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 <[email protected]> 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 > > -- > > > _______________________________________________ > talk-ph mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph >
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