Mapping Complete on County Down

After close to three years, the task of mapping all the buildings* in Co. Down was completed 13th March 2026.

Progress was typified by larger squares in the earlier years of the project (poor design choice by jonny) with much splitting of tiles (looking at you Aka) later on. In the end, we had 4,088 tiles of varying sizes. Tile size is an interesting issue with much smaller tiles being easier for urban areas such as East Belfast, Bangor, Ards and Newry. With that in mind we have started with a much smaller tile size for the newly created Belfast project.

Contributor statistics

Of those that used the OSMIE Task Server to record progress, 25 mappers contributed to the completion of the mapping with three people contributing to the validation process so far (3,814 squares still need validation). According to the task manager, 53 people in total contributed, but there must have been user accounts involved which no longer exist, because the maths ain’t mathing.

From the OSMIE Task Server, the Top 10 contributors were: b-unicycling, jonnymccullagh, Jonako, groen_sb, OscarBrownbread, mm123465, IpswichEdits, jrdy, eireidium and EM_OSM. Many thanks to them and all the other contributors!

There were also many existing edits and edits that were not part of our task server stats, so mentions are also due to c2r, latenightone, DeBigC, VictorIE, béal dubh and hundreds of others.

Buildings statistics

The buildings statistics were extracted using ohsome and overpass-turbo.

Most numbers increase greatly but notice how terraces have been replaced with individual houses.

Other features

*As completed as the task of mapping anything is ever completed.