Users of the Welsh Government’s digital mapping platform will be able to visualise Wales entirely in Cymraeg thanks to a new partnership. “Data Map Wales” is a Welsh Government service that allows people to search and visualise geographic data about Wales.
This data can be displayed on a choice of digital maps; and now one of these options is to see a map in Welsh. This service is provided by Mapio Cymru: a project that aims to ensure mapping services are available in Welsh as well as English.
Mapio Cymru has been providing a Welsh-language map of Wales for four years at openstreetmap.cymru but this is the first time they’ve provided Welsh Government.with their data.
According to Glyn Jones, Chief Digital Officer for Welsh Government, Mapio Cymru’s work with the new Data Map Wales team, “…is a flagship example of what we’re looking to achieve.”
He went on to say,
“it’s a really good example of good partnership working, ensuring a bilingual experience for the user”.
Speaking on behalf the Mapio Cymru project Wyn Williams said:
“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.”
Mapio Cymru is a project hosted by Data Orchard CIC and part-funded by the Welsh Government’s #Cymraeg2050 project that works towards supporting a million regular users of Welsh.
We worked with Transport for Wales to investigate Welsh language mapping, geolocation and route finding. This is what we found.
Mapping in Welsh
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.
Digital mapping is really commodified… in English
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 support Welsh… but…
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 surfaces a lot more Welsh than we had realised
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.
Ordnance Survey could do better
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.
The “official” name
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.
Overall
At the time of writing:
It is very straightforward to build web mapping applications in English.
It isn’t at all straightforward to build web mapping applications in Welsh. It is possible to build them in Welsh though.
We’d like to encourage public bodies and other organisations serving the people of Wales to look into how they can build bilingual mapping applications. The more organisations working on this problem the more solutions will be developed.
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.
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).
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.
46:35 General chat: about names of fields in Wales, where to put names, the importance of distributing names under freedom-respecting licences for use in the future
Diolch o galon i Eisteddfod AmGen a’r Lle Hanes am y croeso, ac wrth gwrs i bawb a gymerodd rhan yn y gweithdy!
This is an introduction to the Mapio Cymru project which is creating a map of Wales with place names in Welsh.
During the session there will be opportunities to play with the map, find names and locations, and contribute information to the next generation of Welsh map apps.
The work is relevant to education, leisure, employment, heritage and community – and history.
The organisers will describe how the project takes advantage of open and freely-licensed web resources such as OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia / Wikidata, and what you can do to get involved.
No prior experience or understanding is required, just curiosity!
This Zoom workshop has been organised by the Mapio Cymru project in association with Y Lle Hanes.
Our team has been working continuously on improving the number of Welsh place names that appear online since our inception in 2017 as partt of the Welsh Government’s Welsh Government #Cymraeg2050 project, and we are now very happy to announce that we’ll be working with the National Library of Wales this year on new aspects of the work.
The National Library has a great experience of crowdsourcing projects, and between now and April 2022 we hope to attract quite a crowd to a number of aspects of the work:
hold Wikidata-OSM Cymru events all over Wales –
e.g. school sessions (come into contact if you want to invite us over!) and collect audio clips of local names
As well as crowdsourcing the project, we will also use Wikidata to store and share Welsh language information. Wikidata is a sister project for Wikipedia, and we will take advantage of the wealth of Welsh data already in this huge dataset to improve the map in terms of the core data that we have at our fingertips. In addition to using the existing Wikidata we intend to add between 5,000 and 10,000 new data records with Welsh labels, for things like hills, mountains, lakes and public services and ensure that these are displayed on our Welsh map on OSM. Menter Iaith Mon will lead on a series of events in schools to improve the content of Wicipedia Cymraeg for their local places and spaces.
By making links between Wici and OSM projects we can help build a Welsh map rich in data and more ways for users to explore that data in Welsh.
We hope that this project will provide a framework for developers and organisations who want to build digital mapping services in the Welsh language.
In addition, by the end of this year’s project, we will move ‘back to the future’ and to the blue sky thinking of the popular SatNav concept that attracted a great deal of attention during our first year…and we’ll ask
what kind of additional steps are needed for an external company to add Welsh to the languages supported by SatNav?
