Monday, 4 May 2009

Berkshire

It has taken me a while, but I have finally managed to get a decent outline of my local authority, and most of its neighbours, onto Open Street Map.

The picture shows how OSM Inspector judges my success. As far as I can see, the red lines are where different levels of boundary coincide, and I can't see a consistent way of tagging them to remove the error. Otherwise, the different authorities in what used to be Berkshire all seem to join up correctly, in closed loops.

Compared to adding roads and streams I found it remarkably difficult to get a satisfactory outline of the local authority. This is partly because boundaries are not clearly plotted on the out-of-copyright maps, and there have been some changes over the last fifty years or so. It's also partly because local authority boundaries coincide with a lot of other features, such as rivers. In some cases, a rough outline had already been added, and these had to be identified, and disentangled from neighbours so that I didn't do any damage. 

So a hat-tip of respect to those who are adding the other boundaries.

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