“Don’t Lose Your Way”: How 4000 volunteers found 50,000 miles of lost historic paths in England and Wales using OSGeo technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Across the UK there are a network of footpaths and bridleways on which members of the public are free to walk, accessing some of the country’s most beautiful landscapes and places of historic interest. However, thousands of miles of historic paths were missed when the UK’s definitive “rights of way” map was first created in the 1950’s. The UK Government has set a deadline of 2026 when applications for them to be reinstated will close, and they will be lost forever. In 2020, the Ramblers, a UK walking charity, embarked on a crowd source campaign to find, map and save these historic paths. Using a web application built with OS-Geo tech, around 4000 members of the public undertook a “spot the difference” comparison of every square kilometre of England and Wales, comparing the historic maps with those published today. A remarkable 50,000 miles of paths were found across the country, generating significant interest in the UK media. The project is now moving on to the next stage of building up supplementary historic evidence to support applications for their reinstatement. In this talk and interactive demonstration by the Ramblers and their geospatial partner Astun Technology, we will look at the background of the project, the technical solution, the results and what happens next. If you love the outdoors, historic maps and OSGeo technology including PostGIS and OpenLayers, and want to find out about an ancient route called the Fosse Way, then this is the talk for you! During the talk we will include a presentation of the project and also a live demonstration of how OSGeo technology was used to map our historic path network. You will discover more about the project, get to see some beautiful historic maps of England and Wales, and understand how OSGeo technology made the project a reality. Requirements for the Attendees – None Track – Use cases & applications Topic – FOSS4G implementations in strategic application domains: land management, crisis/disaster response, smart cities, population mapping, climate change, ocean and marine monitoring, etc. Level – 1 - Principiants. No required specific knowledge is needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".