Mapio Cymru, like OpenStreetMap itself, is a community project where people from different parts of the country co-operate via the ‘parent’ site https://osm.org ; which in turn feeds a lot of data to our Welsh-language map https://openstreetmap.cymru so if you’ve developed a taste for changing the world and would like to know more our work on any other aspect of the work of adding to the Welsh names that exist online – that therefore protects our history and culture and indeed our legacy – then please do get in touch
We are building an open public map of Wales with all the names in Welsh. Because of recent work, the map will load much faster for you now.
Here’s what we did to improve the map loading speed.
When you load the map, what you’re seeing is a grid of tiles. Each is a square image file, like this:
Here’s a small bit of Tyddewi / St David’s at zoom level 17.
A JavaScript library called Leaflet manages your navigation around the map (panning and zooming). The main point is, it’s ultimately made up of images.
These tile images are rendered from the underlying map data in OpenStreetMap, which is stored as points, ways, and relations. As well as the data, the OpenStreetMap software stack developed by the project is also freely licensed.
The most time consuming part of showing an up-to-date map to a user is converting the data into images. This tends to be done when the user loads the map: the images are generated and served, and also stored in a cache on the server.
If the map were completely finished and final then that would help. We could make sure the server has the tile images all rendered and stored, and serve them every time. But that’s not an option for the whole map for a couple of reasons.
At the moment the Mapio Cymru map is updated automatically once every night when most people in Wales are asleep, and server capacity tends to be higher. These updates are necessary because geographical map features and names change often, whenever somebody makes an edit to OpenStreetMap. This is often an improvement to the map, e.g. somebody adding a name to a feature. The open data elements are constantly being revised, making it a bit like a Wikipedia of maps. The edit can also be a response to something changing in the physical world, e.g. a café changing its name or perhaps a lovely new railway station.
Therefore we can’t preserve the map in aspic, it’s changing all the time.
It turns out there’s another snag to the idea of pre-rendering and storing the whole map to speed up loading. There is a different set of image tiles at each zoom level. For the furthest zoom levels it is possible to store all the tile images. But for closer zoom levels, the total number of tiles grows exponentially. Pretty soon we need a vast amount of time and storage space, much more than we have.
For example all of Wales at zoom level 17 took a little over seven hours to render overnight. That’s too much.
Can we pre-render and store some selected tiles, and then render any others on demand? It turns out that we can. The challenge is to figure out what to pre-render for maximum speed advantage, given the constraints of time and storage.
What are the map areas of ‘interest’ or ‘relevance’, and how do we codify this more precisely?
Initially we had a hypothesis that for the map sparsely populated areas would be less frequently visited than densely populated areas. One method would be to pre-render areas above a certain population density threshold.
I then realised that there was another solution much more ready to go, and even better. We could refer to aggregated browser requests for tiles to see which parts of our map were visited most. This allows us to look at the historical popularity of areas right down to individual tile level. This was data we already had, lying in the server logs.
Here’s a heat map produced by Ben Proctor.
Heat map for one year of visits at all zoom levels
The popular areas do seem to correspond to population density. There may also be a relationship with the number and/or percentage of Welsh speakers in different areas, which is available from Census data.
I’ve instructed the server to pre-render these tiles and store them. We have chosen these areas:
Zoom levels 3 to 16 are now entirely pre-rendered.
Zoom levels 17 and 18 are now partially pre-rendered.
Now the server automatically pre-renders these areas every night, immediately after importing the up-to-date data.
The difference was very noticeable when I loaded the site before and after the change. Beforehand I’d been a bit embarrassed about the huge blank areas and the apparent freeze-ups of the map, while the server wheezed along. I am not experiencing that anymore – at least for now!
On average, tiles are loading in 40% of the time when pre-rendered. That’s a dramatic improvement, although the degree of speed-up is highly dependent on how many users are accessing the server at once.
Even tiles that are not pre-rendered are loading faster because there is usually more capacity on the server.
Incidentally the smooth running of the server also depends on choosing the right settings and configuration. (We briefly considered nginx as an alternative to Apache but it appears not to have an equivalent of the mod_tile module.)
As we gain more interest and users for the map I expect to have to visit this again. Your contributions to project costs are always useful.
