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 Northern Ireland County Shapes in Cognos Map Not Correct.

Alan Inglis's profile image
Alan Inglis posted Wed January 14, 2026 07:43 AM

Hi, 

So I was having an issue creating a County map of Ireland in Cognos due to many of the County names being used in the U.S. (and Cognos seemingly defaulted to the U.S. locations). I solved this for the Republic of Ireland (ie., Southern Ireland) by adding a 'Country' column to my data along with a 'County' column the contains the county names (e.g., 'Dublin' Kildare' etc.). The 'Country' column just had 'Ireland' for the Rep. Ireland counties. 


However, I am having issue creating the counties for Northern Ireland. I only have two N.Irish counties in my data ('Armagh' and 'Antrim'). But for some reason, Antrim is appearing as a circle, and Armagh is the correct shape but is rotated the wrong way. I tried changing the Country for these counties to 'Ireland', 'Northern Ireland', 'United Kingdom', and 'United Kingdom and Northern Ireland' - just to see if it makes a difference, but these two county shapes are not appearing correctly. 

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could fix this?

Bob Smith's profile image
Bob Smith posted Mon January 19, 2026 03:23 PM

Hi, I am not sure how you are representing Armagh and Antrim in you data but you might want to try and use these different references that may give you a different result that could be what you are looking for. "Antrim and Newtownabbey" or "Mid and East Antrim" vs Antrim / "Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon" vs Armagh.  I was able to generate a map with different regions and points using Great Britian, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland etc.  See screen shot. Thanks.

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Lorraine McAllister's profile image
Lorraine McAllister posted Tue January 20, 2026 04:28 AM

Hi

You can see what COGNOS uses for mapping via this link:

Mapbox Global Boundaries Explorer v4

I have had the same issue with mapping and counties as it looks like COGNOS does not have them set as standard boundaries.  If you look at the link above the country drop down when selected shows the District Council boundaries which are not the same as counties.  Country Armagh is not the same boundary as Armagh, City, Banbridge and Craigavon - this is the council area not the county.

To get around this problem I have had to create my own maps using MapBox.  I download a country geojson file from MapBox and then use it within COGNOS using the custom map links available on the map visual. I get the county geojson file from the OSNI website.

If you need more help with doing this then let me know.

Lorraine

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