UNESCO has introduced a map showing polygons for the inscribed sites:
https://whc.unesco.org/en/wh-gis/
Only Europe and North America have been done so far.

Thanks to the people of Flanders for their monetary contribution! (your tax money at work, @Jurre)

Pretty cool... GIS also works better than ours.

@Els: Should be support Unesco into getting the data fully in and then simplify the maps?

A dream comes true; I wont have to strenously try to identify the boundaries and copy them into my atlas.
Spain is obviously not done yet: Routes of Santiago and Iberian Rocks should be inetresting!

Very impressed with the accuracy of the ones I have looked at so far - even accurately identifies the very small (and of unknown significance!) "exclave" for Studley Royal.......

BUT - I am not getting any polygons for e.g France - only the dots for the sites/locations....... am I missing something.... but it can't be that i have the relevant "layer" switched off since I can look at polygons for e.g Switzerland and then cross the border and not get them in France!! Haven't checked every European country yet but Italy, Spain, and Greece also seem to lack polygons. Albania also lacks them ....except for its Primeval forest which seems to have had all of its locations done across every country. Portugal only has the Mafra polygon - WIP I guess.
PS - the whole of Scandinavia is also missing - in fact, the more I look the more European countries seem to be missing their polygons so it would seem somewhat precipitate to claim that Europe has "been done"!
In Ireland Skellig Michael has been done but not Bru na Boinne
In NL Amsterdam and some others have been done but not the Defense lines
Belgium's unique sites have not been done
UK and Germany have been done. Some of Switzerland...........

"Locations" seem to have been populated by dots across the ENTIRE World - I have checked e.g Algeria and e.g Tipasa correctly has dots for each of its 2 locations. Unfortunately there is no naming of locations and the search features are rather poor insofar as I have experienced/identified them... so. to find for instance just how many locations have been identified for The Great Wall of China doesn't seem easy - it seems that one has to go back to the UNESCO page via the link provided. There is no "mouse over" feature for quickly assessing an area

Can we remember any "errors" we found in the UNESCO coordinates when we placed them on our maps? It would be interesting to see if they have been corrected!

Favourite finding so far: Neolithic Orkney has *five* components and not just four (the Watch Stone North West of Stenness is highlighted as a discrete component).

Looks great - but definitely a WIP. Hadrian's Wall looks super... but the Antonine Wall seems not to exist. Slate Landscape markup in North Wales is helpful, but Pontcysyllte Aqueduct has just a single pinprick location.

It will be interesting to see how they deal with double inscriptions. I think they have 'double-marked' the Ravenglass component of Hadrian's Wall within the wider Lake District site but it is not marked as such.

Well spotted - but it seems that it has been "there" since at least 2015!!! The Minor Boundary Modification Map of 2015 on this page of the UNESCO Web site actually shows it. IF you zoom it a massive amount you will see it appear as a very, very small purple dot!!! As far as I can make out, that map was supposed to reflect agreement to a "minor modification to the boundary of the buffer zone " as per this decision
To date i can find no reference to anything more substantive - The previous map replaced in 2015 rather strangely shows inscribed areas in grey and buffer areas in pink - but its resolution isn't really adequate to make out any possible separate status of the "Watch Stone".
The UNESCO description deoes however contain this paragraph - "The four main monuments, consisting of the four substantial surviving standing stones of the elliptical Stones of Stenness and the surrounding ditch and bank of the henge, the thirty-six surviving stones of the circular Ring of Brodgar with the thirteen Neolithic and Bronze Age mounds that are found around it and the stone setting known as the Comet Stone, the large stone chambered tomb of Maeshowe, whose passage points close to midwinter sunset, and the sophisticated settlement of Skara Brae with its stone built houses connected by narrow roofed passages, together with the Barnhouse Stone and the Watch Stone, serve as a paradigm of the megalithic culture of north-western Europe that is unparalleled." (My bold)
The Barnhouse Stone (situated just north of the A695) away from both the Stenness Stones AND Maeshowe does NOT however get a separate location on the 2015 official map and would thus seem to lie outside the inscribed area whatever the UNESCO text states! Which raises another issue.........!!! It did get a mention on the earlier map but within the pink "buffer" area

@all i think it's mostly a matter of time for the gis to be clean, at least for some continents.

question is what maps will we keep?
* tentative -> as is.
* aspiring?
* POI -> personally, i would like POIs for each site to quickly grasp what there is to see. i dont think unesco would try to do this.

