Welsh is an official language in the UK. Public bodies that serve the people of Wales are required to provide services in Welsh and English. Public bodies cannot, currently, provide digital mapping services in Welsh. It is not possible, for example, to obtain Welsh-language tiles from the Ordnance Survey. Official sources of Welsh names for places and features are far from comprehensive and using alternative sources can be complex in technical and policy terms.

Mapio Cymru is a project hosted by Data Orchard CIC that has aimed to highlight and solve the problem of the empty maps. The project provides a full set of mapping tiles covering Wales using only Welsh-language data (from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata) and works with public bodies to help them solve the problem of empty maps.

In this presentation Mapio Cymru will talk about the problem, why it matters, what has been done to address it so far and what more public bodies could do to address it in the future.

Speakers: Carl Morris, Ben Proctor and David Wyn Williams from Mapio Cymru.

This event will be part of DataConnect22 - Festival of UK Government and Public Sector Data organised by the UK Government’s Central Digital and Data Office and the Government Data Quality Hub 26th to 30th September.