Prime2 Transfer

See the following links for more details.

• Prime2 Transfer Status
• Public and Private Roads
• Missing Roads
• Prime2 Fixes
• Automated Tertiary Road Splitting
• Legacy Segments

Overview

Road schedule editing is the final piece of functionality remaining from the MapRoad desktop system, first developed in the late 1990s. Up until 2016 local authorities were responsible for editing and maintaining the roads schedules. These were edited locally and changes synchronised with a central Pavement Management System (PMS) database.

Many of the road schedules had not been kept up to date, and were missing significant road alterations, new regional and local roads, and housing estates. Road centrelines were often significantly different from the actual location due to digitising over 20 years ago when base maps were less accurate. Some housing estates had been entered as a single feature, meaning they could not be used by the routing and editing tools in PMS, and there were many instances where roads had not been snapped to junctions, and were not connected; again meaning the PMS tools could not be used for these sections of the road network. Unless editors were careful to only modify roads, rather than deleting and redrawing roads, then all data collected as part of the PMS were lost, including many years of works, surveys, and speed limits.

Moving to the OSi’s Prime2 dataset provided a solution to these problems. The Prime2 dataset consists of a fully connected road network, with a unique reference for every road in the country. It also tracks changes over time, and has been created with a high level of accuracy. It uses the Irish Transverse Mercator (rather than Irish National Grid projection used in MapRoad), which reduces map distortion and is more compatible with GPS. Along with the road geometry additional attributes such as local and national names and road class are recorded.

The Prime2 transfer project took 100,000 Km of local and regional roads from the MapRoad road schedules, and mapped them to the 170,000 Km of roads available in Prime2. All data collected over the last 7 years by the PMS was also migrated, including over 40,000 Km of road works data, 110,000 Km of condition rating surveys, and 12,000 Km of speed limit records.

In preparation for the use of Prime2 in PMS significant changes had to be made to the database, moving from 31 databases hosted in each LA, to a single central database. Updates had to be made throughout the PMS code base including changes to over 100 web services and 100 map. A new user interface and toolset was created in the PMS browser to allow LAs to attribute the Prime2 data, and allow naming of local and regional roads.

After the completion of the transfer PMS can take full advantage of the constant updates and corrections to the Prime2 data by the OSi. Local authorities will no longer have to edit and update the road geometries themselves, and can concentrate efforts on their own data collection. Centralisation of the road schedule editing tools means there is no longer a requirement for each local authority to have a MapInfo license for each MapRoad user.

Significant value will have been added to the Prime2 through the association of all local authority road data. This dataset will form a key part of the Irish spatial data infrastructure (SDI), and facilitate data sharing between organisations such as the TII, RSA, and the NRA.