Re: [OSM-talk] Czech republic not in Europe?
On 7/2/2011 9:00 AM, Jakub wrote: According to this reation: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/7888 Czech republic (and many more countres) is not in Europe. Or am I missing something? I don't see Germany or France either! I tried to build a geospatial hierarchy out of OSM about a year ago and gave up on it because the quality of data wasn't good. I ended up using Yahoo's GeoPlanet because at least it was (sorta) consistent, even if the shapes look terrible. For instance, one problem is that there's no constraint that forces country outlines to be closed. For instance, the boundary of South Africa contained only the coastline. This kind of problem persists in OSM because OSM's quality control mechanism is feedback that come from users who are interested in maps. If you're just drawing maps, the boundaries of the countries to the north of South Africa will cause the boundary to be properly drawn. Nobody sees or cares that there's something wrong. On the other hand, if you're interested in doing spatial reasoning (Is point A inside South Africa?) the non-closed country boundary is absolutely useless. I guess the answer is somebody who wants good data in this department ought to fix it, but it's a big job, and since GeoPlanet is good enough for now, I haven't been motivated to try to do anything about it. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Is it a temporary file or Derivative Database under ODbL
On 6/21/2011 4:20 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote: We have a specalist mailing list, legal-talk, to discuss these matters. However, in this particular question you are unlikely to find a firm answer, given that the question whether temporary files constitute a proper manifestation of data or are just an implementation detail of an algorithm is something that lots of lawyers are discussing (see current cases about streaming media and if consumers need a copyright license). I try to stay out of this argument, but I'd advise everyone to carefully read the text above, and then read it again. If I wanted to spend my time talking to lawyers (and could afford it) I'd be building applications with Teleatlas and similar data sources. There's no end to the involvement of lawyers, salespersons and other parasites there. People who want to build applications gravitate towards open data precisely because they can escape this BS and be engineers. Fred has just made a brilliant explanation of why the license change is an attempt of the OSMF to commit suicide. Ten years from now, OSM may well be like Usenet or DOS, fondly remembered but part of the past. It didn't have to be this way, and frankly, the same effect of the license change could have been had by just deleting all the data, selling the servers, and letting the domain names expire and be bought by domainers -- except this way people are going to keep wasting their time on a project that's been failed. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] splitting up planet file
On 11/30/2010 7:16 AM, Donald Campbell II wrote: Now there's probably several huge reasons the concept wouldn't work with the planet.osm file, I don't know a thing about it's internal organization so I can't say... But perhaps there's some amount of data locality that can be exploited to make this work. If there's at least one type of information that we can use to seek through the file and find perhaps a country or a boundary of some sort, then it could be possible. Well, for one things, the nodes, ways and relations are represented separately. I've already split the OSM file into these segments because there are times I want to do a scan, and only want to scan one of these things. It would also be logical to break things up into big geographical chunks, say, continents, countries, etc. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Something wrong with planet file? Or osmosis?
On 11/26/2010 11:31 PM, Toby Murray wrote: I think you are seeing the problem with java's built in bzip2 library. It doesn't support all bzip2 features. Try unzipping the planet file using an external program and piping it into osmosis. Like this (assuming you are on linux): bunzip2 planet.bz2 | osmosis --rx /dev/stdin [...] There is a small note about this on the bottom of the osmosis wiki page but it should probably be a little more prominent somewhere... Toby I've had the same problem with a third-party BZip2 library for .NET as well. Of course, there's something in .NET that works like popen() in unix, so it's not hard at all to use GNU bzip, which will accept pbzip2's output. That said, my new strategy for dealing with large dump files is to cut the file into segments (like 'split') and recompress the fragments. If your processing chain allows it, this can be a powerful way to get a concurrency speedup. If more dump files were published in this format, we could get the benefits of parallel compression without the cost. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] tile downloader
