Geograph Britain and Ireland
Geograph British Isles is a web-based project initiated in March 2005 to create a freely accessible archive of geographically located photographs of the British Isles.
Photographs in the Geograph collection are chosen to illustrate significant or typical features [1] of each 1 km x 1 km grid square in the British national grid reference system and the Irish national grid reference system. There are 329,299 such grid squares containing at least some land.
Geographs are being collected for Great Britain and Ireland, and a similar project is planned for New Zealand. The Channel Islands fall outside Britain's grid system, but may be geographed using their local UTM grid.
The project is sponsored by the Ordnance Survey, and extracts from the OS Landranger 1:50,000 maps illustrate the grid square pages.
Contributions
Photographs can be contributed by any registered user, although they must be approved before appearing on the website. The activity of taking photographs for the project is known as geographing. All images are licensed by the contributors using the Creative Commons cc-by-sa 2.0 licence which permits modification and redistribution of the images under certain conditions.
As an incentive to increase coverage, participants are awarded a point each time they contribute a first geograph to a grid square, but there is no limit to the number of photos per square – some squares have over 100 already! A weekly competition runs in the members-only forums to select the Geograph of the Year from photographs taken that week. The winner for 2006 was Islands of mud, East Hoyle Bank, contributed by Peter Craine for grid square SJ1989.
Some participants combine geographing with other outdoor location sports such as geocaching, trigpointing, benchmarking, and peak bagging.
Types of image
Geograph images are categorised by site moderators as:
- Geograph - an image which usefully illustrates or characterises the area in which it was taken
- First geograph - the first image uploaded of a particular grid square which meets the requirements to be a geograph
- Supplemental - an image which adds useful information about a square but which does not meet the requirements of a geograph (includes close-ups, interior shots and shots taken from significantly outside the grid square)
Some of the common themes for geograph photos include:
- Physical landscape
- Human land use
- Built environment
- Social interaction
- Geology
- Flora and fauna
- Local history
Statistics
As of March 2007, the project had over 350,000 photographs contributed by more than 4000 photographers, covering 50% of grid squares in the British Isles (65% of those in Great Britain and 8.5% of those in Ireland).[2] Occupied squares had an average of just over two images.[3]
Milestones include:
- 5 March 2007: 50% coverage of entire British Isles
- 3 October 2006: 250,000 images
- 17 August 2006: 50% coverage of grid squares in Great Britain
- 1 March 2006: 25% coverage of entire British Isles
- 21 December 2005: 25% coverage of grid squares in Great Britain
Awards
The Geograph site was awarded the Yahoo (UK & Ireland) Travel Find of the Year 2006.[4]