tag at all; so no PRoW-aware tool, including MOROW, could recognise it.
Digging into how common that pattern is led me to Robert Whittaker’s excellent UK Public Rights of Way and Countryside Mapping | Robert Whittaker's OpenStreetMap Stuff toolkit ( UK Public Rights of Way and Countryside Mapping | Robert Whittaker's OpenStreetMap Stuff ), which already
tracks designation/prow_ref coverage per county against the official Definitive Map. For Wiltshire specifically, his tool shows only 58% of the legal PRoW network by length carries a designation= tag, and only 24% carries prow_ref=.
What this is, and what it isn’t: Wiltshire Council publishes its official PRoW GIS data under OGL v3; checked directly against Wiltshire’s own dataset rather than assumed compatible just because it’s OGL, since the licence itself only says data may be reused, not that every dataset under it has been
cleared. I’ve cross-referenced that data against live OSM data to find ways that are missing or wrongly tagged, and turned the results into 55 MapRoulette challenges, covering just under 2,500 candidate ways. This is a tag-correction exercise, not an import: no new geometry is added anywhere. Every task points at a way that’s already mapped in OSM, asks a human to compare it against the official reference geometry, and only then apply the correct designation=/prow_ref= tag. A genuine mismatch gets marked “Too Hard,” not silently tagged. Attribution to Wiltshire Council under OGL is included in the changeset on every accepted edit.
This builds on Robert’s tool rather than duplicating it; his per-county reports already surface the “known missing” cases; this project’s contribution is the cross-reference against official council data specifically for ways that don’t carry any PRoW-recognition tag yet, like CHIP108, plus turning the
results into a reviewable MapRoulette workflow.
Wiltshire is a validated pilot, not a first attempt: the original 45-task test batch is already complete (25 fixed, 18 already-fixed, 2 too-hard), which is what gave me the confidence to scale it up to the full county before considering any other authority.
Project page: MapRoulette
Methodology and source: chris_debian/prow-open-data: UK Public Rights of Way open-data licensing campaign, tagging-mismatch audit, and tooling — separate from MOROW - Codeberg.org
I’d welcome anyone trying a challenge or two, and especially any feedback on the tagging approach, task quality, or the licensing/import reasoning above; this is the first county done this way, so mistakes found early are cheap to fix before extending to others.
Many thanks,
Chris