On 10/20/2010 12:13 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: Maybe we could work around this by automatically changing the link for the stored tiles? This would also harm friendly projects with small tile-download-rates though. If it is technically possible to identify this application they could also be filtered out. I used to work on a website where we were always waging wars against webcrawlers. It's certainly useful to ban certain user agents, but it's very easy for attackers to change their user agent to look like an ordinary web browser. We had a system called robocop that did a running tail -f of the access_log, kept counts of how many hits we'd gotten from different IP addresses in the last hour, and if somebody was downloading too much, we'd drop a deny directive into our .htaccess file and that would be the end of them. I'd even get a text message when this happened. I sketched out a design for a system called robocop 2 that would do this in a better way and would generally help us manage our traffic in real time. I didn't get the go-ahead to build it. Before I had that job, I had another job doing, uh, difficult information retrieval. I had a webcrawler called Blackbird that was designed for low observability and that was designed to understand the structure of a website enough that, rather than copying the site, it would copy the database behind the site. With the right configuration, Blackbird could have completely subverted the defenses of the site mentioned above -- but I wasn't doing that kind of stuff anymore. I got sick of being on mailing lists where I knew somebody was a spy but not who... ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Response to A critique of OpenStreetMap
On 10/14/2010 8:07 AM, Milo van der Linden wrote: Dear 41latitude, I came accross your blog on critique of OpenStreetMap. http://www.41latitude.com/post/1310985699/openstreetmap-critique and read it with interest. Some points are true, others need better explaination and I think you misinterpreted some things. Justin's written detailed critiques of Yahoo, Google and Bing maps as well. As one of the people who encouraged him to write about OSM, I think his criticism ought to be taken as constructive criticism. Of course, you're right to point out that the community nature of OSM means that different people and organizations can create their own renderings. I've talk with Justin, for instance, about Cloudmade's ability to render custom map tiles, and we're both really impressed with that. However, I'll say that the claim that we don't have the resources to do it right is a bad smell that I often perceive around organizations that are in a death spiral. Back when I worked in the library field, it struck me that librarians were just conceding everything to the likes of AMZN and GOOG. Making little effort to take their fate into their own hands, I'm afraid that things are going to continue to get worse for them. It's better to say we know we could do it better and we'll do better in the future. As for the licensing thing, I do believe that CC-BY-SA licensing would allow OSM to join the 'giant component' of generic databases (particularly centering around wikipedia) which would in turn let third parties improve OSM. I am afraid that license proliferation could lead to a number of 'data ghettos', eviscerating the disruptive power of open data, thus granting control of the information future to Tele Atlas, Google, Elsevier and other commercial organizations that don't spend vast amounts of intellectual effort by hobbling themselves. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Response to A critique of OpenStreetMap
On 10/14/2010 12:52 PM, Mike N. wrote: And along those lines, based on the constructive criticism, the default map shown on the main OSM page should be a pretty map, using tiles from Mapquest, while mappers that have a need to view more details can select one of the existing map styles. I don't think that Justin is advocating pretty, he's advocating usable. If highways are labeled I 85 sometimes and I-85 sometimes and I:85 sometimes, that doesn't make things easier for contributors. If roads are too thick and merge into a blob, that doesn't help contributors either. Some of these issues, such as the labels, are data quality issues too and could be addressed in the actual OSM database. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Anonymous edits on OpenStreetMap through Tor
On 10/6/2010 6:19 PM, Brendan Morley wrote: It will be good to check for sure. Certainly in my CommonMap project it's a different story, I'm using Apache httpd as the web server. Out of the box httpd logs IP addresses in the access_log. I think OSM is also using Apache httpd now as well. It's likely that the sysadmins would almost never use the logging results, but it could still be a problem if, say, the hardware got seized for investigation. Quite a few systems block users that come from the Tor network, particularly Wikipedia. Tor is a popular method for vandals to not only hide their IP address but to use multiple IP addresses to evade any attempt to block their IP address. I've also come to understand that it drives the FBI nuts when it turns out that Tor has been used in connection with a crime. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Het Vondelpark -- OSM for the win...
I was just looking at Amsterdam's Vondelpark in OSM (one of my favorite places anywhere), http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/371522/Vondelpark and noticed that OSM has very detailed differentiation between bike and pedestrian paths in the park, something that Google doesn't have. [Check out the dynamic POI's on the map by the way...] ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] The CloudMade API rocks!
I just switched my site at http://ookaboo.com/ to use the CloudMade API instead of OpenLayers... All I can say is Wow!... It seems to me that the performance of the CloudMade API is as good or better than Google's Map API. And the ability to choose a large range of tilesets is really something... ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] What would it cost to host an OSM tileset on AMZN Cloudfront?
Just for the heck of it, I've been thinking about hosting OSM tilesets on AMZN's Cloudfront and I'd like to estimate what the cost would be. What is the current size of the OSM tilesets and how much bandwidth gets used by them? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Languages, OSM, scripts and all that.
