Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. There is a separate page for the country called Ireland.

Contact

For geographically pragmatic reasons, Northern Ireland has the unique status of being covered by not one, but two Local Chapters. Mappers are invited to interact with both, either, or neither depending on their personal views or preferences.

At the national level OSMUK (osmuk.org) is a non-profit company and registered Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. OSMUK's roles are to act as a focus for community, be a financial entity, give the community representation at national level infrastructure meetings, run regional events, and provide advice and assistance to organisations and companies wishing to add to or use OpenStreetMap. They maintain a Talent Directory for professional and voluntary service providers.

OpenStreetMap Ireland as an entity, provides an advocate voice for the OpenStreetMap project on the 'island of Ireland', in relation to interacting with other Open initiatives. They run meetups and events open to mappers from both Ireland and Northern Ireland. openstreetmap.ie web site has more details.

Northern Ireland matters are often discussed on the Talk-IE mailing list (historic archive).

There is an active online United Kingdom community participating in the Talk-GB mailing list (historic archive).

Administration Areas

Under Northern Ireland Local Government Reform council boundaries have changed (part of the reduction in the number of councils from 26 to 11).

No council administrative boundary relations (admin_level = 8) are present in OpenStreetMap for either old or new councils. Openly licensed shapefiles are available from OSNI. Many of these boundaries will be similar to those of townlands.

Cities, Towns and Villages

This is a list of Northern Ireland's 50 most populous settlements as measured by NISRA in the 2001 census. Hopefully this can provide a useful starting point for people looking for areas to contribute. Feel free to add another area/town if you feel it has not been included below.

Motorways

• Motorways (Northern Ireland)

Trunk Roads

Unlike their GB equivalents, NI's trunk roads are numbered. Although these numbers don't appear on signage, they are used in legislation and other government documents (e.g. notification of roadworks) to refer to the roads.

T1-T10 were first created in 1949. In 1998 T10 was extended, and the remainder created.

Sites like Google Maps tend not to treat many of these as trunk at all (e.g. T12), and to colour numerous other A roads as if they were trunk, however there are various non-trunk roads signed with green signs (eg A11, bypassed trunk roads).

'A' roads

'B' roads

'C' roads

highway=tertiary ref=C436 name=Inishmore Road

Roads which have a name and a C number and listed on schedules of works by the Roads Service. They are usually named after a townland in which the road intersects.

'U' roads

highway=unclassified ref=U9428 name=Derryharney Road

Roads which are maintained by the Roads Service. They will have a name and a U number and listed on schedules of works by the Roads Service. They are usually named after a townland in which the road intersects. These roads are very important as they usually make up the address of rural properties.

Other non-Roads Service roads

Some roads in rural areas are access to private land and maintained by the land owner, these should be tagged highway=residential with the appropriate access tags. Another type of road in rural areas is highway=service used for roads or lane ways into areas which may not be residential. Then there is highway=track for agricultural or forestry uses.

Railways

People Involved

• TMtm
• glasseyes when he visits back home
• NotMyOpinion when he gets bored
• Noodles
• Pvt_Ryan as and when
• mackerski
• cwilkinson1998 - Maps Co.Armagh and Co.Down
• KDDA - Mapping around Counties Fermanagh, Monaghan and Cavan
• _jmk_ working with open data as it improves in NI

See also

• Ireland
• United Kingdom