Yesterday we wrote about how important it was to stay on track and meet a deadline. Today we are tossing up how much flexibility we can have to meet a deadline and still be able to squeeze some more content into the maps before they are published.
Recently the map format was changed so that diagram maps show the most detail and aerial maps show only a subset of detail. Specifically the following is only found on diagram maps: non-rail corridors, roads, sidings, buildings, structures, sites, voids, land data, water and terrain. All maps display distance-based locations, bridges, tunnels, features and main lines. Aerial maps omit all the diagram information except that roads are indicated only by their name.
Because of this we do have the ability to increase the number of aerial maps displayed without checking over all the detail that is in them, since much of that detail will not be displayed on them. Because of the flexibility that offers to add more aerial maps without having to draw in the extra detail that is in them, we can add in more historical aerials without having to update the information in the GIS.
The result is we are juggling to see if we can squeeze in a few more aerial maps into the published map set without updating the diagrams so that we can cover a bit more, for example Napier, and in some of the other areas where we have added some aerials that haven't been fully checked over because of lack of time.
Regardless however there is still an absolute deadline for publication which is going to be Saturday 8th February, the maps will be going online at that point regardless.
It means you may still see some historical maps of Dannevirke for example but the information in the diagrams in particular may not fully reflect what is in the aerial maps. We will strive to be as complete as possible but some information may be omitted, this is always a possibility and unavoidable at any time. We are prioritising fixing a few issues with historical aerial mosaics and at the same time looking to add a bit more into some of them, which leaves some possibility to add some more of Napier with a little work but without spending the time going over every square inch of them to check all the details in them. That means in practice, we are not marking in the names of the individual sidings in Napier as we have elsewhere (Gisborne for example) but have still made a reasonable effort to include as much historical detail about the area as we can achieve in our limited time frame.
