OSNI 50K Boundaries: Northern Ireland Wards (1993)

OSNI Open Data provides a mid-scale vector polygon dataset of Ward boundaries for Northern Ireland as they were defined in 1993. The dataset is published under an open government license and is available in multiple geospatial formats, including ESRI Shapefile, GeoJSON, and KML. Its primary use is for mapping and spatial analysis related to historical administrative geography.

Use Cases

• Historical mapping of Northern Ireland's electoral or administrative units based on 1993 boundaries.
• Spatial joins for demographic or socio-economic data aggregated at the 1993 Ward level.
• Creating base maps for regional planning or policy analysis referencing the 1993 administrative framework.

Strengths

• Published under the OGL-UK-3.0 open government license, facilitating reuse.
• Available in multiple standard geospatial formats (e.g., ESRI SHAPE, GeoJSON, KML).
• Represents a specific, documented historical snapshot (1993) of administrative boundaries.

Limitations

• Metadata is incomplete: specific column names, row counts, and dataset size are not provided.
• The dataset's temporal coverage is fixed to a single year (1993) and is not current.
• Platform update timestamps (2026) appear to be future dates, indicating potential metadata errors.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI / Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland (OSNI)

Collection Method

Likely digitized from official cartographic sources.

Time Range

1993

Freshness

Last updated timestamps are inconsistent and appear erroneous (e.g., 2026-07-08). The underlying data represents boundaries from 1993.

Geography

Northern Ireland