Re: [Talk-us] Washington DC place node cleanup

[Kevin Kenny]

Native en-US speaker here.

The city of Washington and the District of Columbia are coterminous.
Toponyms such as 'Georgetown', 'Anacostial', 'University Heights', refer to
neighbourhoods within the city.

It's quite common in the US to say, 'D.C.' when talking about the city -
perhaps even commoner than saying 'Washington'.  There are many contexts in
which the city and state of Washington introduce an ambiguity, so it's also
pretty common to say, 'Washington State' if context doesn't make it clear
that the state is what's intended.

The full name, 'District of Columbia', is almost never used colloquially;
it's always abbreviated when speaking.



On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 6:04 AM Frederik Ramm  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> when reverting an edit this morning I noticed that the node for
> Washington (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/158368533) has myriad
> name:xx tags, many of which seem to be some variant of "Washington D.C."
> (with or without commas or dots), whereas the "local" name seems to be
> just Washington, without the D.C.
>
> As a native speaker of German I can assure you that we don't call the US
> capital "Washington D.C." as the name:de tag claims; I would assume that
> it is similar for most other languages. The German-language OSM map at
> https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=10=38.70174=-76.93764
> has a mechanism where it displays the German name and then, if the local
> name is different, the local name below; since the German name
> "Washington D.C." and the local name "Washington" are different, this
> leads to a somewhat funny display (whereas the logic works ok for other
> US cities).
>
> I could of course fix the German name but I think that it might need a
> more thorough review and I don't feel competent for that.
>
> Two name tags (and this is checking only those that use Roman letters)
> look like they might be entirely wrong and refer to the District of
> Columbia only:
>
> name:lfn=Distrito de Columbia
> name:mi=Takiwā o Columbia
>
> Then again, I've heard people say "I was in D.C." and mean the city, so
> perhaps that *is* a legitimate name for the city? Maybe someone in the
> US community wants to have a look and do this right.
>
> It is a bit of a conundrum in OSM - we usually say that local knowledge
> tops everything, but then again for many of the languages there might
> not even *be* a local Washington mapper in OSM ;)
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>


-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Reference numbers to use for hiking trail route relations

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 5:48 PM Mark Brown  wrote:

> I've noticed that the US Topo Maps are way out of date before - whole
> rivers have shifted since the version that displays on JSOM was last
> compiled. Still, like TIGER roads, it's better than nothing I guess.
>

No surprise. USGS was defunded in the G.H.W. Bush administration and hasn't
really done field surveys since.  The new US Topo series is based on
whatever databases they had or could get their hands on. In many places
it's missing even the railroads.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-there-no-power-lines-pipelines-libraries-trails-etc-us-topo-maps

Unfortunately, for political reasons, they've been forced to set themselves
up in competition with OSM even as they've come to rely on crowdsourced
data. As far as I can tell "The National Map Corps" (
https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/tnm-corps) hasn't really gone
anywhere. OSM, at this point, offers more 'bang' for the volunteers'
'buck'. (The big problem, from the perspective of any government agency, is
that OSM doesn't have enough administrative control; who's to say that the
mappers are trustworthy? They could put *any* sort of bogosity into the
map! And I had better stop myself before I veer off into saying something
political that I'll regret.)

In any case, we have better maps of Iraq and Afghanistan than we have of
our own country.

I got into this project because for too many areas near me, I couldn't get
decent trail maps - from any source.  The ones from the state were rife
with errors; the USGS topos were sometimes from the 1953 state survey; the
NatGeo trail maps were at an unusably small scale (1:75000 for a trail map?
Really???)  Now, thanks to many OSM volunteers, I can get reasonably usable
maps for many places where I hike. The state appears to have been
correcting its maps - and apparently using OSM to do it.  (I also noticed
that at least one USGS site uses OSM, properly credited, to produce its
index map.)

For all we bitch about the TIGER import, I'd probably not have joined
without it. I recall looking at OSM before that happened, and saying to
myself, "why bother? There's nothing there!"  Now I spend various odd
moments 'cleaning the cat box' after what TIGER left behind, but it was
indeed better than nothing.



> On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 12:14:35 -0700, stevea 
> wrote:
>
> > On Oct 15, 2020, at 12:06 PM, Joseph Eisenberg <
> joseph.eisenb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Many of the old "pack trail" labeled features near my home-town are
> now overgrown and barely usable. I would be skeptical about the utility of
> this tag - mappers will need to survey the trail in person before
> suggesting that it is currently suitable for horse, mules or other pack
> animals.
> >
> > Right:  many "trails" labelled "Pack Trail" are either from a long time
> ago and/or mapped a long time ago.  I would be wary of the utility of this
> label on many maps, but that can be said of many labels on many maps,
> especially when they are older or specify an "older" aspect of a map label
> such as "Pack Trail."  This has an old-fashioned sense about it, as while
> pack animals on trails are certainly still used, it's safe to say far, far
> less than they were in the 20th (and 19th and previous) centuries.


Uhm, yeah.  About the only useful information to be gleaned is that such a
trail was once graded for livestock, so is highly unlikely to have rock
scrambles or difficult fords. (Nothing about what our friend Castor
canadensis might have done to it!)

Still, there's at least one group still organizing llama trekking in the
Adirondacks:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3HVYZTbQVTw/XuOGlHM3nTI/XOM/g1KTWlBPMng_xCRnmcEdcubJhBBx0M0oACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_0453.jpg



-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Reference numbers to use for hiking trail route relations

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 6:09 PM Mark Brown  wrote:

> Just mapping some of the trails in the Cabinet Mountains in the Idaho
> panhandle, from the US Topo Maps. Noticed that the trails have numbers.
> What should I put in the "ref" for the route relation?


It's perfectly acceptable to put a trail number in 'ref' on a route
relation.  And while the presets only offer 'lwn' 'rwn', 'nwn', 'iwn', I'd
say that in North American practice, putting in the name of the authority
that assigned the 'ref' would be appropriate in 'network=*', particularly
in regions where multiple networks may be overlaid.


> Also, some of the trails are marked as Pack Trails but there is no
> documented tag in the wiki. Would adding "pack=yes" be acceptable?
>

What is a 'Pack Trail'? One graded for livestock, so that a pack mule
(horse, llama, etc.) can be brought along?  Would 'horse=yes' (or maybe
some other value if pack animals are OK but riding animals is forbidden)
cover it? In which case, also consider making the way a bridleway and and
having a route=horse as well as a route=hiking relation.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Recent Trunk road edits

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 3:15 PM Evin Fairchild  wrote:
> Many of his downgrading from Trump to primary were completely unjustified.

Oh, $LC_DEITY, autocorrupt in 2020!  (I'd have loved to have
downgraded Trump in the primary, but this year he was unopposed.)

Yeah, I know, you meant 'trunk'.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Recent Trunk road edits

[Kevin Kenny]

1. I agree with Paul that the US definitely does have trunk roads.
High-speed dual carriageways with some grade crossings, or 'super
twos,' both qualify. (See (3) for the counterargument about
'importance to the highway network.')

2. The network and route number do not reliably identify the highway
class. New York has unnumbered roads, state highways, and US highways,
that are definitely freeways, There is at least one section of
Interstate that is not a freeway, but rather a 'super two'. US
Highways can be anything from unclassified or tertiary (there are some
US highways that the world has bypassed, but retain the designation
for historical reasons) to freeway. New York's numbered state highways
all appear to be at least secondary, but some are primaries, trunks or
motorways.

3. While the 'highway=*' designation is supposed to denote 'importance
to the highway system', the road characteristics (surface, lanes,
speed limit, ...) are useful surrogates. Highway administrators who
commission multi-lane divided highways that don't provide a major
connection in the network, or elevate crossings on low-traffic roads,
tend to get tarred and feathered by the taxpayers, so the road
characteristics tend to provide a lower bound on the highway class.
It's not a hard upper bound; in some rural areas, a tertiary or even
secondary road may well be narrow and lack a hard surface, simply
because that's what the traffic demands and the community will
support. It's also not an infallible guide, particularly in urban
areas; a city street may be six or eight lanes wide in a congested
area without necessarily having a key role in the network.

4. The official designation of the road's importance is tremendously
influenced by politics. Nevertheless, that designation determines
highway funding, which in turn determines the quality of the road,
which in turn ought to determine routing precedence, so in the end,
even if the official designation doesn't make sense, a designated
'trunk' road will likely be built to support more traffic and a higher
speed than a 'tertiary' one.

5. This isn't the first edit war on the subject.

Some more details follow.

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 12:08 PM Matthew Woehlke
 wrote:
>
> On 28/09/2020 11.42, Jack Burke wrote:
> > I'm willing to bet that most OSM editors who drive on either of those two
> > will think "this is a great freeway, just with occasional traffic signals."
>
> That's an oxymoron. Freeways are, by definition, limited access (no
> crossing intersections, period) and do not have (permanent¹) signs or
> signals to halt traffic. IMNSHO, if it has traffic lights, stop signs,
> or the possibility of vehicles suddenly driving *across* the way, it
> isn't a freeway.
>
> That's not to say there aren't non-interstate highways that meet these
> definitions.
>
> But... is it a highway=trunk? *I* don't see where the wiki excludes the
> possibility. (It does, however, seem to me that only *actual* interstate
> freeways should be highway=motorway in the US.)

I beg to differ.  NY-17 is indeed a motorway for most of its length
(east and south of Harriman, it ought to be primary) It's more-or-less
permanently unfinished between Deposit and Hancock, because the
terrain offers extremely difficult challenges to freeway-building.
Portions are, in fact, posted intermittently as 'Future I-86', but my
understanding is that it can't get that designation until and unless
the missing bit in the middle is finished.

Several of New York's state parkways, such as Southern State Parkway
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1676429, are multi-lane, dual
carriageway, access fully controlled, all crossings elevated, for
their entire length. Southern State Parkway would differ from
'Interstate' only in that: (a) the speed limit is 55 mile/hr (but all
urban freeways in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, including I-495, have
the reduced speed limit), (b) they are hgv=no, (c) they don't have
Federal interstate highway funding. It's not clear to me that any of
these attributes would make them 'not a freeway'.

Taconic Parkway is controversial.  To me, it's clearly a trunk road
from the southern terminus through I-287 (mile 2.85), with all but one
intersection at grade.  Between I-287 and Peekskill Hollow Road (mile
41.28) it drives like a freeway. All the crossings are elevated. North
of that, the crossings with major roads are mostly elevated, but local
streets typically have intersections at grade.  North of Rigor Hill
Road (mile 152.73) there are no at-grade crossings to the northern
terminus (I-90, mile 104.12). I've mostly refrained from editing this
one.  My preference would be to call it a motorway between I-287 and
Peekskill Hollow Road, and again between NY-203 and I-90, and a trunk
road in between. At one point, the locals (or the TIGER import?) had
mapped it as 'motorway' throughout, downgrading it to 'trunk' only for
a few hundred yards surrounding each at-grade intersection; I consider
the latter practice 

Re: [Talk-us] place=neighborhood on subdivisions?

[Kevin Kenny]

Another vote for Evin and Minh's interpretation.

I've been tagging named, signed, suburban (in the US sense)
subdivisions with landuse=residential and name=*.