I just recently pointed my nooscope at places outside the U.S. and was quite amused to see arabic letters in the tile maps around Tunis... http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/82500/Tunis Looking around a bit more I find Japanese writing w/ Romanized text around Tokyo http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/75666/Museum_of_Contemporary_Art_Tokyo I appreciate that the people on the ground who make the map are going to be people who are located in an area, and are going to know the local language, but people who want to explore faraway places could have a hard time with the rendering that I'm seeing -- are there are roman-alphabet tilemaps around anywhere? Cultural imperialist or not, my suspicion that that the roman alphabet is (at least somewhat) understood by educated people who use non-roman alphabets regularly (this is definitely the case in the CJK area.) On the other hand, my guess is that the ability to read Arabic is as common in, say Korea, as it is in the U.S. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging for street danger levels
M∡rtin Koppenhoefer wrote: 2010/6/23 Anthony o...@inbox.org: The alternative would be to have three different ways. Neither solution is particularly nice, though. I'm actually hoping someone will come up with something better :). use three ways and connect them with area relations ;-) cheers, Martin Now that I think of it, I wonder about the right way to represent the traffic network in the Netherlands, where a single roadway might have a tram track, lanes for cars, bicycle paths, a sidewalk, a canal, and probably some other things too, all exquisitely threaded through intersections. Of course, land use policy in polderized areas is more like land use policy on a space colony than it is like in most places on Earth. Intercity bicycle paths in the sector NW of Amsterdam (that I'm a little familiar with) look pretty good on the Cycle Map but I notice there are some nice recreational areas that don't show up on the Cycle Map that would be good destinations for tourists lucky enough to rent a bike there. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging for street danger levels
Liz wrote: Firstly I don't agree with your assessment. Secondly, how will this assist with tagging streets unsuitable for cycling? The only kind of street that is unsuitable for cycling is a street on which it is illegal to ride bicycles (regardless of safety.) A certain individual cyclist might not enjoy riding on a particular street, because of their preferences, but attempts to segregate cyclists into separate or different ways have proven to be dangerous, at least under American conditions. I'd like to see some tagging that tells cyclists not to ride on sidewalks, for instance: as a pedestrian I've been involved in accidents where cyclists were ~illegally~ riding on a sidewalk and coming around a corner at high speed without looking where they are going. I've also personally witnessed accidents where cyclists have been riding on sidewalks ~illegally~ and either ride their bikes into or get hit by cars. Meanwhile there is a contingent of idiots in a city near me that are continuously complaining that the city is not bicycle friendly but that won't speak out about absurdly dangerous bicycling behaviors that go on all the time.. Even the bicycle cops in town are ignorant of the basics of bicycle safety. There's a pretty extensive literature showing that bikeway systems (going back to San Luis Obispo in the 1970s) increase cycling fatalities (at least under American conditions): you might as well open a hunting season on cyclists... Anyway, John Forrester (http://www.johnforester.com/) is a hardcore cyclist who makes a stronger case for this than I ever will, particularly see http://www.johnforester.com/Articles/Facilities/TransQuart01.htm ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Traffic, Safety, Danger, Oh My!
As a response to a proposal to add perceived safety information to OSM (which may or may not be accurate) I was thinking last night about what kind of safety information would be useful and correct. The county I'm in has a GIS system in which they put red dots for every accident that is reported to the police. I also see monitoring devices on the (rural) roads near me all of the time, so unless somebody is doing a master's thesis on my neighborhood, extensive traffic data is available for both the major and minor streets. Periodically the Ithaca Journal runs an article on The Most Dangerous Roads In Tompkins County, derived from actual accident data. Of course, each of these roads has a story about why it is dangerous, and that's particularly useful to travelers. For instance, a rpad near me is on an exposed hilltop (gets covered with snowdrifts in the winter) and has a 90 degree turn. There's also a plateau just north of Cornell that has several roads that go up a steep incline. Some of these have hairpin turns that often accumulate multiple stuck and crashed cars during winter storms... And if you think that's bad, try the one that goes straight up the hill and seems to get several tractor trailers stuck in it every year [despite the sign that tells trucks not to enter] Generally it seems that traffic engineers in Upstate NY like building unusual intersections -- I can think of many interstate intersections around Albany and Binghamton that baffled me the first time I saw them, and there's a particular approach to Ithaca in which traffic on the left is supposed to yield to traffic on the right. All of these intersections make sense when you look at the big picture of traffic flow, but many people get confused when they see them infrequently, and sometimes they do the wrong things. It seems to me that it would be useful to mark particular hazards and give people enough information that they can understand the curveballs along routes. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging for street danger levels
