OSNI Largescale Boundaries: Northern Ireland District Electoral Areas (2012)

OSNI Largescale Boundaries is a polygon dataset detailing the District Electoral Areas (DEAs) of Northern Ireland as of 2012. The data was extracted from the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland's Largescale database, topologically cleansed, and attributed to create a seamless geospatial dataset. It is published as open data under the Open Government Licence.

Use Cases

• Electoral mapping and constituency analysis based on the 2012 District Electoral Area boundaries.
• Spatial joins for demographic or socio-economic data using the polygon boundaries.
• Creating base maps for local government or public service planning in Northern Ireland.
• Historical analysis of administrative geography using the topologically cleansed 2012 snapshot.

Strengths

• Data is topologically cleansed, ensuring geometric consistency for spatial analysis.
• Published under a permissive Open Government Licence (OGL-UK-3.0).
• Represents a specific, authoritative snapshot of electoral geography from 2012.

Limitations

• The dataset's temporal coverage is limited to a single year (2012) and may not reflect subsequent boundary changes.
• Specific column names and the total number of features (rows/polygons) are not documented in the provided metadata.
• A future update date (2026-07-08) is listed, which is inconsistent with the 2012 data content and may indicate a metadata error.

Provenance

Source

Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) Largescale database.

Collection Method

Extracted, topologically cleansed, and attributed from the source database.

Time Range

2012

Freshness

Metadata lists a last updated date of 2026-07-08, but the data content is explicitly for 2012.

Geography

Northern Ireland