The map browsing interface, showing thumbnail photos for each completed "geograph"

Coverage of the Bristol area in December 2005

Geograph British Isles is a web-based project, initiated in March 2005, to create a freely accessible archive of geographically located photographs of Great Britain and Ireland.^[1] Photographs in the Geograph collection are chosen to illustrate significant or typical features of each 1 km x 1 km grid square in the British national grid reference system and the Irish national grid reference system.^[2] There are 330,184 such grid squares containing at least some land.^[3] Each page uses a Geo microformat.^[4]

Geographs are being collected for all parts of the British Isles with the exception of the Channel Islands 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 Ordnance Survey, and extracts from the OS Landranger 1:50,000 scale maps illustrate the grid square pages.

[edit] Contributions

Photographs can be contributed by any registered user, although they must be approved by a panel of moderators 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. Contributors should be aware that they are granting Geograph an irrevocable licence to use their image(s); it is very difficult to get an image removed once it appears on the website.

The entire archive of images with RDF metadata is being made available for download via BitTorrent.^[5]

As an incentive to increase coverage, participants are awarded a point each time they contribute the first photograph classified as a geograph to a grid square.^[6] There is, however, no limit to the number of images per square, and some squares have over 100. A weekly competition runs in the members-only forums to select the Geograph of the Year from photographs taken that week. The annual winners are "Deer Fence on the Shank of Drumfollow" by Gwen and James Anderson (2008), "Horsey Drainage Mill, Horsey, Norfolk" by Rodney Burton (2007) and "Islands of mud, East Hoyle Bank" by Peter Craine (2006).^[7][8][9]

Some participants combine geographing with other outdoor location sports such as letterboxing,geocaching, trigpointing, benchmarking, and peak bagging.

[edit] Types of image

Typical rural geograph image

Typical urban geograph 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; this includes close-ups, interior, underground and aerial shots, and shots taken from outside the grid square.^[2]

Some of the common themes for geograph photos include:

• Physical landscape
• Human land use
• Built environment
• Social interaction
• Geology
• Flora and fauna
• Local history^[2]

[edit] Statistics

1,000,000th image submitted shows Minor road near Aberuchill

500,000th image shows a milepost in Devon

As of January 2009, the project had over 1,000,000 photographs contributed by more than 8,000 photographers, covering 72% of grid squares in the British Isles (90% of those in Great Britain, 74% in Northern Ireland, and only 12% of those in the Republic of Ireland where the term "British Isles" is not recognised as including Ireland).^[3] Photographed squares had an average of 4.7 images.^[10]

Milestones include:

• 15 October 2008: Millionth image^[6]
• 8 April 2008: 750,000 images^[11]
• 13 March 2008: Two-thirds coverage of entire British Isles^[11]
• 25 July 2007: 500,000 images^[12]
• 25 June 2007: 75% coverage of Great Britain^[13]
• 30 May 2007: 10% coverage of Ireland^[11]
• 5 March 2007: 50% coverage of entire British Isles^[11]
• 3 October 2006: 250,000 images^[14]
• 17 August 2006: 50% coverage of Great Britain^[15]
• 1 March 2006: 25% coverage of entire British Isles^[16]
• 21 December 2005: 25% coverage of Great Britain^[11]

[edit] Awards

The Geograph site was awarded the Yahoo (UK & Ireland) Travel Find of the Year 2006.^[17]

[edit] Sister projects

In 2009, a sister project, Geograph Deutschland was launched, covering Germany.^[18] Geograph Ireland currently co-exists with Geograph British Isles, but may split into a separate project.^[19]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Geograph images

• Degree Confluence Project

[edit] External links

• Geograph British Isles website