Toby Murray wrote: Someone in my area is starting up a new website that is focused on cycling in the city. They have decided to use OSM as their map which is awesome. Streets are not dangerous to bicyclists; ~intersections~ are dangerous to bicyclists. When bicyclists modify their behavior in search of safe streets they set themselves up, lemming like, to be killed at intersections. Most of the dangerous and (mostly) illegal cycling behaviors that are widespread, such as riding on sidewalks, riding on the wrong side of the road, riding on sidewalks on the wrong side of the road, and weaving around parked cars are derived from this fantasy cyclists have that some motorist is going to come up from behind in a faster, larger vehicle and cream them. In reality, the self-preservation of motorists forces them to be looking ahead of themselves for vehicles that behave like other automobiles. Cyclists are most likely to be picked up by that scanning behavior if they follow traffic rules. If they disobey traffic rules, they're at much greater risk. Cyclists may be safer if they follow a dangerous busy street that is well signalized and has few dangerous intersections than riding on a safe back alley that crosses numerous busy streets at poorly defined intersections. There very well may be an objective measurement of the safety of ways, routes, and intersections, but the majority of cyclists have demonstrated in everyday behavior and by their actions in the political sphere that the mental model of safety that they have is dangerously incorrect. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Extracting administrative division boundaries from OSM
Hi, I'm trying to construct a 'spatial control' structure for the Earth that's entirely based on CC-BY and CC-BY-SA compatible data. Something I'm looking at right now is creating a complete set of country boundaries and second-level administrative divisions. (Third-level might be nice too, but that might be asking a lot) I've got a fairly complete list of items with ISO 3166-2 country codes and I'd like to extract shapes for these. I could get them out of Yahoo's WEO shapes but these really look bad. I can see that these shapes are in OSM, but I've got no idea how to get them out. Can anybody point me to where to get started? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Post code areas
Anthony wrote: The actual areas are basically only useful for reverse geocoding (click a spot on the map and get the postal code). But whether or not that's even possible is highly dependent on whether or not the post office provides such information. For some post offices, such information is not meaningful. What is the postal code for the middle of a highway? Maybe there is one defined, which represents what the postal code would be if there were a post box there. But maybe there isn't. It depends on the post office. In the US, ZIP codes are really sets of points (addresses that get delivered to), not geographies. There are commercially available ZIP code boundaries that are made by a process of assigning plausible shapes that fit the points known to be in the ZIP codes. I suppose these are done with alpha shapes or maximum-margin or some similar algorithm. There's a lot of demand for ZIP code-indexed data in the US because everybody is familiar with them, and because they're roughly on the scale of marketing activities: you're likely to drive to stores that are in your ZIP code or nearby ZIP code. On the other hand, the more I learn about ZIP codes the more I learn how bad they are: for instance, ZIP codes are insufficient to determine a person's congressional district, commonly cross counties, and I'm aware of at least one ZIP code that spans two US states. ZIPs are also too big to do effective geodemographics: for instance, the ZIP code 14850 (most of Ithaca, NY) contains some very rich neighborhoods, some very white neighborhoods, and also some neighborhoods that are poor and minority. There are good commercial databases, however, that give geodemographic profiles at the census block or individual household level: enough that you could find out that the most of the 'rich' people in 14850 are college professors who don't spend ostentatiously so they wouldn't support a Nordstrom's or a Jaguar dealership. Personally I like the TIGER county shapes for spatial control in the US. These are accurate and tile nicely and, I find I that the union of several counties is generally a good proxy for the kind of 'semantic regions' that I work with... For instance, even if I'm targeting a city, the noosphere density falls off so much in the suburbs that the county is an effective boundary: and if something out in the 'burbs has that much 'interestingness' it's probably semantically associated with the city anyway. I'm currently establishing a spatial control system for the world and it's probably going to be based on second-level administrative divisions, though I've got good third-levels for a lot of interesting places. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] mod_cache for OSM tiles?
Hi, I'm using the OSM slippy maps on a site of mine and I'm starting to think about loading time and reliability. Even though my site is graphically intensive, I find that OSM tiles are usually the last to load. I'm thinking about using mod_cache or something similar to cache the tiles... Does anyone have experience doing this? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Semantic GIS site based on dbpedia, freebase, openstreetmaps, etc.
