Townlands: Experimental import of Irish places from GNS Dataset

Why are all the Townlands as created with *“Experimental import of Irish places and POIs from GNS Dataset” * tagged as Hamlets? Is there some way someone could make a “bot” to re-tag them as Localities?

Hi Groundspeak,

As the guy who performed the original import, I can add some clarity here:

I’ve performed a total of two such imports, one for the Republic, one for NI. The NI import built on the experience of the earlier one, and in that, I did default all places with no better information to localities rather than hamlets. If you look at any random part of rural NI, you’ll recognise this. As an aside, you should know that not all of the smaller-than-village place nodes are actual townlands, though some certainly are. They can be bridges, crossroads, basically any local landmark with a name.

As to a bot, there are some drawbacks to this approach. Notably, some places really are hamlets (which, for my mapping purposes, I’d define as “tiny number of houses, maybe a pub”). Reverting all hamlets to locality would require either a reconstruction of these or some strategy to prevent them being touched. Two such strategies occur to me:

a) The gns: namespace contains the original lat and long. We could opt not to allow the bot to change any node whose position has changed since the import, since that would imply deliberate acceptance of the hamlet status by the mapper.

b) Similar - we could ignore nodes with edits after the original import date.

Having said that, I’m not sure this would all gain us much. I can imagine that we might, in the future, wish to perform a more systematic townland entry/cleanup based on old OSI maps that are out of copyright. Keep in mind that place areas will be a lot more useful for townlands, so sooner or later everything needs to be changed.

What do you think?

Hi Mackerski,

I suppose the best thing to do would be to have townlands marked as localities. And then down the road if we want to add place areas (I presume these are the townland “boarders” -instead of nodes) for the townlands we can.

As to the best strategy, I suppose I would go with strategy (a)

Also, just to say, it’s no major issue for me, if we decide to leave the GNS import townlands as they are- if changing them throws a spanner in OSM’s systems etc. or if it’s technically too difficult. It was just for the sake of consistency that I raised the topic.