I make no distinction among the subdivisions that consist of
apartments, terraces, or detached houses (except when mapping the
buildings themselves): thus, I've mapped 'Hillcrest Villaage' and 'Van
Antwerp Village' (apartment complexes), 'Village Meadow' and 'Country
Gardens' (condos), 'Orchard Park' (mixed condos and detached houses)
and 'Hawthorne Hill' (detached houses) all as landuse=residential
name=*.

I overlap natural=wood where appropriate, since the overlap of landuse
and landcover causes no conflict. I work similarly with
amenity=parking when the parking lot is part of the community. If
there's landuse=basin, landuse=religious, or something similar inside
the area, I make a cutout, since those are conflicting land uses, even
if the drainage basin or church is part of the planned community.

I've contemplated using place=neighbourhood (on either node or way)
with them, but eventually concluded that it was too subjective a
decision for whether residents would self-identify their neighbourhood
as being the same as their subdivision.  To someone from Niskayuna,
New York, I might say that I live in Orchard Park, or that Andrea
lives in Windsor Estates - the locals know most of the subdivision
names, and many of them have the names of the main entrance roads
match the name of the subdivision (Orchard Park Road, Windsor Drive).
To someone who isn't local, I'd more likely reference cross streets or
landmarks: "the subdivision on the north side of the high school". I
have no problem, though, with putting the name of the subdivision on
the landuse=residential polygon: the names are signed and
field-verifiable.

When I'm micromapping a neighbourhood, I do map private swimming pools
because the fire department appreciates it.

I try to respect privacy, and map landuse=residential on individual
lots only when the lot is completely surrounded by other land uses.
That case is hard to reconcile with privacy: if someone owns a parcel
that has park land (in the US sense) on two sides, a wastewater plant
on a third, and a river on the fourth, the parcel is going to be
visible in any case as the hole among the other land uses.  To have it
not be deducible, I'd have to refrain from mapping one or another of
the adjoining facilities, and I think we all agree that parks,
wastewater plants and rivers are objects that ought to be mapped.



On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 11:48 AM Evin Fairchild  wrote:
>
> I totally agree with Minh here. I always thought that it was standard 
> parctice in OSM to add the name tag to a landuse=residential way that 
> encompasses the subdivision. Subdivision names aren't always used in common 
> parlance (especially if it's a smaller subdivision) so most people wouldn't 
> necessarily consider the subdivision name to be the name of the neighborhood 
> that they live in.
>
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:44 AM Minh Nguyen  
> wrote:
>>
>> Vào lúc 18:40 2020-09-22, Paul Johnson đã viết:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 8:36 PM Mike N
>> > > > > wrote:
>> >
>> > On 9/22/2020 9:26 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
>> >  > The extra hamlet nodes are import remainders that haven't
>> > yet been
>> >  > converted to landuse areas.   The general landuse zones for
>> > that area
>> >  > have been identified, but do not exactly correspond to the named
>> >  > subdivisions.   As I get a chance to survey, I divide the
>> > landuse into
>> >  > subdivisions and convert the node to a named area for the
>> > subdivision.
>> >  >
>> >  >
>> >  > Please don't expand these as landuse, please expand them as
>> >  > place=neighborhood instead.  Landuse polygons should be congruent
>> > to the
>> >  > actual land use.
>> >
>> > That's a good point: the subdivisions often contain one or more landuse
>> > basins, clusters of trees, etc.   I've been thinking of them as one big
>> > blob, but it seem correct on a more micromap level to mark them as
>> > place=, and identify the smaller landuse areas (which are sometimes all
>> > residential).
>> >
>> >
>> > Exactly.  My rule of thumb is if you're thinking about putting a name on
>> > it, and it's not a shopping center, apartment complex or similar large
>> > but contiguous landuse, then landuse=* probably isn't what your polygon
>> > should be.
>>
>> It's common, intuitive, and IMO beneficial to map a planned,
>> suburban-style residential development as a single named
>> landuse=residential area. These developments have well-defined
>> boundaries and are primarily residential in character. If there are some
>> wooded lots in the subdivision, it's perfectly fine to map a
>> natural=wood area inside of or partially overlapping the
>> landuse=residential area, ideally without being connected 

Re: [Talk-us] While we're fixing things in iterations

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 6:04 AM Minh Nguyen
 wrote:
> More recently, Kevin Kenny reimplemented the shield renderer using a
> more robust approach [3] and has discussed route relation support with
> the openstreetmap-carto developers. [4]
>
> OSMUS is interested in offering an Americentric renderer replete with
> shields. If anyone would like to help with the server situation, let's
> get in touch. Also I'm sure Kevin would welcome any pull requests to his
> osm-shields project, which would probably be a good starting point for
> this renderer if we go with Mapnik and raster tiles.

Everything Minh said here is true. I'd welcome all the help I can get!

The project has been on hold for quite some time, because I got
tremendously frustrated with it.  There are a lot of moving parts that
all need to come together to make it work. It touches a many
components in the rendering chain.

OSM-Carto is not the main problem.  Its developers are quite
responsive indeed to the idea. (I know that it would eventually bog
down for a while in controversy, but if we're talking about a
US-centric openstreetmap.us server, we could fork the style.) It's not
been my #1 priority, simply because I use the shield rendering for
some of my own maps, and I don't use the OSM style for them.

For OSM-Carto to do the shield rendering, Carto itself would have to
handle it.  That requires support in Carto for the GroupSymbolzer in
Mapnik. [5] I don't imagine this would be all that hard a problem, and
again the Carto developers are interested and would most likely accept
a well-done PR.

Mapnik is a non-issue. For my maps, I was able to use Mapnik itself
'out of the box', except for the fact that I render in two layers, one
for fill colour and one to overlay linear features, icons and labels.
(I work it this way because I interrupt linear features with
transparent cutouts for labels, and I want the fill colour to show in
the transparent areas.) This is easy enough in Python; I have no idea
what the impact would be on Carto because at present I don't use it.

The shield placement in Mapnik depends on quite a complex piece of
SQL. [6] The reason for the complexity is that readable shield
placement is extremely difficult when considering a route as a bucket
of discrete ways. It gets much easier if ways can be grouped into the
longest possible linear sequences that share a set of markers (this
happens at [7]). The SQL in turn depends on a couple of extra tables
in the rendering database: 'planet_shieldroute', which enumerates the
route relations that require shields; and 'planet_shieldway', which
enumerates the ways that are members of the routes and gives their
roles.

Because of the complexity of composing the shielded routes at the time
of rendering, Paul Norman and Sarah Hoffmann are convinced that the
approach I'm using would be far too slow if it were tried on an OSM
tile server, and demand a different one. Neither of them has, so far,
sketched an alternative design, and I have so far not been able to
come up with one myself. Paul, in one message, hinted that developing
a renderer for concurrent routes that would satisfy all his
constraints may not, in fact, be possible. Unfortunately for me, this
discussion spilled over into the changes that would be required for
osm2pgsql; I sketched what osm2pgsql would need for the two auxiliary
tables to be created, and drafted a formal proposal [8] for the idea.
(Note that in that proposal I proposed no changes whatsoever to OSM's
main renderer.) The developers of osm2pgsql unambiguously indicated
that a PR implementing the change would not be considered. As a
result, I decided that the project would have to switch to another
database importer, likely imposm3. [9] Maintaining a fork of osm2pgsql
indefinitely was not an acceptable approach to me! Making the switch
would require me to retool quite a lot of unrelated work, so I
reluctantly decided to put the project on hold.

Since then, Joseph Eisenberg and Jochen Topf have stepped in on the
osm2pgsql project and committed the 'Flex' backend. [10] I have not
had the time to try to use the Flex backend to develop an importer for
the tables that I need, but quickly scanning the documentation
suggests that it has everything that the project would require - and
was found acceptable to the osm2pgsql developers. I think, therefore,
that particular roadblock may have been removed.

So the limiting factor, then, is my time - which is in
catastrophically short supply at the moment. I'm facing clamouring
demands at work because people seem finally to be getting the idea
that I'm retiring - with only five weeks left to go.  Once I've
finally left the workplace and had a little bit of time to rest, I
might take another run at the hill.

In the meantime, the Github for the project has some further notes on
what needs to be done to make the shaped rendering and route relation
handling scalable. [11]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 6:57 P

Re: [Talk-us] Cooper Country State Forest in Keweenaw County, MI [parcel ownership]

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 5:34 PM Doug Peterson <
dougpeter...@dpeters2.dyndns.org> wrote:

> That is made up of two properties. The southern, larger square is owned by
> Thomas & Jane Griffith. The northern, smaller square is owned by the John &
> Jane Griffith. The other square to the west of that, not included, is owned
> by John & Jane Griffith. That is just ownership. That does not say whether
> is any sort of "easement" (possibly the wrong choice of word) that could
> cause it to be included.
>
> This can be referenced from Landgrid.
>
>
> https://landgrid.com/us/mi/keweenaw/allouez#b=none=property=/us/mi/keweenaw/27
>
>
> https://landgrid.com/us/mi/keweenaw/allouez#b=none=property=/us/mi/keweenaw/15
>
>
Since it's showing up there, and it isn't showing up in the DNR Parcels
data set (which shows conservation easements as well as land owned in fee
simple), we have two confirmations that it's indeed private.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Unintentional improvements in OSM data influencing / improving other databases

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 2:48 PM Joseph Eisenberg 
wrote:

> But if we are talking about legal parcel boundaries or legal protected
> area boundaries, or administrative limits, then it's not at all possible
> for OpenStreetMap users to resolve these conflicts in our database alone.
>
> What needs to happen is bringing this information back to the local
> government and asking them to correct the data and provide an
> authoritative, public-domain source for everyone to use.
>
> It's no good if OpenStreetMap has a more "accurate" boundary line which
> follows a physical feature like a ridgeline, if the legal definition is
> different. Determining this might require lawyers getting involved.
>
> Now certainly OpenStreetMap data, which can include features like
> ridgelines, waterways, roads and paths, which are often used to determine
> historic land ownership boundaries, can be useful in determining if
> existing databases are accurate and precise. But unless those outside
> databases are corrected, our data will be inaccurate as well, when it comes
> to legal issues like boundaries.
>

You are labouring under a misconception that there is some authoritative
database somewhere in the halls of government. There simply is not.

In the US legal system, the verbal description of a property in a deed
takes absolute precedence over any map, and the witness marks in the field
*are* the boundary. Recovering and refreshing the marks is a big part of
what a land surveyor does.

If there is a dispute over a boundary,  the courts can resolve it. In the
cases we're talking about, the courts will not weigh in because there is no
case or controversy before them.

In no case is _any_ government GIS system in most states[1] of the US an
authoritative reference for a property line, and there is nothing
resembling a Torrens title system. Even in the ten or so states that
maintain a registry of land plans as well as titles, the verbal description
generally takes priority over the map. The registries are more about
identifying parcels, and tracking who owns them (and holds easements,
liens, deeds of trust, and the like) than they are about specifying the
metes and bounds of the parcels.

One reason that my uncle's feud with his neighbour could go on so long was
that the formal description of the property was something like 'SW/4 of
NW/4 of Section XX, Lot YY, Great Lot ZZ, Division 1 of the Minisink Patent
of 1704.  Searching that sort of title is like writing _Roots_!
Fortunately, when my brother and the neighbour decided to bury the hatchet,
a forester with a metal detector was able to recover not only corner
monuments, but the remains of a barbed-wire fence - so there was an obvious
place to strike the line.