I am less sure of that. It's a lot of work, and the financing of this UNESCO project is a bit weird (will they continue and finish it?)

I wonder really if the "project" per se has much more to do - the platform is there to be populated .........and there lies the rub!!!
Note this quote from the project page "States Parties concerned were invited to submit georeferenced maps of their World Heritage properties as inscribed by the World Heritage Committee. A verification phase followed: only those layers that do not show any deviation from the maps as adopted by the World Heritage Committee are integrated into the newly developed platform. If the layers present discrepancies, the project team will contact the State Party to rectify the data."
The State Parties have to submit the "georeferenced maps" in the first place.... followed by a verification stage......decisions on deviations........ etc etc

The critical path now seems to lie with States Parties, The WH Centre etc. Can you imagine certain countries ever getting round to presenting "georeferenced maps" to the Centre? I think we will need "our" maps for a long time. But, for those sites which are on this platform it will provide a very useful source of information. I know that these maps already show ALL WHS "point" locations across the World but their accessibility is very poor compared with ours- maybe the Project will backward engineer the current WH Site pages to the maps?? That would be a start - at the moment this map is NOT a good "entry point" to referencing sites.

I presume the polygons will be "open source"? If so then we could link to them where available?

You're welcome? LOL

Oh this is really great, though this was always my plan once I had some sort of massive lottery win that enabled me to retire and just make maps all day, I'm glad someone else is getting the fun out of it.

:) Though I promise I'm not taking it personally, but I posted a few of these that I had mapped/ sourced myself on here a few years ago :)

UK with the five sets of boundaries for Neolithic Orkney, and full polygons for Pontcysyllte and the Antonine Wall ;)
Partial USA
Czechia

And all the Natural and mixed sites have been available for over a decade on protected planet (see note from 2013 Livestream)

Creating the boundary files from scratch is fun but time consuming, I started doing them to fill my commute in 2019, then COVID hit and I didn't have a commute to fill anymore :) I did the Afghan, Algerian and Gambian/ Senegalese sites, but lost them with a frazzeled laptop. I started doing a few countries that I knew were going to be a long way off submitting full GIS data, thinking that Europe/ North America would probably already have heritage bodies with the relevant info already.

For the UK the relevant heritage bodies make the polygons available (e.g. Historic England), Jasam has pointed me to a French site that does the same. I assume it is a similar case with many European countries. Though i note there are no polygons for the French/ Belgian belfries, I noticed recently that they have never actually submitted core zones, the official map is just a picture of Belgium/ north France with little bubbles on it.

I would be very keen to get polygons of some type into our maps, I will have to investigate how freely open and useable these new ones are, or if not it could be just the step of finding the relevant national/ regional body that supplied them in the first place.

Someone in our China WHS wechat group has done a mini wechat app for china sites too

I can't seem to fathom why they have some Polygons an not others.

In London they have a polygons for Westminster, but none of the other three sites. This data is all in the same publically available set, so why is there one without the others?

In Czech Republic it is even more confusing:
Kladruby, Spa Towns, Krusnohori/ Erzgebirge and Kutna Hora have core zones and buffer zones polygons, but the rest don't even have core zones (There are no simpler Core Zones to map that Olomouc, it is just a 10m radius circle centred on a big gold shiny statue).
There doesn't seem to be any logic to this, most of them are recent additions, but Kutna Hora isn't. The ones with polygons are all in Bohemia, but so are Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Litomysl and Holasovice and they don't have them.

Oh that is really interesting. Is it something that can be shared somehow?

Out of interest would the map I posted on my Stonehenge review be along the lines of a POI/ Core Zone hybrid that you had in mind?