Hello, We just launched a new site at http://ny-pictures.com/nyc/photo/ which is based on data from dbpedia and freebase and uses openstreetmaps for mapping. Behind it all is a 'semantic GIS' engine that combines the ability to represent traditional GIS with the ability to make assertions such as The Empire State Building is in Manhattan. A particularly remarkable feature is that very few of the images are geotagged: we're able to establish the locations of the photographs based on text and other available evidence. Any thoughts? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq
Igor Brejc wrote: I have to agree with Nop, up to a point. OSM is a great project and I invest a lot of my free time in it, but I still think it has a lot of failure points. The first time I wanted to use OSM data for a professional job, the data simply failed me. And I'm only talking about generating a high-scale UK map, not some complex routing application. Even drawing land borders between England, Scotland and Wales proved to be big PITA because of different approaches to tagging between the three regions (not to mention that England's regional boundaries were tagged the same way as the border with Scotland). I don't whether this has been improved in the meantime. (1) My experience is that commercial and government GIS map data is less than perfect; particularly if you're crossing international borders. Even if you're targeting North America, it turns out the whole architecture of commercial information (generally built on top of the national census) is entirely different in Mexico, Canada and the US. Project #2 in the pipeline is a fundamentally international GIS system that wouldn't be possible at all w/o dbpedia, geonames, freebase, Yahoo's shapes, and Open Street Maps; unless I had the kind of resources that Google has. (2) A big part of the Web 2 - Web 3 transition is going to be finding a way to clean up the tagging morass. When it comes down to it, tags suck for two reasons: (i) they're a lot of work to create, and (ii) people don't use them consistently. There's are many approaches, but it's one of the biggest problems that I see in front of me personally. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] GeoEye Haiti imagery Ok'd
Maybe I've missed it but is there any page that's easily accessable to OSM outsiders about the Haiti mapping efforts? This page is full of info but intimidating: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haiti#Mapping_the_earthquake_area I'd really like to see something that looks more like a press release... ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] ??? Compatibility of OSM w/ CC-BY-SA sources ???
My major concern with a license change is compatibility with CC-BY-SA sources such as dbpedia, wikipedia, etc. So far as I'm concerned, dbpedia and freebase are the core of a linked data space that assigns taxonomic identifiers to (most) things that exist, and will really be critical to machine understanding efforts going forward. I think we're going to see additional data 'stuck' to a growing katamari ball of facts and relationships. I think that that ball of data is going to form a 'giant component' that grows explosively, and anything that isn't legally compatible with that space is effectively going to 'disappear;' one of the reasons why Cyc really failed to make a splash is that organizations needed to make a huge investment just to get a good look at it. In the short term I'm primarily concerned w/ displaying slippy maps to display CC-BY-SA and PD-derived coordinates and shapes on. That's one issue. Another, longer-term, issue would be the construction of new products based on automated reasoning applied to ways in OSM. Note that freebase seems to be safe to merge with OSM data, but I'm not sure if using OSM data prevents me from pushing corrections/enhancements that are found in my processing chain back into Freebase. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Garmin eTrex Vista Hcx
John F. Eldredge wrote: The GPS in my car is a Garmin (I don't recall the exact model at the moment). It appears to be much more accurate when the car is in motion than when the car is stationary. If I power the GPS up with the car stationary, the location given can be inaccurate by 100 meters or more. Once the car starts to move, the GPS can locate the car within 3 or 4 meters. In automotive applications, GPS Units often use a 'snap to road' that makes them look a lot more accurate. My eTrex Vista HCX has two modes of computing headings: one of them is to (i) look at the direction your track is going in and the other is a (ii) built-in magnetic compass. If I'm moving, either in a vehicle or on foot, I find (i) more satisfying than (ii). The most obnoxious thing about altitude on my eTrex is that I don't see how to get it to use GPS altitude instead of barometric altitude. (I know how to pop up a dialog box to ~view~ GPS altitude, but that's it.) Barometric altitude is totally useless if you're inside a pressurized airplane. ;-) In most situations repeatability is pretty good for me; I use tracks for breadcrumb navigation all of the time on foot and rarely see anomalies that cause practical problems. I circumnavigated the BWI airport during a layover the other day and got at the the terminal within 3 minutes of when I thought I would, using GPS data as the major input to my mental calculation. Now, I did get lost in the tunnels of the Library of Congress the day before that... I just need an inertial guidance system for situations like that. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Help from Tourist office?