Even for public land, there's no single authoritative source.  In New York,
for instance, there was a legal dispute about land ownership between
private landholders and the state that went back to the 1860s that required
a statewide constitutional referendum in 2013 to authorize the settlement.
https://www.wamc.org/post/new-york-settles-adirondack-land-dispute . (Yes,
the place is named 'Township 40'.) When this sort of title dispute can
languish for 150 years, how could there be an authoritative reference?

There are cases where I've left inconsistent boundaries in OSM
intentionally. In at least one of those places, I successfully recovered
monuments at both of the inconsistent corners. That one's beyond my pay
grade and will be an issue for the courts if there's ever a dispute.
(Unlikely, both sides of the line are protected forest land, belonging to
different authorities.)

In typically American-capitalist fashion, in lieu of state registration, we
have a privatized system of title insurance
.

[Notes]

[1] There's limited Torrens title in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Washington.
Several of these states are in the process of abolishing it.

In New York, Torrens title was abolished in 2000, and there have been no
new land title registrations since. Even before then, it was optional,
complex and expensive. (I bought my house in 1993 and got a warranty deed,
not a certificate of registered title.) There are still some landowners
still have a Certificate of Title rather than a deed. There are only a
handful of Torrens properties in most counties. It is most common in
Suffolk County, and there are several in Kings and Rockland counties. It's
now considered rather a blemish; many title insurers won't accept a
certificate of title and need to do an extended search to protect against
claims of fraud against the certified title. It's a mess.

Illinois has abolished its Torrens system entirely, but again, there are
issues surrounding legacy title, so the registry must remain accessible.

Torrens title has been unpopular because it is vulnerable to fraudulent
deeds and has been abused

Re: [Talk-us] Cooper Country State Forest in Keweenaw County, MI

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 1:47 PM Joseph Eisenberg 
wrote:

> My goodness, look at that monstrosity:
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1976405#map=8/46.459/-87.627
>
> How can we claim that all of these patches of state-owned land constitute
> a single OpenStreetMap feature?
>

Because they share a name, share a management plan, are managed as a whole,
are signed alike, enjoy the same protection status, and are popularly
thought of as a unit.

The US has some untidy and diffuse features. Some of those untidy and
diffuse features are important to those who live around them, earn their
livings by them, or recreate in them. Don't demand that we refrain from
mapping them because they fail to conform with your mental model of the
world as it ought to be. It comes across as saying, "My model is fine, fix
your country!" I can't fix it, in any reasonable timeframe at least. I'm
constrained to mapping the country I have.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Trouble with getting Superior National Forest boundary to render on standard map

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 3:14 PM stevea  wrote:

> Here I weigh-in with what I believe to be a crucial distinction between
> "cadastral data which are privately owned" and "data which can be
> characterized as cadastral, but which are publicly owned and are often used
> for recreation, hiking and similar human activities."
>

'Private' vs 'public' hits near the mark, but not in the gold.  I was
trying to be precise when I said that the property line determines the
protected status and the public access constraints. A public-access nature
reserve operated by an NGO (such as a private conservancy or land trust -
there are quite a few in my part of the world) deserves the same treatment
as a government-run one.

What we discuss here is the particular (peculiar?) example of national
> forests in the USA, where there are effectively "two legal boundaries, one
> actual ownership, another potential ownership."


There's a nearly parallel situation in New York, where the 'potential
ownership' in the Adirondack and Catskill Parks is, in effect, the entirety
of those parks. In that case, though, the outer boundary is indeed signed,
affects zoning to a tremendous extent, and realtors will make it quite
clear that a property is in (or is not in) the park. (It's parallel to
several national parks in the UK, and I've gotten affirmation from a number
of prominent UK mappers that these two are properly
`boundary=national_park`.)

Within these two parks, there are a great many Wild Forests and Wilderness
Areas and Intensive Use Areas and New York City Watershed Recreation Areas
and a zoo of other things that are owned by one government or another.
They, too, are mapped, since they have protection status different from the
park as a whole, and since they are the public-access portions of the park.
(They account for something like half the land area - and we're talking a
pretty huge swath; the Adirondack Park has about the same land area as the
State of Massachusetts.)  Wilderness and Intensive Use Areas tend to have
fairly compact borders (in topology, not in size!) High Peaks
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360488 and West Canada Lakes
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360511 are the largest, and as you
can see, they have few inholdings or transportation corridors.  Wild Forest
areas (a slightly less restrictive classification) are ordinarily a lot
more diffuse, with patchworks of public and private holdings. They include
messes like Saranac Lakes https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6362702 and
Wilcox Lake https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360587
.
While the classification of any land being added to the Forest Preserve
goes through a public notice and comment period, I'm sure that someone in
the Adirondack Park Agency has on the drawing board a sketch that says,
'any conservation land that comes into our hands in *this* area will be
added to *that* wild forest', but that's not proclaimed the way it is with
National Forests.

As diffuse as they are, these are the areas that have public access, and
`protect_class=1b` (or whatever the protection class of any given area is).
The cadastre determines the land use and protection status.

We absolutely should agree (here? now?) on which of these two (or both) we
> enter into OSM.  The current situation of data in our map is scattered
> between the two and still confused in the minds of many mappers who do or
> wish to enter these data.  Since we agree they should be entered, let's
> better discuss how we enter them "properly" (by achieving consensus) and
> watch as they render according to our hammered-out-here agreements on how
> this should and will best take place.  We really are getting closer to
> doing this, thanks to excellent discussion here.


With the two great parks of New York, we've mapped both the outer bounds -
which are consistently signed, at least on the highways - and the bounds of
the state-owned conservation land - which are also signed.  With the
National Forests, it's much less clear. Ordinarily the signage does NOT
follow the proclaimed boundary - there are no National Forest signs in the
middle of Reno - but rather are posted at the first actual Forest Service
parcel that a road encounters. The markings for the individual protected
parcels are more subtle, but they're there. Generally, the proclaimed
boundary is NOT visible in the field. (By contrast, there *are*  Adirondack
Park signs on streets  in Glens Falls/Queensbury, Corinth, Broadalbin,
Mayfield,  even in the villages)

I don't mind mapping the proclaimed areas of National Forests, but it's
hard to come up with an appropriate tag since the proclamation has so
little actual effect. The actual owned areas are definitely significant and
I do *not* want to give them up. My belief is that the conservation
easements - the intermediate category - would be nothing but clutter if
rendered on a general-purpose 

Re: [Talk-us] Trouble with getting Superior National Forest

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 9:03 AM Frederik Ramm  wrote:

> On 01.09.20 14:40, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> > We don't map cadastre at least partly out of respect for personal
> > privacy - something that is not at issue with government-owned land.
>
> I think I'm with Joseph here, we don't map cadastre stuff also because
> it makes no sense for us to become a copy of data that is
> authoritatively kept elsewhere. OSM's strength is that data can be
> edited by everybody based on observations. Data for which the sentence
> "if you edit this it will become wrong" is true should not be in OSM.
>

In my area, I deal with - and have imported - several 'authoritative' data
sets, and I personally do _not_ consider them all that authoritative, since
they are digitizations of descriptions of what is in the field. (Our land
title does not work by latitude and longitude; the authoritative reference
is a verbal description of the 'metes and bounds' - the physical objects in
the field that define the property line. A land surveyor must recover those
objects in order to do a formal survey of the line; generally speaking, the
surveyors choose or make marks that will last for decades or centuries, and
make redundant marks so that a line can be struck from partial recovery.)
They're quite often some distance away from reality.

I deal routinely with cases where there is public land managed by different
authorities, with shared boundaries. The boundaries very seldom align, and
occasionally are far off.

In many of these cases OSM has an opportunity to improve the government
data.  A mapper can analyze the conflict, sort out the different data
sources, perhaps visit the site in the field, and produce a result that is
more accurate than any of the government data sets. It's been pretty quiet,
but I know that there some corrections from OSM have flowed back into some
of the government data sets that I use.

A handful of particular examples:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/391486 - reconstructing a
town line by comparison of old maps from the Federal government (three
versions of the USGS topo maps), the State government (the topo maps from
the State department of transportation, wilderness boundaries from the
Department of Environmental Conservaion, tax plats from two counties, and
historic maps of the old Dutch land grants.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/42951 - clarifying the
boundary between a State Park and a military reservation - needed to warn
hikers of trespassing - which was incorrect in *all* available data sources
and needed some field work to recover.

(no diary entry) Unifying the boundaries of the West Point military
reservation https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175474 with the
surrounding lands, which include three state parks, a protected forest
belonging to an NGO, a cemetery, a golf course, and several transportation
corridors. The boundaries of all these objects had been previously on the
map from other imports and from hand-mapping - and conspicuously failed to
align. The data from the US Government were perhaps the worst of the lot -
and in fact, I got conflicting data from multiple agencies. I'm still not
100% sure of the totality of the boundary - it's a massive project - but
the very worst inconsistencies did indeed have their corners verified in
the field. (Every so often, someone, without discussion, reimports one or
another government data set on top of this hard work, and I'm grateful to
the DWG for the times that they've helped me get it sorted again.) One
thing that was particularly satisfying about this one is that Black Rock
Forest had previously been a blank spot on the map. I heard from a local
mapper who had learnt about its existence from OSM - and within a few
months after I added the boundary, he and others had filled in quite a lot
of detail within it!

(no diary entry again) I've revised the boundaries of a number of the
Wilderness and Wild Forest areas in the Adirondacks, because they clearly
were following natural features, and were misaligned to those features
(e.g., islands in the lakes).  That's gone as far as to remove one boundary
line from the Lake George Islands property because that island itself was
destroyed in a storm some years ago. (The State GIS people had simply not
got around to making the change.)

(no diary entry) OSM had, more or less correctly, the expansion of the High
Peaks Wilderness https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360488 into the
area around the Boreas Ponds about six months before the state GIS
department released the updated data set.  I entered it by obtaining copies
of the tax plats of the former Finch Pruyn company, and hand-digitizing the
areas that had been transferred to New York State.  (I reconciled the
differences when they did; I didn't leave my interim lines in place.)



In your criticisms of imports, you often describe them as dead data. I
don't agree.  In fact, any

Re: [Talk-us] Trouble with getting Superior National Forest

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 12:52 AM Bradley White 
wrote:

>  If you drive into a checkerboard
>> area of private/public land, there are no Forest Service signs at the
>> limits of private land.
>>
>
> In my neck of the woods, USFS owned land is signed fairly frequently with
> small yellow property markers at the boundaries.
>

In repeated discussions about the large government-owned mixed-public-use
land areas in the US, people have argued repeatedly that the boundaries are
unverifiable.  We've shown references like
https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/gwj/specialplaces/?cid=stelprdb5276999
indicating
that the boundaries are indeed marked, and how they are marked.

Note that that reference distinguishes the proclaimed boundary - the large
region in which the Congress has authorized the National Forest to exist -
from the actual forest land.

Maps commonly show proclaimed national forest boundaries. However, all land
> within these boundaries is not national forest land; some is privately
> owned. The user is cautioned to comply with state law and owner's rules
> when entering onto private land.


