[talk-ph] 7500 and counting.

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

According to the latest news, there are now "exactly" 7,641 islands. This
is stated by the so-called Philippine Islands Measurements Project of
NAMRIA. (Really unfortunate acronym: PIMP. People, when when creating
multi-word names, make sure that the acronym is palatable!)

http://cnnphilippines.com/videos/2016/02/20/More-islands-more-fun-in-PH.html

I have previously e-mailed NAMRIA to get info on how they keep track of
islands and how the most often quoted figure of 7,107 islands was derived.
Predictably I didn't get any definitive answer.

Afterwards, I discovered the 1939 Census Atlas of the Philippines which
listed in glorious detail exactly 7,100 islands, including name (if there
is one), land area, municipality/city, and coordinates (no datum was given
but it is presumably the Luzon Datum of 1911). I assume that this is the
mother of all Philippine islands list. An additional 7 islands were
probably added later on (Spratlys maybe?) but I have no information on who
or what those 7 islands are.

I was able to take photos of the list in the Census Atlas and initiated a
crowd-sourced project to digitize this list. Phase 1 was completed last
year and Phase 2 is currently on hold:

https://hackpad.com/1939-Census-Atlas-of-the-Philippines-7100-Islands-Encoding-Project-FhYXjmZ2rAw

Maning did a straight plot of those 7,100 islands assuming WGS84 datum
(which has around 90m difference from Luzon datum):

https://gist.github.com/maning/ef01a174c7160280dcee

Based on the map and even taking into account the datum difference, I now
have serious doubts on the accuracy of the Census Atlas list. Some islands
were located in the Pacific, outside the Philippines' baselines!

Because of that, I now have serious doubts on the accuracy of the 7,107
islands total number. This makes me doubt the 7,641 as well unless NAMRIA
can publish their database and tracking methodology.

~Eugene

P.S. I hope that OSM can in the future provide us with a free/open database
all islands of the Philippines.


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:08 PM, Jim Morgan <jim at datalude.com> wrote:

> MANILA, Philippines -The Philippines is now officially a +7,500 islands
> after the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority discovered
> 400 more islets in a series of mapping research.
>
>
> http://themaharlikan.info/news/breaking-philippines-no-longer-7107-islands-after-discovery-of-400-more-islets/
>
> Jim
>
> --
>
>
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