Hi all, with the Ryder Cup due in Adare over the 13 to the 19th of September 2027, there is a plan to install a temporary train platform and pathways outside the town, with many more temporary structures around the Adare Manor golf course for the duration of the event.
Looking at postings on the forum here I can see that temporary events are not catered for by virtue of both their non-permanent existence but also due to technical limitations with map tile downloads (local caching, etc). The proposed solutions appear to suggest third-party mapping systems and apps, but that significantly limits the availability and ease-of-use of maps, and - in my opinion - goes against the concepts which OSM exists for in the first instance.
I see it as ironic that these types of events are exactly the situations where OSM mapping would be beneficial to hundreds of thousands of users, but are ham-strung by policy and technical limitations.
My question in my naivety is that given that there is a 22-month lead-up to this event, is there a facility to support this and other temporary events, or a technical workaround which could be deployed to either allow for temporary structures to appear for a duration, or to enable some type of technical solution so that tiles within the area around Adare to be marked as un-cached, etc?
The challenge here is the refresh cycles of consumers of OSM data - that’s basically the “technical limitation”. If any update to OSM appeared on OSM users’ devices as it happened, I’m sure OSM contributors would be delighted to map the planning, construction, operation and removal of the new station in real time, subject to the availability of the data.
However, if it’s only going to be there for a few days there’s little point in mapping it if it appears only a month or so after the 2027 event. The other approach (“pretending it exists before it does”) will catch people out the other way around - they might try and get a train there and end up on a building site!
That said, it’s absolutely possible to “mix and match” data from OSM with other data showing “what will be present” and make available (subject to OSM’s usual licence for whoever wants to have “a map for the 2027 Ryder Cup” in whatever format they want). I wouldn’t expect any of the map styles featured on osm.org to want to feature that data (but I’m just guessing), and I’ve no idea what approach other big consumers of OSM data (Apple, Facebook, etc.) will have, although they might try and do something in-house.
If you want help creating something that will show the temporary facilities I’m sure that there are people here who would help you with that. What might be more of a challenge is if you wanted someone to do it for you.
There is one caveat to the above though - what I’ve described above applies broadly to OSM as a whole. I’m not from Ireland, although I do create maps from Irish data. The OSM community in Ireland has a higher tolerance for things that wouldn’t normally be in OSM (in Dublin this bit of Liffey is a member of 108 relations including e.g. “North Central Constitiency 1947”. It may be that the approach the community takes here isn’t that same as what might happen elsewhere.