OSNI Open Data 50K Transport Lines: Roads and Railways of Northern Ireland

OSNI 1:50,000 transport layer is a vector dataset providing information on roads, road names and railways for Northern Ireland. The dataset contains all motorways, A, B, C class and minor roads in the region. It is provided by the Government Digital Service under an Open Government License.

Use Cases

• Map road network connectivity and classification based on the described motorway and A/B/C class road hierarchy.
• Perform spatial analysis of transport infrastructure density and distribution across Northern Ireland.
• Integrate road and railway vector data into webmaps or desktop GIS applications for routing or visualization.
• Study the relationship between different road classes and other geographic features in the region.

Strengths

• Dataset provides a detailed vector representation of the complete road network, including minor roads.
• Covers a specific, defined geography (Northern Ireland) at a standardized 1:50,000 scale.
• Available in multiple interoperable geospatial formats, including GeoJSON, ESRI Shapefile, and KML.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service

Collection Method

Likely derived from official survey and mapping data.

Time Range

null

Freshness

unknown

Geography

Northern Ireland