This has failed to satisfy. The same individuals continue to contend, each
time the topic comes around, that the boundaries are unverifiable, and to
cling to that contention in the face of this evidence. In a previous round,
one of the people actually advanced the argument that only each individual
sign, blaze, stake or cairn is verifiable, and that the line that they mark
is not verifiable and ought not to be mapped.

This behaviour convinced me long ago that there is a certain contingent
here, almost entirely comprising people who've never set foot in a National
Forest, who ardently wish to keep US National Forests and similar lands
(e.g., the zoo of New York State public-access areas, the Pennsylvania
State Game Lands, and even our State Parks) off the map, for reasons that
don't touch on verifiability, but throw verifiability into the pot in an
effort to make a stronger case.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Trouble with getting Superior National Forest

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 3:18 AM Joseph Eisenberg 
wrote:

> The OpenStreetMap community has long agreed that mapping cadastral parcels
> (land ownership) is not in scope. Protect area and National Park boundaries
> were supposed to be less difficult to confirm and more valid.
>
> But if what we are going to start mapping in the USA is simply the federal
> ownership of land, that's just pure cadastre data. We might as well try to
> map all the private land parcels and keep that information accurate - but
> both tasks are too difficult, and the data is better provided by local
> governments directly.
>

We don't map cadastre at least partly out of respect for personal privacy -
something that is not at issue with government-owned land.

A larger point, however, is that we _do_ map land use; we _do_ map
protection status, and we _do_ map constraints on public access.  In this
particular case, as with many cases of government-owned land, the land use,
the protection status, and the public access all follow the property lines.
That is what is (implicitly) being mapped; mapping the property line is the
way that it is achieved.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Trouble with getting Superior National Forest boundary to render on standard map

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 7:11 PM Joseph Eisenberg 
wrote:

> I believe there might be an issue with these complex multipolygons which
> is preventing osm2pgsql from handling them. Perhaps it is because nodes are
> shared between two outer rings?
>
> However, I also want to note that it is not clear to me that the new
> mapping is correct.
>
> The new outer boundaries for the Superior National Forest are very complex
> and only cover a small portion of the land within the National Forest outer
> boundary:
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/11558095
>
> Compare the official National Forest web map:
> https://usfs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=03a17ac9df1a4cd0bcc872ac996e7231
> - this matches the older, simpler boundary that was in OpenStreetMap
> previously. Also see this map on the Forest website:
> https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MEDIA/stelprdb5130373.pdf
>
> It appears that the new, complex relation is attempting to map what land
> is owned by the Federal government, rather than mapping the legal boundary
> of the National Forest. Is that correct?
>
> I believe this is a misinterpretation of the meaning of
> boundary=protected_area.
>

They're both 'legal' boundaries.

The simple outer boundary of a National Forest is 'the area in which the
Forest Service is authorized to purchase land without a new Act of Congress
expanding the forest.'  It's not signed in the field and has very little
effect upon the actual land management. It's generally all that the
enabling act of Congress specifies; the rest is done by having the law
authorize the Executive Branch to determine the status of parcels within
the legislated boundary.

The outer boundary also generally excludes all 'inholdings' - private
holdings that are enclosed by the national forest.

It gives a more pleasant rendering at low zoom levels while still giving a
sense of where the National Forest is, but does not reflect the situation
in the field.

The 'patchwork quilt' area is the area actually owned by the Federal
Government and administered by the Forest Service. It's normally what will
be posted in the field, and it's the area that actually enjoys the
protection.

For many Federally-administered land areas, there's also a third category:
land on which the Federal government owns a conservation easement
(essentially, the right to develop the land) but the land ownership (the
right to exclude others) is private. There are huge pieces of wildlife
refuges where Uncle Sam owns the hunting and development rights, but some
farmer or forester owns and works the land.

Most people in the general public would recognize only the most restrictive
definition in the field, since that is what's signed. A duck hunter would
look at an official map to see which of the private parcels comprising a
wildlife refuge are open to the public for hunting in season. Very few
people except the real estate lawyers care about the outermost boundary,
except to give something that can yield a readable rendering on small-scale
maps.

I'm all for making the boundary follow the legal designation that has the
greatest effect and is visibly signed.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Opinions on Devil's Slide Bunker (San Mateo, CA)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 9:06 AM Mateusz Konieczny via Talk-us <
talk-us@openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> 31 Aug 2020, 10:12 by frede...@remote.org:
>
> And @Mateusz, I am not convinced that "there are great views from here"
> is sufficient for tourism=viewpoint because it is too subjective. With
> that reasoning, someone with a personal low bar for "great views" could
> plaster the map with tourism=viewpoint.
>
> "Only places signed as viewpoint"
> would remove valuable data in Poland,
> and solving problem that AFAIK is not
> existing. At least in places where I visited
> (except rare cases).
>

There isn't a lot of signage on most of the trails I hike. Eliminating
unsigned viewpoints would impoverish the map.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 8:52 AM Russell Nelson  wrote:
> Maybe the problem is the name of the tag? Tag names can be misleading.
> They aren't just metadata.
They aren't *just* metadata, but we have a long history of enshrining
misleading tags by usage. (*cough* amenity=prison *cough*) Rather than
getting into fine and subjective distinctions about whether a viewpoint is
'intended' for tourism, I'm willing to accept that the existing tagging
simply announces 'there's a view' here and use access tagging to indicate
whether enjoying the view is invited, controlled, deprecated, or forbidden.

For those who claim that 'off-limits attractions should not be mapped' I
offer a few corner cases, to try to establish the contours of what we're
talking about.

OFF TRAIL, LAWFUL, UNSIGNED

(1) There's a ledge (that I've not mapped) between Balsam Cap and Friday
Mountain near https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/41.9810/-74.3610 that
offers a superb view of the Ashokan Valley and eastward as far as the
mountains of northwestern Connecticut and western Massachusetts.  It's well
known to local hikers. It's in a wilderness area. No trail serves it, and
there is no signage. Off-trail hiking is permitted in the area in question,
but hikers are cautioned to avoid the inadvertent creation of 'herd paths'
(=='use paths', 'social trails', ...).  Local trail maps (from New York/New
Jersey Trail Conference, Appalachian Mountain Club, National Geographic)
show the viewpoint.  Should we? I've refrained, but I also wouldn't delete
it if someone else were to map it.  (I personally mostly try to follow the
guidelines in https://www.trailgroove.com/issue36.html?autoflip=61. I'm
less afraid of my personal writing or posting of photos having a terrible
impact, since I don't have nearly Paul's following, but I've taken to being
more circumspect after reading that article and the blog posts that led up
to it, and I recognize that mapping on OSM might have a disproportionately
greater risk.)

Map, or not map?

OFF TRAIL, QUASI--LAWFUL, UNSIGNED

(2) There are several ghost towns and ruins of abandoned 19th-century
industry in Harriman State Park.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4080499 There are several guidebooks
that describe them in some detail.  Hiking off-trail in that park is
formally prohibited. Nevertheless, whenever I've visited one of the ranger
stations and asked something like, "would it be all right if I lead a party
of six to the Surebridge and Hogencamp mines starting from Lake
Skannatati?" the answer has been, "sure, have a good time!"

There has been exactly once that I was challenged by a policeman for
unlawful hiking, while coming onto a road from one of the old mine roads,
now grown to trees. I said, "Oh, sorry, when I asked at Tiorati Circle, the
desk corporal said it was all right."

He answered with a smile, 'OK, you're good!"

Essentially, the prohibition of off-trail hiking is because of the fact
that the area has lots of open mine shafts, cellar holes,
hundred-year-abandoned rusting mining equipment, and so on: quite dangerous
indeed if you aren't expecting them. It also gets a horde of novice hikers
from New York City and New Jersey. The combination could be deadly. The
solution is simply the weak 'security by obscurity' - if you know that
permission is routinely granted, you also are highly likely to know what
and where the hazards are.

To map the ruins, or not to map?

Another story from the same park, illustrating the overlap between
'permitted' and 'forbidden': There was one time I was going in on a Friday
evening for a winter backpack, and heard a ranger at the parking area
telling the couple ahead of me, "the park's closed!"

I was sufficiently puzzled that I stuck around until after they left, and
said to the ranger, "what's going on?"

He asked, "where were you headed?"

"I'm meeting some buddies up at the campsite on Fingerboard Mountain, and
we're planning to bum around on Saturday, make camp at West Mountain and
then hit the Bear Mountain Inn for Sunday brunch. I don't mind night-hiking
to Fingerboard, the reflective trail markers are easy to spot!"

He said, "oh, no problem, you go in!"

"Huh?"

"Oh, those two didn't have proper gear and had no clue where they were
going. You've obviously 

Re: [Talk-us] Mapping the Future I-87?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 5:21 PM Eric H. Christensen via Talk-us <
talk-us@openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> For the last few months, I've been seeing "Future I-87" signs along
> portions of US-64 and US-17 in North Carolina.  I-87[0] exists on a section
> of highway near Raleigh, NC, and will eventually extend to Norfolk, VA.
>
> Should I start a relation for "Future I-87" and add those sections of
> highway that are already known to be part of the project to the relation?
>
>
My opinion: Map the parts that are signed as 'Future I-87' in the field.
The extent to which we map 'future' routes is controversial, but if there
are M1 signs accompanied with signs in the style of M4 that read 'FUTURE'
instead of 'ALT', 'TEMPORARY', etc., then very few mappers would object to
mapping something that's signed in the field.

There are already routes mapped with route=road, network=US:I:Future, with
ref=26, ref=74, ref=785 and ref=840. I've been wanting to do 'Future I-86'
in New York, but I'd have to drive it to see precisely where it's signed.
(I can find out easily where the DOT says it is built, not so easily where
they've actually marked it.)



-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] changeset: 89516909

[Kevin Kenny]

You still aren't giving us very much to go on.  There's obviously some
boundary that you consider to be inarguably correct. You need either to
enter the data yourself or tell us where to find it and where the
discrepancies are.

Sometimes that involves quite a lot of research. I have a ton of data
conflicts about boundaries near me, and only rarely do I have the time to
pursue the issues. If often involves reconciling half a dozen supposedly
authoritative sources, as shown in
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/391486.  It's very rarely as
simple as 'agency X is wrong and agency Y is right'. It's often 'agency X
has lines that reflect current annexation, but part of their boundary is in
NAD27 and part WGS84. Agency Y misses a recent annexation but has got the
datums right. Agency Z has the artificial lines right, but is totally off
base with the shorelines. Agency W appears to have digitized from a
small-scale map and has a ton of quantization error.'

It's not a political boundary, but
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/42951 shows another example
of the level of cadastral research that's often required to sort these
things out.

By the way, I _do_ occasionally go out into the field and try to recover
old survey marks to sort these things out.  For the inconsistent corner
between Lost Clove Unit and Big Indian Wilderness at
https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/attachments/20191205/osm-vs-nysgis.png I simply
gave up. There are cairns at both corners. If the professional surveyors
couldn't close the line, what hope do I have? (Nobody actually cares. It's
wilderness anyway.)

