It was a pleasure to take part in the FOSS4G conference today in Cardiff.
video coming very soon
This presentation will be of interest to people who want to advance mapping in lesser-resourced languages around the world. Then again, anybody with an interest in the overall growth of OpenStreetMap would do well to pay attention to the multilingual aspects of the project – in my view.
Thanks to the organisers and all participants for an insightful day at FOSS4G!
If you’re interested in the server software and data aspects of Mapio Cymru and OpenStreetMap, come to my talk at FOSS4G.
FOSS4G is the international Free and Open Source Software Conference for Geospatial. This year it is happening on Thursday 17th November simultaneously over several physical sites around Wales, Scotland, and England – including Cardiff where I will be.
As Mapio Cymru we’ve shared our learnings and enthusiasm at several events and organised a few of our own events, variously through the medium of Welsh and English. This time my talk will be through the medium of English. I am going to focus on the more technical side – what happens on the servers, plus some context about the Welsh language situation for those who might need it.
I’ll be discussing how we’ve built a map of Wales in Welsh, what technical and other challenges we’ve overcome, what the next steps will be, and share our overall vision for bringing mapping in Welsh to all.
Hopefully somebody out there will be inspired to contribute to mapping in the Welsh language or OpenStreetMap as a wider project, or start their own initiative – perhaps for another lesser-resourced language.
At the time of writing this I’ve just heard that the allocation of tickets for the Cardiff branch of the event is now running low. If you’re unable to get a ticket you can still watch the recording afterwards.
Mapio Cymru now has an experimental map you can browse, as a counterpart to the main map.
This map currently looks fairly similar to the main map, but it’s running on a separate server which I’ve provisioned for it:
Look closely and you’ll see that all the place names are subtly different.
Why do this? The main purpose is to spot gaps in the data for names in Welsh. There are a few means by which a name can find its way to the main map. The map takes data from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, and then processes it. We at the Mapio Cymru project wanted to convey the data source of each name on a map, but separately from the main map.
At the moment there are four potential sources noted in the experimental map’s key:
Please note that this key could change in future. Please refer to the map and its own key for details.
You won’t be able to do all the things that you can do with the main map, like search and easy embedding.
What you can do is browse the experimental map to find deficiencies and then edit OSM to enter names, in instances where the data is incomplete.
Your changes will appear on the main map and the experimental map.
Ultimately the place name you enter could then appear in a multitude of apps and projects, thanks to its licensing status as open data. I am very glad to offer this resource as a means of helping anybody who wants to share place names in Welsh. Thanks again to the Welsh Government for supporting this work.
The experimental map server is called the Pwll Tywod, or sand pit. This is denoted by the sandy coloured border. Our use of this term is to convey that we are playing with how it appears. Please excuse any occasional tech glitches you might see on the experimental map – but that’s the point.
“This is an important step towards allowing people to access digital mapping in Welsh as easily as they can in English. We’re delighted to be working with the Data Map Wales team to support their services in Welsh.”“The Welsh-language map is not as data rich as the English-language maps available from, for example, Ordnance Survey, because of the difficulty of accessing accurate Welsh-language mapping data. Mapio Cymru is working hard to increase the amount of Welsh language mapping data available to all.”
IMAGES
This is Data Map Wales:
This is how to select Mapio Cymru on Data Map Wales!
Mapio Cymru on Data Map Wales!
We worked with Transport for Wales to investigate Welsh language mapping, geolocation and route finding. This is what we found.
Transport for Wales asked us to undertake a piece of research for them. They wanted to know how they could build online mapping applications that treated Welsh and English language equally.
We’ve been thinking about these issues for several years and we maintain a Welsh language map of Wales at openstreetmap.cymru This, however, was a real opportunity to think about these questions from an organisation providing public transport services across Wales. We’ve produced a report for Transport for Wales which has a lot of detail in it and is very focused on their specific circumstances. This post is an opportunity to take a step back and think about some of the key things we have learned.
If you want to spin up a transport application with slick background mapping, geo-location, route finding and lots of points of interest there are many robust options available. For many uses digital mapping applications can be rapidly assembled, at least in part, by stitching together commercial services that provide data on demand (for a fee).
For those of us on the team who remember when they had to drive to a mini-Computer in Cardiff to do some fairly simple GIS tasks this is really impressive. When you want those results in Welsh it suddenly becomes much harder.
Google Maps does not officially support Welsh.
This means that if you are a developer wanting to create an online mapping application using the Google Maps APIs you can’t ask for the data to be provided to you in Welsh. That should rule it out for most uses by public bodies in Wales. But… Google Maps does use Welsh in interesting ways. It seems to perform on-the fly translation. For example: it knows that Prifysgol is the same as University and so if you search for Prifysgol… it will offer you universities not just in Wales but across the World. We searched for a pub called the Black Horse and were offered the Ceffyl Du. This is quite clever.
If you use Google Maps on your phone with your locality set to Cymraeg you will see Welsh place names on the map, including in England. But without official support there are real limits to where it should be used.
Bing Maps is Microsoft’s mapping platform. I’m sure they wouldn’t like to be de-scribed this way but I think most of us would say they are “Microsoft’s version of Google Maps”.
