Corine dataset

Communities Ireland
1

Hi,

I am assuming this dataset has not been uploaded into the Irish map? Does anyone know that status? I am interested in the Shannon and associated Lakes, and this appears to have pretty good detail…

Thanks,
Mark.

2

I’m not sure of the current state of this: you are more likely to get an answer on talk-ie the #osm-ie irc channel or asking Dermot McNally (mackerski) directly.

3

UPDATE

My understanding is that the community looked at the Corine data, and the shapes and detail of the landuses were inferior to what already existed at the time. The main concern may have been the background work to resolve the two datasets, so nothing happened. Dermot, Rory and Dacor will know the detail better than that.

The Corine dataset is supposed to be undergoing vast improvement - so with that in mind I wrote this letter to the Irish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/land-use-maps-a-sustainable-approach-1.4026373

4

Yes, the data is basically worse than could be done by hand and it would have introduced lots of issues for updating the data (which in particular would have interfered with the townland project). There was also a tedious issue with a single polygon covering most of Ireland.

In general experience with Corine data across Europe is that the resolution and actual factual accuracy aren’t really good enough for OSM. I doubt if this data would be imported in many places now. I’m not sure how this applies to water polygons, but for major lakes I’d expect OSM to be better. Corine will suppress any feature below the 25ha level which may be a degree of generalisation too far.

What Corine data is good for is for spotting things which are missing on OSM: e.g. a difference between woodland cover from OSM vs Corine-2012 data will identify many forests and even patches of native woodland which need mapping. So perhaps using it for given feature types in association with a MapRoulette project may be a way to use the data (e.g. to compare OSM/Corine water bodies).

I can’t speak precisely for lakes in the Republic, but I recently extracted major lakes and waterbodies of Northern Ireland to create a dataset for botanical purposes which was perfectly adequate. What is missing in general across much of Ireland is the detailed hydrography of minor rivers and streams. Also not every major river has the actual water surface mapped as an area.