Community: September 2007 Archives
While working on a project to display local heritage in a map format I discovered to my cost that google maps are not 100 % accurate. For some unexplained reason they position grid coordinates about 100 meters further north than they should. The OSI data that I used had the original 6 inch map and the coordinates. Yahoo maps concurred with the OSI map.
To compare the difference click on the following two links and compare the difference. The pointer (which is the location of a fulacht fiadh) is placed above the road in google maps and below the road in yahoo maps.
This raises a number of issues for my project as google maps has a wealth of embedding and annotation facilities. If the maps are not accurate then creating the maps is more problematic as it require manual intervention and correction,
The National sites and monuments database has received a Web 2.0 interactive face lift. It is now possible to select a townsland or town in a respective county and view all the records on a map. The individual records can then be viewed by clicking on the printer icon. The maps are based on the 6 inch formats with an accompanying aerial photograph.
The National Monuments Service of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government are to be congratulated on this effort. If they could open it up a bit more and provide embedding options it could prove to be very popular and accessible.