Unlike Google Maps, Bing Maps does officially support Welsh. As a casual user of the Bing maps website you might not notice this but as a developer you can amend your API calls to request responses in Welsh. Overall a developer can surface a great deal of Welsh in services from Bing maps. At most zoom levels roads will have bilingual names (rather than the Welsh name or the English name) and there are some odd gaps.
If you have very simple requirements for displaying points on a background map of Wales that won’t be dominated by English-language names Bing Maps is certainly worth a look at.
We feel that most public bodies could probably go beyond what Bing offers however.
Public bodies in Wales can use Ordnance Survey data under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement. Ordnance Survey data is of extremely high quality and they offer a range of data downloads and APIs to support public bodies in their work.
But the way OS handles Welsh could be much improved.
OS publishes tiles: essentially electronic versions of the OS maps we are familiar with from walking trips. These include Welsh and English language names but OS policy means that English language names are more likely to appear than Welsh language names. It is not possible to request tiles that show only Welsh language names or where Welsh language names are more likely to appear than English language names.
OS also provides other datasets. Some of these contain the Welsh and English language names for features but we found that often the way that the data is labelled in the datasets made it difficult to identify what was the Welsh language name and what was the English language name.
Some of these are data quality issues, others are policy issues. Hopefully public bodies in Wales are working with OS to see improvements in these areas.
In many cases there isn’t an obvious, official source of the English language name and Welsh language name for a place, for a stream, a forest or an area.
This makes it hard to measure how good the coverage of a map is. There simply isn’t a “correct” dataset to compare it to. In many ways this is one of the strengths of the Welsh language, it truly is a living language and things are called what people using the language call them.
That said, computers need rules, and as we use maps on computers more and more the need for some rules around Welsh language names grows.
Our Welsh language map is based on the community edited OpenStreetMap and Wikidata databases. Our researches suggest that these datasets are likely to remain part of the mix in terms of naming places and features until, at least, commercial competitors catch-up. We really encourage people to contribute to these datasets.
At the time of writing:
We will carry on working on this area and we would love to hear from others with questions or ideas about welsh language and bilingual mapping.
We’d like to thank Transport for Wales for commissioning this work and for allowing us to share this summary of things we found as a result of this project.
This entry is only available in Welsh.
Putting your organisation on the map for FREE!
Welsh Government is sponsoring a Welsh map to promote events in Wales.
As we move towards 2022, find out how to put your events on the map
https://openstreetmap.cymru for free.
Join our mapping expert Ben Proctor of Herefordshire 3rd sector organisation Data Orchard & David Wyn of www.dailingual.wales at 11am this Wednesday 1st December on Zoom
as they explain how the WG’s @MapioCymru could help you promote your events on an embeddable map for your website at no cost to you.
Recently Mapio Cymru as a project has been working with the National Library of Wales to uncover the place names in Welsh that are in Wikidata, and improve them.
Now there are hundreds of names from Wikidata on the map along with the names from OpenStreetMap (OSM).
Here’s Jason Evans from the library to elaborate on the work and its importance:
[…]
Combining Wikidata with OSM allows us to build on the work of Mapio Cymru which has been developing a map of Wales using only Welsh language data held in the OSM database. By aligning and combining this with Wikidata the map can begin to grow further, offering more information to users through the medium of Welsh.
And this is important. Many places in Wales, be they towns, villages, hills or beaches have two names, or sometimes more. The names in Welsh are almost always the original place names, ancient in origin and steeped in history. These names are usually descriptive or refer to long lost saints, chieftains or fortresses. The English versions of place names are sometimes meaningless mutations of the Welsh originals or names imposed by medieval invaders or Victorian ‘modernisers’. Even today historic properties are renamed in English by their new owners and Welsh names are dropped from websites and maps in favour of English alternatives deemed to be ‘more easy to pronounce’.
This project aims to decolonise mapping in Wales, not by erasing English place names from the record but giving users the option to view and explore a modern map of Wales solely through the medium of Welsh – a service that didn’t really exist until the launch of Mapio Cymru.
So the first challenge with this project is actually to encourage communities to contribute their local Welsh place names to OSM or Wikidata so that they can be included in the map, and this is done through a series of discussions, workshops and editing events. […]
The always pre-revenue what3words company has been buying up advertisement slots again, and there’s been some pretty unquestioning – might I say gushing – press coverage lately too.
I found this very interesting video which lists several of the serious weaknesses of the company and system.
A particularly big no-no for the Mapio Cymru team is the lack of open licensing of the data and software, mentioned in the video – and as a result the lack of peer review of the system.
The confusion inherent in converting from one language system to another is a cause for concern too.
See also: Rescuers question what3words’ use in emergencies (BBC)
This post is a video recording of our event Gweithdy Mapio Cymru held at Eisteddfod AmGen 2021.
The video is entirely through the medium of Welsh.
In the video we discuss:
Diolch o galon i Eisteddfod AmGen a’r Lle Hanes am y croeso, ac wrth gwrs i bawb a gymerodd rhan yn y gweithdy!