Dave F. wrote: Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote: (Which is a pretty stupid thing, given that tourists ought to know all the local web portals when preparing a trip, instead of going to e.g. OSM or Wikitravel) I dunno. That kind of site is usually a site for sore eyes. If they've got the attitude that we want our site to be the only source of information about our area it means that they don't get the web and that the site isn't going to be a good source of information. I have to concur with Ivan. Whenever I've travelled the English tourist board appears to have a limited number of hotels on its books, usually of the middle to expensive variety. Does anybody know if they work on commission? In a lot of places the Tourist Office is actually (or practically) a cooperative sponsored by certain businesses, generally the larger and more expensive ones. This is true of restaurants as much as it is of hotels. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Building a paper globe
bernhard wrote: Hi all I would like to build an OSM printed paper globe. It should be made out of 2 sheets of A3 paper - A3 (297mm × 420mm) is the maximum size the color printer is able to handle. The globe will be a Dodecahedron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecahedron This reminds me of Bucky Fuller's dymaxion map: http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/rbfnotes/maps/graymap1.html My guess is that Fuller's patents on this have long run out. This could be a really fun project. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] radioactivity
John Smith wrote: The cost of a home made Geiger counter is about $100-200 in parts, and if you combine that with a gps logger you could log points combined with the rads, chances are you will end up with areas of the same values. Cheap radiation measurement tools suck. A homemade geiger counter is a fun experiment, but I wouldn't count on it to be accurate at all. In fact, expensive radiation counters aren't all that great either: the DHS has spent a lot of money on portal monitors and they really aren't as good as we'd like. Cheap counters are good at counting gamma particles, but not so good at alpha particles, betas or neutrons. Specialized alpha counters exist, but they need to be pressed right up to the thing you're counting. If you don't get close enough to the radiation source, you'll miss it. There's still controversy about the Harrisburg accident today, since they didn't have instruments in the stack to measure beta radiation, so we don't know exactly how much I131 went out the stack. There's a lot of practical interest in detecting Plutonium, common isotopes of which emit alpha particles. Workers exposed to Pu (such as Karen Silkwood) can have their exposure evaluated with whole-body gamma counters that detect gammas from Am241, which is a decay product of Pu241. The ratio of gamma rays to Pu all depends on the isotopic composition of the Pu, how long it's been sitting around, etc. Governments of the world would like to be able to detect smuggled Pu and assembled nuclear weapons with gamma ray counters, but it's pretty tough to do. In the case of depleted U, which appears to have started this discussion, it's not so clear what the actual hazard is. U is pyrophoric and a bit toxic, just as a chemical. With a ~1Gy half-life, most of the radiation from natural U comes from products in the decay chain (radium, polonium, etc.) and not from the actual U itself. It's not exactly clear what the provenance of depleted U used in weapons it is: some of it may be relatively clean, but there could be dangerous contaminants in some of it. There's also spotty evidence of chemical weapon involvement in some combat areas where DU has been used, both in Iraq and Yugoslavia, the governments of which had weaponized acetylcholine-targeting chemicals, which can cause all sort of strange and lingering health problems. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] radioactivity
Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: no, we shouldn't. But what's so strange about the desire to tag nuclear installations? Why not tag all chemical plants? There is a lot of benefit in mapping not just industrial but also the type of industry, be it chemical, automotive, steel, clothing or whatever. Antinuclear activists have tried quite often to use open database sites as a place to make political statements. For instance, there's a Nuclear Reactor type in Freebase which has just one property: final disposition of waste. It doesn't have any other attributes such as purpose, thermal power output, fuel composition, nothing. The waste issue is complex, but I can tell you one thing. The current LWR extracts only 2% of the energy in it's fuel. Future reactors could extract much more of that: there's enough energy sitting in the spent fuel system in the US to power the country for centuries: a closed fuel cycle could put a stop to Uranium mining for generations. Yes, the technology isn't there yet, but we've still got decades to develop it. Some kind of hazard marking could be OK, or some marking for industrial sites, or for power plants as a whole -- and I'm not saying that antinuclear activists didn't have a point in the 1970's, because they did. I think citizens should have input into energy policy decisions. I think there are bright futures for photovoltaic and biofuel systems that use waste materials as feedstocks -- in particular applications. I'm all for energy conservation. However, if we want to keep civilization together under the threats of fossil fuel depletion and global warming, we can't flush an energy source much bigger than Saudi Arabia down the drain. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] GPS Accuracy under Forest Canopy