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 8:03 PM 80hnhtv4agou--- via Talk-us <
talk-us@openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> FYI;
>
> for all of you who are not in country and do not understand about usa
> city bounders.
>
> https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/contact.html
>
> and did you read what the other guy said, this is the census data not true
> map data.
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/89598349.
>
>
> Tuesday, August 18, 2020 10:52 AM -05:00 from James Umbanhowar <
> jumba...@gmail.com>:
>
> What link are you using for this? I downloaded the places boundary
> information from here:
> https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php
>
> As I said, I'm happy to change, but I can't change without actual
> information.
>
> On Tue, 2020-08-18 at 18:43 +0300, 80hnhtv4agou--- via Talk-us wrote:
> > i am looking at the TIRGER web, show’s the real map online and
> > nothing you did matches.
> >
> > i live here and a block away from the edens spur just saying.
> >
> > > Tuesday, August 18, 2020 10:38 AM -05:00 from James Umbanhowar <
> > > jumba...@gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > It would probably be best if these suggestions were added in the
> > > changeset comments, as they don't need to be discussed on the
> > > mailing
> > > list.
> > >
> > > On Tue, 2020-08-18 at 11:36 -0400, James Umbanhowar wrote:
> > > > I'm the person who made the changes and am happy to adjust the
> > > map to
> > > > better authoritative data or information. My motivation for this
> > > was
> > > > to fix a mangled boundary relation that didn't have consistent
> > > outer
> > > > and inner members. The changes came in two changesets,
> > > > https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/89220282 and
> > > > https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/89516909
> > > >
> > > > The first changeset just made the relation consistent with outer
> > > ways
> > > > and inner ways. I preserved all the ways that were in the
> > > relation
> > > > that
> > > > lead to the inconsistency and they are still in the database with
> > > a
> > > > note attached to them. The second came after a changeset comment
> > > that
> > > > noted that the fixed relation didn't match and earlier unbroken
> > > > relation, in particular around the Edens Spur. I then changed the
> > > > border in this area to match the 2019 Tiger data in that area
> > > only.
> > > >
> > > > James
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, 2020-08-18 at 02:37 +0300, 80hnhtv4agou--- via Talk-us
> > > wrote:
> > > > > Changeset #89220282
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > > Monday, August 17, 2020 6:34 PM -05:00 from Mike Thompson <
> > > > > > miketh...@gmail.com>:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 5:24 PM 80hnhtv4agou--- via Talk-us <
> > > > > > talk-us@openstreetmap.org> wrote:
> > > > > > > tiger is up to date on the web map using the current data i
> > > > > > > just
> > > > > > > think he picked the wrong year,
> > > > > >
> > > > > > That relation was first created in 2009. According to the
> > > source
> > > > > > tag, it used 2008 Tiger data, so the original mapper probably
> > > > > > used
> > > > > > the best available TIGER data at the time.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > also all he got was a white line in his first try.
> > > > > > > Way: 813726663
> > > > > >
> > > > > > That way needs to be added to the relation, and the relation
> > > must
> > > > > > close.
> > >
>
>

Re: [Talk-us] Anyone familiar with Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP)?

[Kevin Kenny]

The 'names' look like someone's field notes: 'Tarn A', 'Tarn B', 'Tarn C',
'Tarn Off the Map', 'Tarn Off the Trail', rather than something that the
locals would call them.

Of course, people's field notes leak into imported data sources all the
time.

For the sake of not firing the first shot in an edit war, since the mapper
is responsive, ask if there's any objection to removing the questionable
names?

On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 3:15 PM Mike Thompson  wrote:

> I thought the names of these water bodies[0] in RMNP were suspect because:
> 1) The names do not appear in the GNIS,
> 2) The names do not appear on the USGS topo
> 3) The names do not appear in the NHD
> 4) The names do not appear on the RMNP map that is handed out to visitors
> 5) I have hiked past here several times but have never seen signs naming
> these bodies of water.
> 6) I asked the mapper that added the names what their source was, and they
> said they didn't remember.
> 7) I have several hiking books covering RMNP and none mention these water
> bodies using these names.
>
> Mike
>
> [0]
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/429681825
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/429451427
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/429681824
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/429681823
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/429451428
>
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>


-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Interested in importing address points in New York State

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 1:27 PM Mateusz Konieczny via Talk-us <
talk-us@openstreetmap.org> wrote:

>
> Jul 20, 2020, 15:32 by o...@dead10ck.com:
>
> I was going to make a subpage of New York with the title of "NYS GIS
> Clearinghouse", and include a link to it in the Potential Data sources
> page. I'm not sure if it's possible to upload and serve arbitrary files in
> the wiki; if so, I was going to upload that raw email file.
>
> Is this email a text-only email? That I would create a page where
> section/text would quote it.
>
> I moved page to
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/New_York/NYS_GIS_Clearinghouse
>
> It is just stub, so feel free to expand it.
>


I don't have time just at the moment for extensive Wiki editing. (Maybe
tonight.)

It's worth noting that the NYSDEC data sets listed under
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources#Statewide are
also hosted at gis.ny.gov and fall under the same rubric. (The obsolete
metadata are still present, by the way - but it appears that the only part
of the metadata that actually gets updated is the calendar date of the most
recent update.) I'm sure, for instance, that 'Microsoft Windows XP version
5.1 (Build 2600) Service Pack 3', is no longer the native data set
environment!

It might also be worth noting that
https://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=430 (New York State
Historic Sites and Park Boundaries) has been used extensively in revising
and correcting state park boundaries, which were also compared with what
mappers had already mapped, with the data from county GIS systems, and with
data from adjoining mapped parcels. For instance, Harriman, Bear Mountain,
and Storm King state parks share boundaries with West Point and with the
NGO-owned-and-operated Black Rock Forest. Hudson Highlands State Park
shares a boundary with Camp Smith. Moreau Lake State park shares a boundary
with a brownfield [a closed state prison] and with a small DEC parcel. John
Brown Farm State Historic Site borders the Lake Placid Olympic ski complex
and the Saranac Lakes Wild Forest. In some cases, _no_extant GIS system had
the correct boundary, and an alignment was created specifically for OSM:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/42951 illustrates the
process for one of these. In other cases, more information was needed, so
boundaries were intentionally left  unconflated and their inconsistencies
unresolved - the border between the Allegany Indian reservation and
Allegany State Park is one of these.

Since everything was redrawn when I reworked the NY State Parks, I didn't
call that one an 'import' - it was manual editing with reference to
multiple (OSM and external) data sources.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Labeling forestry service roads/tracks

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2020 at 9:29 PM brad  wrote:

> Thanks for diving in.   If it's a very minor unimproved road and not
> clearly service, I usually tag it track.   I would suggest adding some
> indication of road quality.   If it's an improved gravel road, I consider
> surface=gravel sufficient.   If it's rougher than an improved gravel road,
> surface=unpaved (in my area the surface is usually a mix of dirt, rocks,
> gravel, so unpaved seems best),   and smoothness=very_bad (high clearance),
> or horrible (4wd)  [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:smoothness],
> or  4wd_only=yes .
>

A nit: most 'improved' gravel roads are surface=compacted.  'gravel' is
like rail ballast; a compacted surface ordinarily has a mix of fine gravel
and even finer material such as sand, and is rolled. Americans will often
refer to a compacted road as a 'dirt' or 'gravel' road but the difference
is like night and day when you're driving on one!

For the rougher stuff, 'smoothness' is essential.  Consider also
'tracktype', which addresses more the firmness of the surface rather than
its smoothness. A clay surface may be lovely in a dry season and impassable
in a wet one, despite having a fast enough slump that the surface is
deceptively smooth.

Some National Forests separate Forest Highway (a regular access road) and
Forest Road (usually a logging track, might be inaccessible in any given
season, and often passable only to logging trucks and similar
high-clearance off-road vehicles). I don't know if any of them overlay the
numbering of the two systems.

_Please_ create route relations!
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Interested in importing address points in New York State

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 12:46 PM Mateusz Konieczny via Talk-us <
talk-us@openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> Once you write this diary entry (or OSM Wiki page) please post
> it to the mailing list!
>

Here you go:  https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/393684

 Feel free to repost, wikify, share as appropriate!

Skyler, thanks for trying again to reach out!  I'd written, both email and
paper, to several people listed as contacts on gis.ny.gov and never
received a response. You'll notice that I made a copy of the mail on my
personal site and referenced it as an exhibit in the diary entry.

(PS: I was shouting at the screen as I read that self-congratulatory
article at https://gis.ny.gov/outreach/gist/fall01.htm)

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Interested in importing address points in New York State

[Kevin Kenny]

(By the way, hi, Skyler, and welcome!  You've stepped into a difficult
area - most programmers don't realize just how difficult until they've
waded in.

The legal situation in New York is _very_ complicated, because the key
court case that governs GIS data settled out of court before the
underlying issues were resolved. You simply will not ever get a clear
statement about the legalities, because, alas, there was a court case
that left a door open a tiny crack - and then never reached a judgment
because the parties settled on undisclosed terms.  The only people who
could actually cut through the weeds at this point would be the Court
of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  Copyright litigation is ruinously
expensive, and neither the agencies who would have a purported
interest in the data nor any user has the means to pursue a copyright
case that far.

I've been asked this question enough that it deserves a more
comprehensive answer.  I probably will write at greater length over
the weekend and put the results in an OSM diary entry and blog post,
and come back here to link to them.

My personal belief, with which OSM's legal team may or may not agree
(with that said, there's never any certainty in the law!) is that New
York's open government law renders the use of the data pretty much
fair game from the legal perspective.

This data set has a  complex history.  It was produced because there
were grants offered to prepare a geocoding system for E911 use. The
address points used to support this effort, for the most part, did not
originate in the state's GIS office, but instead were provided by the
counties. The role of NYSGIS was to coordinate the efffort, to pass
grant money through to local governments, and to normalize and adapt
the data, in some cases to anonymize, and to conform the data to
national standards (https://nena.org/). When I've referred on the list
(or in changeset comments, etc.) to county E911 data in New York, I've
ordinarily been talking about exactly this data set.

I use it routinely, but only as a source of address data when I'm
tracing buildings; in my town. It's usable for that when taken with a
grain of salt and backed up with field survey for items that look
questionable (e.g., the addresses of all buildings in a subdivision or
apartment complex sharing a single point).  I do field surveys only
afoot, so I'm somewhat limited in how far from home I've been ready to
map, but you can see the results in the general area of
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/42.8213/-73.8833. I'm confident
that my use steers clear of copyright issues in any case. I'm making
my own selection of the data with significant revisions, so the
"selection, sequence and arrangement" of the data are not even similar
to what is in the data set.  Essentially, all that I extract are bald,
individual facts. To assert that such extraction is a violation of
copyright is to advance a 'mental contamination' theory, and would
disqualify most mappers from ever mapping anything, since it would
effectively mean that if you'd ever seen anything in a commercial data
set, you couldn't map that object even if you verified it
independently. (There are copyright maximalists who have attempted to
advance just that sort of claim.  The US pretty much shot them down in
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340
(1991) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.>
The solution in the UK and Australia is murkier, and does verge on the
"mental contamination" theory.) Moreover, the purpose of the database
is to enable both governments and NGO's to have access to the
geocoding for emergency response. Asserting copyright against OSM for
use of E911 data would almost certainly be held to go against sound
public policy.