Stephen Hope wrote: I've done some rain-forest hiking, and I've noticed similar results. If you really want to see some wandering tracks, try hiking along the base of some cliffs, in dense forest. I have noticed that the errors do seems to be less the faster I'm moving. If I stand in one place for a while, the path can wander over quite an area if there is dense cover. If I walk fairly quickly, then it still has errors, but not as large. I think it must be finding more open patches and correcting itself more often. My Garmin eTrex HCx makes reasonable tracks under forest cover, although the tracks are certainly worse under forest than under a clear sky. It's not the cheapest GPS unit you can get, but it's reasonably priced and it's a great navigator to enjoy both OSM and commercial maps on foot or sitting in the passenger seat of a car. The ability to see my own track has gotten me unlost more than once; it seems that once I've gotten into GPS mapping I've been more aggressive about going into unfamilliar and confusing terrain, so I've been getting lost more! I think of track accuracy from a practical viewpoint. Having a trail off by 20 meters isn't so important so long as I get the topology right. I walked a segment of trail that followed a creek and always stayed by one side: when I looked at the tracks overlaid with Garmin's Topo 2008, I saw the track crossing the creek. I was often within 10 meters of the creek, so this isn't 'crazy' If I'm loading this into OSM and if the creek is there, I certainly feel pressured to manually push the trail across the creek so that the trail doesn't show false creek crossings: that's an error that people when they're using the map and could even cause confusion. As for speed, it's an issue that GPS errors have a brown noise characteristic: they look worse on longer timescales. If you're standing at one place and your GPS seems to be swirling around in lazy nested circles, it looks real bad. It's hard to average the coordinates to get a betting point position. If you take a track or go walking for 4 miles or drive 40 miles in your car, that craziness is still there, but it's made invisible by the scale of the map. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] radioactivity
Nic Roets wrote: Many scientific labs and hospitals work with radio active materials within an appropriate legal and enforcement framework. That may include placing of signs at the perimeter of the premises. In those cases we should tag it. But people have an irrational fear of radioactivity. We certainly don't want mappers to draw they own conclusions. For example, if a site is storing depleted uranium, that does not mean that the public should be worried. The level of radiation may be so low that it is not harmful to humans. +1 Radioactivity is just one of many man-made hazards, and, overall, people overestimate it's danger compared to other hazards and often don't understand the real hazards. If you're going to tag radioactive hazards, you ought to be tagging other hazards as well. In Upstate NY there are a large number of industrial brownfield sites that are still contaminated with heavy metals, hazardous organic solvents, and other hazards. Yes, in upstate we had the only commercial nuclear reprocessing plant in the US (with a sordid story that makes Sellafield look golden) but there was also a 40-building complex that manufactured film that contaminated a heavily populated area in Binghamton NY with Cadmium and Silver. Two industrial plants near Ithaca have leaked TCE and other solvents, affecting an elementary school, nursing home and the entire South Hill neighborhood. Note that these hazards are both pointwise and diffuse. For instance, you could be quickly killed by a lethal radiation field if you were to go for a swim in a spent fuel storage pond at a nuclear reactor. On the other hand, there are good procedures in place to protect the public and the workers at nuclear plants; for one thing you'd need to get past the fence and armed guards. There's a hypothetical danger there (the glaciers could come and spread the contents of a temporary nuclear waste repository across a wide area) but no clear and present immediate danger. You might as well tag all the roads as dangerous since hundreds of thousands of people get killed in automobile accidents every year. Now, coal burning power plants release about 300 times as much radiation into the environment during normal operation as a nuclear power plant. The issue is that there are trace quantities of uranium and it's decay products such as radium and polonium in coal: the coal burning plant in my county consumes about 120 freight cars of coal every day, to produce only 1/3 the power of a typical nuclear plant, which consumes 1 kg of U235 and produces about 1 kg of fission products every day. It deposits a fallout plume for hundreds of miles, which includes radioactive elements, sulfur compounds and which contributes to lung and heart diseases. It emits more carbon dioxide, as a point source, than all of the other activities in the county put together, but yet, by some Jedi Mind Trick, it was left out of a report on Global Warming In Tompkins County since they charged CO^2 emissions to the places where electricity is used, not where it is produced. The nuke industry isn't perfect either. The operation of once through plutonium production reactors at Hanford has deposited radioactive contamination into sediments downstream in the Colombia river. Early tank storage systems at Hanford were criminally inadequate, and have leaked plumes of FP and TRU contamination that are migrating to the Colombia. Yet, Hanford didn't drive Salmon and Trout to the verge of extinction: that was done by hydroelectric dams and overfishing. SRS did a much better (but not perfect) job of tank storage, and future commercial reprocessing operations at SRS won't need tank storage at all. On top of all that, the hazard of environmental contamination is distributed oddly in space. If you put a dab of a strong essential oil on your skin and spend a few hours in your house, it's quite entertaining to sniff around the next day and try to explain the spatial distribution of the odor. You might find that somebody else sits down, picks up the odor and their clothes, and distributes it to a room that you didn't go in. Similarly, you'd think that DDT and PCB contamination would be worst in places close to where these substances were used. However, if you look at tissue concentrations in wild animals, you'll find shockingly high levels of contamination in arctic animal populations in places that are basically uninhabited -- food webs work like that. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Business listings