I'm less sanguine than Skyler is about the data quality.  I suspect
s/he (the given name doesn't clearly identify a preferred pronoun) has
been looking at urban or suburban areas in counties whose GIS
departments have relatively stable funding. In those situations, yes,
the data are fairly good.  There is still a serious conflation issue
that isn't addressed, with respect to buildings whose footprints are
already mapped but do not bear addresses, where the address point may
or may not be in the building footprint.  Many address points, too,
get clustered at the entrance of a private or shared driveway, rather
than being on the indivdual dwellings. I seem to recall that at least
one or two of the apartment and townhouse complexes in the general
area of https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/42.83211/-73.89931 had
to have their house numbers collected on foot, because the E911 data
showed all the address points in a single cluster.

In the rural areas, particularly in the counties with tiny
populations, the situation is grimmer. I'm not certain that Schuyler
or Wyoming Counties even would _have_ dedicated GIS departments!
Until relatively recently, when grant 

Re: [Talk-us] access=private on driveways (was: Deleting tiger:reviewed=no/addr:street for routes)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 1:52 PM Jmapb  wrote:
> I'm also in the "worry about it" camp.
>
> To me, it's sad to see a mapper go to all the trouble of fixing the routing 
> to the house https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/263869602 by drawing in the 
> driveway https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/791633657 and then snatching 
> defeat from the jaws of victory by tagging the driveway private. Yes, a large 
> company like Amazon (who paid for this driveway to be mapped, so we might 
> presume it's mapped to their specifications) can implement their own router 
> and treat the access=private tags more loosely, but that's no reason for them 
> to be breaking routing for everyone else.
>
> In short, I think that driveways and other service roads should ONLY be 
> tagged access=private based on specific knowledge of a restriction. And if 
> the access restriction is not verifiable by survey, it's good to add a 
> access:source=* or note=* so mappers like me won't assume the tag is outdated 
> or erroneous.
>
> And Kevin, relevant for hikers like you & me is the question of service roads 
> that lead to private enclaves within public lands. Often these roads are 
> public access up to a certain point, and having that information correctly 
> mapped is quite helpful. Many of these are imported from TIGER with 
> access=private the whole way, and reclaiming as much of these as possible is 
> certainly on my to-do list.

I'll confess to having perpetrated a fair number - at a time when I
didn't know better.

A few things, though:

The immediate curtilage of a house is presumed to be private; at least
in the US, one does not drive or walk directly up to someone's house
without having business there. (Someone making a delivery, obviously,
has business there.)

I ordinarily will NOT hike on a service way or track across
privately-owned land unless I see some indication that it is open, or
I know what the situation is in advance. Of course, there are
exceptions: for instance, I know of some woods roads that are public
rights-of-way, dating to a time before the automobile, where
landowners have attempted to close them.  The local hiking club
advises to hike them, openly and notoriously, disregarding the
posters.  (In at least one case that I'm aware of, the landowner
eventually changed the posters to read, "PUBLIC RIGHT-OF-WAY ON
PRIVATE LAND. STAY ON TRAIL")
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/291410854 is a public highway,
whatever the posters say! But most of the roads that have signs like
'Johnson Lane // PRIVATE'  are just farm driveways that I ordinarily
wouldn't hike.

I surely don't mark as `acccess=private` the service roads going to
inholdings on public land, whoever maintains them.  The last one I can
recall mapping was https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/20631036 - and I
marked it as `motor_vechicle=private` (it's signed 'no motor
vehicles'), `foot=designated bicycle=no wheelchair=no atv=no ski=yes
snowmobile=yes` and I left out `horse` because I have Absolutely No
Idea, except for the fact that the trail was free of horse
by-products. (Whether to use 'track', 'service' or 'residential' for
that way is controversial and in the end is also meaningless.  It's
there mostly for forestry. Someone happens to have a cabin on it. In
the field, it's a pair of ruts winding off into the woods.)

I haven't had any trouble getting OSMand to navigate to a house on a
road marked `access=private`. It pops up a warning that my destination
is on a private road, and asks whether it's OK to route over it - and
then does so happily.  (Much more happily than before I tweaked
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/165370475 to restore network
connectivity. When I was driving on it, it wound up scolding me, "You
have been driving off road for the last 1.5 miles. Please proceed to
the highlighted route!") It's not just whatever custom system Amazon
uses. I'm perfectly willing to believe that overzealous application of
'private' breaks _some_ routing engines, but 'breaks routing for
everyone' is a bit hyperbolic.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Deleting tiger:reviewed=no/addr:street for routes (was: Streaming JOSM -- suggestions?)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 6:05 PM Mike Thompson  wrote:
> >  - The access -- somewhat common to find a pubic road imported with 
> > access=private, so if I suspect this I'll leave the tiger:reviewed=no tag 
> > until access can be confirmed, and add a note or fixme. (It's also quite 
> > common to find driveways imported as access=private. When surveying, I tend 
> > to remove the private tag if the driveway isn't gated or signed private, 
> > since access=private will prevent routing to the house at the end of the 
> > driveway, sometimes even ending the route on a different residential road 
> > that's physically closer to the house than the road the driveway's 
> > connected to.)
> I always thought that driveways to private residences and private roads 
> (whether gated or not) should be tagged as access=private.  Often these 
> private roads are posted with a sign that says something like "Private road, 
> no trespassing", or "Private Road, Residents and Guests Only."

One thing to watch out for in the countryside is that there are often
streets signed 'Xxx Drive // PRIVATE'  meaning that the road is
privately maintained, rather than meaning 'no trespassing.'

But here I think that the importance of the distinction is overblown.
I strongly suspect:

(1) People don't ordinarily want to be routed down these
privately-maintained roads (which are usually, in effect, driveways
that happen to serve more than one establishment) unless they have
business with some establishment on the road.
(2) Delivery drivers use routers that allow for access to private
drives to deliver to the associated residence.  (In effect, the person
who ordered the goods for delivery has issued an invitation to the
carrier.)

and hence, the public/private distinction for service ways falls in my
mental model under, 'don't worry about it.'

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Streaming JOSM -- suggestions?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 7:38 PM Bob Gambrel  wrote:
>
> A very good answer stevea. I suspect the changes I have been making would be 
> appropriate enough for removing tiger_reviewed=no.
>
> 1) almost always have driven the road as passenger taking notes in OSMAND+ 
> about pavement type
> 2) in ID carefully aligning the roads
> 3) in ID verifying that an extra road doesn't exist by looking at several 
> aerial phots sources before deleting
> 4) setting pavement tpe
> 5) setting lane counts
> 6) putting in traffic signals where known
> 7) noting stop signs where possible and adding stop sign nodes
>
> Have been less likely to change road type. For example have left minor rural 
> roads as residential if there are farms on it. I have made sure that service 
> roads and driveways are not naked as residential.

Personally, I think even that much is overkill for deleting tiger:reviewed.

I think that surface, lanes, and traffic controls are things that a
mapper can notice are not mapped, irrespective of the TIGER review
status. There are lots of hand-mapped roads that don't have the
information!

I'm willing to delete the tag when:

(1) I've checked alignment against two sets of aerials, at least one
with the leaves off. (In my case, that's almost always Maxar and NYS
Orthos Online.)
(2) I've added all bridges and culverts that I can identify on
aerials. (Which always leads me down the rabbit hole of mapping the
corresponding waterways)
(2) I've verified that the name matches the state DOT highway map and
the E911 address points.
(3) I've adjusted the road class (TIGER's 'residential' can mean
anything from a tertiary highway to a track!)
(4) I've created route relations if the road has a ref (and removed
the ref from the road's names!)

I don't do 'lanes' very often.  I do 'surface' if the road is
obviously not hard-surfaced (sometimes I can even see the ruts in
aerials), and I do traffic controls only when surveying in person,
which I always do afoot.

I'd like a way to indicate that an intersection is uncontrolled. I've
found myself returning on foot several times to the same intersection
to look for STOP signs that aren't there, because I can't remember
that I've checked it already.

The reason that I'm so lax is that in my part of the state, TIGER is
_horrible_ and mappers are scarce.  I chronically lack time to do very
much about it, although I've at least checked the above information
for all the unreviewed roads in my home county (barring some service
ways that I'm not sure I can access legally). I work intermittently on
a couple of neighbouring counties. There are a lot of service ways
'residential' ways in TIGER that are a mile or two off from the
correct alignment or are otherwise ridiculous. At this point, in my
area, 'tiger:reviewed=no' means 'beware: this road likely is entirely
hallucinatory' and I kill the tag once I've verified that the
information that TIGER provided is correct. The information that TIGER
didn't ordinarily provide, I can leave for others (possibly including
future-Kevin).

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] National Forest boundaries

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 7:36 PM stevea  wrote:

> Adam Franco  writes:
> > Here's an example:
> >   - Parent relation:
> > - name=Xxxx National Forest
> > - operator=United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service
> > - ownership=national
>
> Ah, OK, If you really DO mean "parent" relation and we move into using 
> super-relations, got it; that's OK if it is what you mean to express, please 
> use the word "super-relation" (a relation of relations).  In a 
> super-relation, the term "parent" can apply to "the" (root) of the 
> super-relation, and "a child relationship" happens between the "parent 
> super-relation" and each of the member relations (which are its "children").  
> Thank you for making that explicit.  I fully anticipated that a "more 
> correct" method to do this (complex NF data relationships in OSM) might 
> necessarily "move up" to super-relations, so here we go!

I've been dealing with this level of complexity with New York State
lands for a while. What I've done has worked fairly well for me. The
legalities are similar to those for National Forests and other Federal
protected lands; in many ways, the US system is based on New York's
because Theodore Roosevelt brought it to Washington with him.

(1) The outermost layers of the most complex cases are the Adirondack
and Catskill Parks.  These are labeled 'boundary=national_park' with a
gratuitous 'protect_class=2'.  They are massive areas: the Adirondack
Park is comparable in land area to the entire Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. They are 'public-private partnerships', with most of
the land remaining in private hands, but with land use and development
very closely regulated.  They are indeed mapped, because they are well
known and very well marked: all the highways that cross them have
prominent signage like
https://www.wamc.org/sites/wamc/files/styles/medium/public/201507/adirondack-park-sign-dscn4503.jpg
or https://tinyurl.com/y9otnrb5. Moreover, all the informational
highway signs (facilities, exits, street names, route number markers,
...) change from their ordinary color schemes (black-and-white,
white-and-green, white-and-blue, yellow-and-blue, ...) to a
distinctive brown-and-gold scheme:
https://mylonglake.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IMG_7731-Raquette-Lake-Old-Forge-Long-Lake.jpg
https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Marcy-Field-Parking-Area-sign-by-John-Warren-300x241.png
http://www.aaroads.com/shields/img/NY/NY19690161i1.jpg.

(2) Within these areas, there are areas that the state owns in
allodium (I'd say 'in fee simple' but the state is sovereign and its
title is allodial; there is no higher authority other than The
People.)  All of the state-owned lands fall under Article 14 of the
state constitution, which begins: "The lands of the state, now owned
or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed
by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be
leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or
private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed."
They have no permanent habitation. The larger contiguous ones are
generally designated, "Wilderness", but then there is a whole zoo of
other classifications: "Wild Forest", "Canoe Area", "Primitive Area",
"Intensive Use Area", ... These are mapped as boundary=protected_area
and usually leisure=nature_reserve (but sometimes they're other
things, such as campgrounds, ski areas, fish hatcheries, recreation
grounds, ... and are mapped accordingly).