Arlindo Pereira wrote: I strongly disagree with you on this point. If I could use Google Maps to find plumbers, dentists and web designers, why shouldn't I be able to do it with OpenStreetMap? Perhaps not on Garmin, but on OSM.org or OpenStreetBrowser or whatever application that uses OSM data. Maybe it's just a matter of making Garmin ignore it. I don't have a problem with having the other business listings there IF having them doesn't compromise the quality of the business listings I actually want. Already my handheld has a menu that lets me select for major categories, so I won't find zoos while looking for gas stations. (Though it would be nice to say NO PIZZA, NO SUBS, and sometimes NO CHINESE FOOD...) I see it more as a matter of resources and business model. If there's a way to get good data for everything, great -- if not, I think it's OK to focus on areas where there's a strong need. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Business listings
The other day my family was on a road trip and we passed by an unfamilliar city. We wanted to find a chinese restaurant, so I used the database of business locations in City Navigator NT to find one. OSM could replace, perhaps even surpass, the street maps in a product like City Navigator, but I'm thinking about the business listings. It seems to me that a free product could be provided on a basis similar to the Yellow Pages: it seems to me that it's worth it for businesses to be listed, so a project like that could pay it's bills by offering premium listings. Is anybody working on anything like that? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Business listings
Phil Endecott wrote: I'm not sure how far you can extrapolate from that, but I think it's still fair to say that Yellow Pages covers most businesses. Certainly the copies that arrive on my doorstep each year (and go straight into the recycling bin) are not getting any thinner. Personally, I'm not concerned with a database that contains ~all~ businesses, rather just the kind of businesses that a person would be interested in if they're travelling. I won't use my Garmin to find a plumber, a dentist or a web designer. I would use it to find a restaurant, gas station or hotel. Producing and maintaining a list of businesses (identity management) is a different problem from determining how good a business is, and what experiences people have had with it. I know that geonames contains a database of hotels. Personally I'm most interested in the restaurants. Travelling in the rural US, I tire pretty quick of pizza, subs and chinese food. The ideal system finds me something that isn't one of those, but if it can't do that, at least helps me get a good sub instead of a bad sub. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Explaining to NASA why the ASTER data should be freely licensed
Jeffrey Ollie wrote: Ævar, thanks for taking point on this... These sort of licensing issues are an annoying, but necessary part of our work and not everyone has the stomach for it. I myself have run into the issue locally... There's nearby county that has very high resolution aerial images but the standard licensing terms that they offer them under would make it impossible for me to use with OSM. That plus the fact that they would charge me a lot of money for copies of the images has made me decide not to even bother. Perhaps I'm assuming something that's not true, but there may be a national security kind of issue here too. I've seen very similar licenses on, for instance, neutronic simulation codes for nuclear reactors. The design of the license is to (i) sound very open, (ii) make it so that the right people can get the product easily, but (iii) the product can be denied to anyone that that the owners want to deny it to without having to give a honest reason. Of course, for all I know, North Korean tanks already have Tom Toms loaded with pirate versions of the latest commercial maps of S. Korea. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Getting Good Tracks With eTrex
I was annoyed to discover that saved tracks on my eTrex Vista HCx don't have timestamps. I did some experimenting and discovered that I need to use the ACTIVE LOG if I want timestamps and control over the tracks. Funny enough, I didn't find this in the manual or online, so I wrote something up at http://gen5.info/q/2009/06/03/getting-a-good-track-from-a-garmin-etrex/ Is there anything else I need to know about getting good tracks? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] How big of an SD card should I get for Openstreetmap work
I just got a Garmin Etrex Vista HCx that I'd like to use for viewing Openstreetmaps and for creating tracks I can upload. I'm about to buy an SD card for this: how big of a card do I need to hold Openstreetmaps? ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Addr:streetnumber:first;last:left;right
Marcus Wolschon wrote: On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Florian Lohoff f...@rfc822.org wrote: On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 11:28:16AM -0400, Russ Nelson wrote: All the world is not Germany (echoing All the world's not a VAX, but I date myself). Reminds me of the time that I walked an extra two miles looking for the US embassy in Berlin because I didn't understand the street numbering. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