Many of these areas, particularly the Wild Forests, are
extraordinarily diffuse.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360587 is typical. They are
full of exclaves and inholdings. They're all open to public
recreation, and signed and posted wherever they're near a habitation,
a highway, or an established trail. (They may be marked with just
survey blazes, cairns and witness trees in the back country - and some
of the lines have not actually ever been surveyed. The Adirondacks are
like that!)

Where the areas share a boundary, or where the outer boundary of one
of the areas is the same as the boundary of one of the great parks,
I've been trying to replace multiple, questionably-aligned boundaries
with shared ways.  I've not got very far.  For instance - and I've not
done this yet - there is a segment across Lake Desolation Road at
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/43.1581/-73.9705=N that
is simultaneously the outer boundary of the Adirondack Park, the
Wilcox Lake Wild Forest, and the Lake Desolation State Forest.  I'd
think that that segment should be drawn only once and present with the
'outer' role on each of those three multipolygons.

The topology of these multipolygons can be horribly complex.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/32023837 is: (1) an islet. (2) An
iner way of Middle Saranac Lake. (3) An outer way of the Saranac Lakes
Wild Forest, of which much of MIddle Saranac Lake is an inner way.
Norway Island's 

Re: [Talk-us] Labeling county roads (Idaho)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 9:31 AM  wrote:
> Started mapping an area of the Idaho panhandle around the Kootenai
> river. I notice that currently minor roads have a "County Road nn" name
> but TIGER2019 data also has names such as "Acacia Avenue". I think most
> map users would want to use the "Acacia Avenue" name as it what would be
> listed in postal addresses and they'd want to search it in applications
> such as OSMand. Question is how to handle this. Also, what to set the
> "ref" to for county roads.

Not an Idahoan, so take this with a grain of salt.  Does Idaho
actually have numbered county highways other than the grid streets?
(Many Western states do not.)

Most states' practice will set the 'ref' to something like 'CR 23',

It's unnecessary to have a name like 'County Road 23'. In fact, if you
do have such a name, a lot of routing software will announce, 'turn
right on CR 23, County Road 23'. If the road has no other name, add
the tag `noname=yes` to silence warnings about a tertiary highway
without a name.

Please, create a route relation for each road with a reference.
Include in the relation all the road segments that make up the route.
Minimal attributes for the relation would be `type=route route=road
network=US:ID:Boundary ref=29A` for Boundary County Road 29A. The
corresponding street segment would have `highway=tertiary
name="Chokecherry Drive" ref="CR 29A"`, and it would ideally have
attributes like surface, maxspeed, lanes,  Having the relation
provides the data model with a way to group all the way segments;
roads get split all the time when people decide to map small bridges,
or when speed limits or lane counts changed, and so on.



-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] National Forest boundaries

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 8:33 PM Joseph Eisenberg
 wrote:
> > I was thinking just create separate polygons for inholdings, tagged with 
> > access=private and possibly ownership=private
>
> While many Americans like to put "no trespassing" signs on their private 
> property, a privately owned parcel is not access=private unless there are 
> signs on the roads and paths leading into it which say so.
>
> Many privately-owned parcels in the national forests are used for forestry 
> only, and there is no issue with crossing through on a road or trail in many 
> cases.
>
> Generally it is difficult to maintain land ownership data in OpenStreetMap. 
> Fortunately, in the USA there are publicly-available databases which contain 
> this cadastral information, so it is not necessary for us to duplicate it in 
> OpenStreetMap. Database users should expect to get land ownership information 
> directly from official sources, if they want accurate and up-to-data land 
> ownership info by parcel.
>
> For example in Oregon you can get data at 
> https://www.oregon.gov/geo/Pages/sdlibrary.aspx
>
> We should not try to map all land ownership data by parcel in OpenStreetMap.

In the particular case of these public lands, the land ownership, the
land use, and the land's access constraints are inextricably bound
together.

Your contention tends to be interpreted by the 'hard liners' as an
assertion that "public lands that are partly or wholly for recreation,
such as National Forests, but also any of a entire menagerie of other
land classes, ought not to be mapped."  This assertion has effectively
arisen whenever the subject of National Forests arises: much of the US
public expects to see them on a map, but get met with the pernicious
reply, "go to several dozen government agencies and get their
cadastre, but don't map these oblects."  (I'll accept that that';s not
what you meant, but the slope here is indeed slippery.)

In fact, OSM is the only good place that I have to aggregate this
information. When I'm using these boundaries for planning, the parcels
may be administered by multiple Federal, State and local government
agencies, plus NGO's and land trusts.  Each of these has its own
database of what it manages. OSM is the best place that I have to see
all of these public recreation lands at once. One of my favorite
motivating examples is planning a trip to Roundtop Mountain
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/357583100#map=14/42.1726/-74.0598.
The on-trail route from Palenville, far to the east, would have been
quite arduous, beyond what I'd attempt on a day trip.  Access from
Twilight Park to the north would be out of the question - it's a gated
community that does not welcome random visitors.  The snowmobile trail
access from Cortina Lane was closed at the time of year that I was
planning the trip.  I could have made the trip from the Platte Clove
Bruderhof; the religious community there is welcoming, and the trail
is open to the public, but I dislike imposing on their hospitality.
With OSM, I was able to see that the Roundtop Mountain Unit (New York
City Department of Environmental Protection, Bureau of Water Supply)
was adjacent to the Kaaterskill Wild Forest, and with my NYC parking
tag and access card in my pack, happily approached the mountain by a
much shorter route from the west.  I'd not have been able to do this
with either agency's information alone.

Now, on to the original question:

I will concede that I've never mapped a National Forest - but I have
helped with the mapping of some similarly-structured National Wildlife
Refuges, and imported data about a great many state lands in New York,
many of which have similarly diffuse boundaries.

What I've done:

1. The outermost boundary of many of these lands consists simply of an
an area in which the managing agency is authorized to acquire land,
and sometimes to apply regulation to the use of property similar to
what a zoning board might impose (and with similar requirements, such
as compensating a landowner if the regulation significantly impairs
the value of a parcel). Ordinarily it is unsigned and unobservable in
the field.  I ignore it for OSM; it's a regulatory designation for the
government's operations, with little impact on protection, public
access, land cover or land use.

2. The actual boundary - of ownership, regulation, protection, and
likely land use - is what most map users expect to see.  In many
cases, these boundaries are quite diffuse. In all the cases that I've
mapped, they're also observable in the field. The managing agency will
post the boundaries at intervals. (In my area, many of the signs look
like 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_(New_York)#/media/File:NYS_Forest_Preserve_sign.jpg,
but there are numerous older-style markers. Where a road traverses a
parcel, the signage will likely be fancier; one common form is
https://hikingthetrailtoyesterday.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1wolf-lakedsc046871.jpg.
This boundary is, in all 

Re: [Talk-us] USGS Topo layer for JOSM?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 11:45 AM Dave Swarthout  wrote:
> Once I restarted JOSM, the old USGS Topo layer disappeared and after a 
> longish search through the Imagery Preferences, finally located the new 
> layer. I'd have never figured out what went wrong had Todd not posted this 
> question. The folks who did this also did a great job of hiding the new 
> layer. I use those maps all day, every day. Sheesh!

My understanding is that the real complaint should go upstream. As I
understand it, the table of imagery sources is shared among multiple
editors and mapping clients and is maintained separately at
https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index. At least, that's where I
was told to submit a PR when I wanted to see 'NYS Orthos Online'
added.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] USGS Topo layer for JOSM?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 8:49 AM Brandon Cobb  wrote:
>
> It still exists in JOSM, it just looks like the imagery was renamed to 
> “USA/Mexico/Canada/Scandinavia Topo Maps”.

AHA! There it is! Up at the top under 'Worldwide", rather than listed
under "US", which is why I didn't spot the replacement.
There seems to have been an issue where the old menu item stuck around
but didn't work.  But that's all right, a little bit of poking at
'Edit->Preferences->WMS/TMS' and it's all hunky-dory.  Thanks!

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Heavily-wooded residential polygons

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 8:15 PM Joseph Eisenberg
 wrote:
> You can just overlap them. Don't worry too much about how OpenStreetMap carto 
> renders it, as long as they way you map it makes sense and matches reality. 
> Perhaps we can fix the rendering if the current results are causing 
> confusion, so that the trees only show when the green background shows.

Like Steve, I tend to overlap land use and land cover - which are two
distinct things.

I use 'landuse=forest' for 'the land is dedicated to the production of
forest products'.  Around here, such lands often, perhaps even
usually, have a secondary purpose of public recreation. This is true
even of privately-held ones; there are significant access easements,
for instance, to the forests owned in the Adirondacks by the paper
companies. I've certainly hiked on land owned by Finch Pruyn (when it
was still a going concern) and International Paper.  I use
'natural=wood' for 'this land is tree covered', and don't follow the
convention that some mappers do that it must be in some sense a
'natural' wood, and 'unmanaged', whatever that means. (In my part of
the world, the wilderness areas are among the most intensively managed
land in the country - to protect them!)

The strict taxonomists object to my use of 'landuse=forest' to denote
the land use - and want to require trees on every square metre. But
that's not the way a working forest works. In any given year, a given
piece of acreage may be grassland, scrub, marsh, open water, alder
thicket, or mature trees, depending on how long it's been since
harvest and what the beavers have been up to that year.  Despite the
awkward rendering, I do not cut the water and wetlands out of a forest
like https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6378266 - because the
whole thing is working forest, and the beaver activity changes, so
those ponds and marshes are actually less permanent than the use to
which the humans put the land.

'natural=wood' may overlay atop different land uses.  The grounds of
the mansion at https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/148531875 are largely
forested, and have a 'natural=wood' polygon overlaid, which also
extends over some of the adjoining protected_areas. (The mansion
grounds are not hard to trace in the field, since the NO TRESPASSING
posters can be spotted from the trails on all four sides.)  The
industrial areas like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/479164244 and
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7464551 are also partly wooded
- largely because in this part of the world, vacant land grows to
trees.  On other industrial sites, the gaps between buildings may be
grass, or bare dirt, or scrub land, or rubbish heaps, but here it
becomes either woodland or wetland.

I don't map orchards or forests as 'farmland'.  I don't mind layering
farm buiildings, residences, or greenhouses on top of 'farmland', and
don't make cutouts for them, but the renderers are happier with me if
I call orchards and forests separate things.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] admin_level and COGs, MPOs, SPDs, Home Rule

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 3:24 PM stevea  wrote:
> I'm not in Massachusetts, but as I constantly strive to improve my listening 
> skills, so I ask you to please point out any flaws in my understanding of 
> this.  I'm literally quoting from Footnote 18:  "Geographically divided into 
> 14 counties, Massachusetts effectively has no county government in eight of 
> them, similar to Rhode Island. This means in these eight counties (Berkshire, 
> Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Suffolk and Worcester), all 
> government administration is at state (4) and local (8, 9) levels. However, 
> several functions implemented by the state are organized by county lines, 
> including District Attorney, Sheriff and the judiciary."

You just said it yourself.  They still have county prosecutors, county
sheriffs, and county courts - paid by the state, but with local
jurisdiction. There is some residual local government, even if the
county's executive and legislative powers, and its powers to tax and
spend, have reverted to the state. Moreover, no city or township
crosses a county line, as I understand it.

If someone dies, having been a resident of Great Barrington, the will
will be probated in Berkshire County, not Hampden County or anywhere
else. A land sale there will be registered with the Register of Deeds
for the Berkshire County Southern District. A misdemeanant there will
be arrested by the Berkshire County Sheriff (elected by the county,
paid by the state), prosecuted by the Berkshire County District
Attorney, and if convicted, will serve sentence in the Berkshire
County House of Correction. All of these are offices of the state
government, because the county has no power to tax and spend, but some
of the officers remain locally elected.

The boroughs of New York City have a similar setup. They have ceded
all legislative function to the city. They retain only a formal
executive branch. (They still have elected borough presidents, but
their role is advisory and ceremonial). They have no power to tax and
spend. Nevertheless, they retain their own judiciary, and I'd say that
if even one of the three branches of government remains divided along
county lines, you still have an admin level there. This goes doubly if
the division is nearly hierarchical - if subdivisions at a finer
admin_level seldom or never cross the borders of coarser ones. (New
York's Villages are a trifle messy there - about a sixth cross
township lines. But since they have limited home rule, have officers
in all three branches, and enjoy the power to tax and spend, they of
course are administrative divisions anyway.)

New York's 'Hamlets' have zero home rule, but we still bring them in
at the same admin_level as villages, when their boundaries are well
known, because town ordinances so often refer to them. Also, in the
suburban townships, the Hamlets' boundaries are frequently defined on
all sides by the neighboring Villages, so things like voting districts
have to follow them. They're ordinarily signed in the suburban
townships, and have a strong local identity. If I go three miles or so
from where I'm sitting and cross over the bridge, I encounter a large
sign saying 'Welcome to Rexford', with 'Town of Clifton Park'
underneath in much smaller print. The Hamlet where I grew up (Inwood)
had an even stronger local identity. If you referred to it as
Hempstead, the locals would look at you as if you had two heads, even
though the Town of Hempstead was the local government. Hempstead was a
half-a-dozen villages away! (The township that I currently inhabit has
neither villages nor hamlets within its borders.)

Wards of cities also usually don't have home rule, but many places map
them, again because so many services get divided along their
boundaries, and so many local ordinances refer to them by number or
name, including metes and bounds only by reference.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] When is your doctor a clinic?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 8:33 AM Brian Stromberg
 wrote:
> When I hear “clinic” in reference to a healthcare facility, I think of 
> “urgent care” clinics, and I think there are about six urgent care clinics 
> within a 20 minute drive of my local hospital. These are usually staffed with 
> nurses and Physicians Assistants rather than MDs.

In my state, a nurse-practitioner or a physician's assistant has to
work under the supervision of an MD, so there's generally at least one
doc at an urgent care clinic. Still, you're right that for routine
matters a patient probably won't need to see the MD.  I know that I've
seen NP's at my doc's office, and they've ordered radiology and lab
work, and prescribed. (If the radiology or labs had shown anything out
of the ordinary, they'd have bucked it up to a doc.)

Your area doesn't also have numerous multi-specialty 'health centres?'
Places where they consolidate radiology, lab, endoscopy, outpatient
surgery, orthopaedics, ...?

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] When is your doctor a clinic?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 7:56 AM Philip Barnes  wrote:
> A clinic is where outpatients go, usually referred by their doctor to
> see a specialist.
>
> The on the ground reality is that most clinics take place within
> hospitals.

My primary care physician works out of a clinic. My family and I have
had a number of specialist referrals from him over the years, many to
the same clinic. It's got radiology (X-ray, ultrasound, CT, MR) on
site, a clinical lab, and a variety of specialty departments:
paediatrics, podiatry, dermatology, endocrinology, haematology,
orthopaedics, oncology, gastroenterology (they can do EGD or
colonoscopy on site), and so on. It's not a hospital and cannot admit
patients overnight. (It does have a limited 24-hour operation; there's
an 'urgent care' department.)

I recently had a scan done at a local hospital, but that was simply
that the radiology department there could schedule it at a more
convenient time. Apart from one emergency visit, it was the first time
I'd been to a hospital in over twenty years. Everything that could be
done on an outpatient basis was done somewhere else. (Even the
emergency visit was unusual circumstances. I needed an emergent
consultation with an ophthalmologist, and it's hard to raise one on
Christmas Day. He still talks about that one, several years later.
It's the only time in his career that he's performed three emergency
surgeries in the same day.)

Clinics like this are quite common in American cities. Some are
hospital outreach, where they've moved outpatient departments off
site. Some are stand-alone. The stand-alone ones often bear the names
of insurance networks: "Community Care Physicians", "Capital District
Physicians' Health Plan", and so on, because many exist so that the
practices can consolidate their billing and insurance negotiations.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Wilderness areas separate from forest?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 3:41 PM Eric H. Christensen via Talk-us
 wrote:
> Sorry for the late entry to the discussion but I did have a little 
> information to add here.
>
> Wilderness, at least at the federal level, enjoys a different protection from 
> that of a national forest.  There is to be no development or tree harvesting 
> in such areas and even wildfire management may be different.  I wouldn't 
> necessarily start combining the two together as they are managed differently 
> and have different purposes and landuse protections.

Nobody's proposing that they just be combined.  The wilderness area is
still "part of" the National Forest; it will be mapped separately, but
will not be cut out of the National Forest boundary.

We've done things that way for non-Federal wilderness areas in New
York for quite a while now.  For example, the Indian Head Wilderness
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6365026 is mapped, and is not
cut out of the larger Catskill Park
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6265477 because the Indian Head
Wilderness is a part of the Catskill Park.

To map the Catskill Park as being, "the designated area of the
Catskill Park. minus the State-designated Wilderness, Wild Forest, and
Primitive Areas, the New York City Watershed Recreation Areas, the
state campgrounds, the Catskill Visitor Center, the Catskill Center
for Conservation and Development, the Nature Conservancy and Open
Space Institute reserves, and the Belleayre Ski Center (and I'm
probably forgetting a few other more-protected areas)" would be pretty
nonsensical. I think data consumers have to be prepared to deal with
the fact that national parks and other large reserves will have parts
that have a different protection class from the default for the
reserve as a whole.

This practice is also consistent with IUCN recommendations: see
https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/PAG-021.pdf
pp 36-38. "Can a protected area contain more than one category?" which
specifically contemplates that management zones within a larger
protected area should acquire their own protection class when they are
clearly mapped, recognized in law or by other effective means, have
unambiguous management aims that are distinct from those of the larger
protected area taken as a whole, and are of significant extent. A
wilderness area within a National Forest satisfies all of these
conditions. Moreover, the same section of the guidelines specifically
warns that a data model must guard against overcounting when using
such 'nested' areas for statistical analysis.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Alt_names on counties

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 1:11 PM stevea  wrote:
> The myriad variations of "name" (alt, loc, nat, old, reg, official, sorting, 
> int...) show how complex this is.  The issues go back many years and will 
> likely continue well into the future, indeed many participants in this/these 
> thread(s) are authors of our wiki's name page.
>
> Better documenting, continuing dialog, consensus-style agreement, changing 
> data in the map to reflect our well- or better-documented conventions:  all 
> of these get us closer to perfection.  Although I think everybody agrees, 
> perfection is nigh on impossible, as "the map is never 'done.'"
>
> "Do our best."  If there is contention, discuss it.  If there is 
> misunderstanding or disagreement, discuss it.  If there is agreement, 
> document it and use it in the map and even write code that depends on it.  We 
> get there, we will better get there as we continue to do these things.

Exactly. There is a plethora of name variations in the database
because there is a plethora of names in the field.

I joke that in New York City, most of the freeways have three names:
the highway number, which is on the signs but nobody ever uses it in
speaking, the name of the highway (e.g., "Jackie Robinson Parkway",
"Avenue of the Americas", "Robert F. Kennedy Bridge") that's on all
the signs (but the locals don't remember the name!), and the name that
the locals call it (e.g., "Interborough Parkway", "Sixth Avenue",
"Triboro Bridge") which isn't on the signs. (Not quite true - New York
gave up some years ago and posted signs reading  both Sixth Avenue and
Avenue of the Americas, but give me some poetic license here.)

Back to counties, specifically:

Three of the five counties that make up New York City absolutely need
alt_names.  The Borough of Manhattan is New York County; the Borough
of Brooklyn is Kings County, and the Borough of Staten Island is
Richmond County. Both sets of names are official - the county courts
still go by the county names, while the executive branch of the city
government uses the borough names.

Some of the Downstate counties (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland
come to mind) in New York are often used in speaking without 'County'
appended, and it certainly would make sense to have alt_names for
those without the 'County' suffix. Upstate, it's much less common,
partly because many are ambiguous. I wouldn't ever say that I live in
Schenectady, because I live outside the Schenectady city limits. I do
nevertheless live in Schenectady County, and might say that to someone
who's not familiar with the area but knows at least where Schenectady
is. Similarly, nobody ever calls Washington County just 'Washington';
it's too confusing.

I haven't yet tried to sort out a proper name:fr for Lake George. All
of 'Lac George', 'Lac Georges', and 'Lac du Saint-Sacrement' appear in
print and on multilingual signage. It was definitely 'Lac du
Saint-Sacrement' to the French before the English seized the land
around it in 1760. Francophone locals would recognize any of the
names.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Wilderness areas separate from forest?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 8:40 PM Tod Fitch  wrote:
> If I am looking at the map data correctly, it seem that at least some 
> designated wilderness areas are excluded from the forest that they are in. 
> For example the Chumash Wilderness [1] seems to have its border as an outer 
> on the Los Padres National Forest [2].
>
> This does not seem correct to me. In this specific case the wilderness is 
> administered as part of the Mt. Pinos Ranger District of the Los Padres 
> National Forest. I believe the same situation exists with the San Mateo 
> Wilderness in the Cleveland National Forest.
>
> What is our tagging policy on this? Should the wilderness be shown as part of 
> the forest that contains it?

My home state of New York has no Federally protected wilderness, but
we have rather a lot of wilderness that enjoys even stronger
State-level protection. Most of our designated wilderness areas (and
all that are titled Wilderness, as opposed to Forest Preserve Detached
Parcel or something) are located within the Adirondack and Catskill
Parks.

For the ones whose boundaries I've edited (that is to say, virtually
all of them), I've kept them consistently as inside the parks. It
seems to me, for instance, that it's nonsensical to make a cutout from
the Adirondack Park to accommodate the High Peaks Wilderness (or,
indeed, any of the other Wilderness, Wild Forest, Canoe or Primitive
Areas, etc; we have a whole menagerie of designations). Where a
wilderness area shares a boundary with the larger park, I've been
attempting to conflate the ways, but have only barely started on that
job, so there is a lot of nuisance misalignment at the edges. (In my
controversial opinion: better to have them mapped with nuisance
misalignments than not to have them mapped at all. Others, I
recognize, disagree.)

I've had to deal with the situation of crossing borders in only one
case, and that one is somewhat up in the air. There's one parcel of
Elm Ridge Wild Forest https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6373226
that's located outside the boundary of the Catskill Park. It's a newly
acquired (2013) parcel transferred from New York City to New York
State. The last (2015) approved amendment to the unit management plan
does not include this acquisitiion. The Catskill Park State Land
Master Plan of the time includes it as an 'Unclassified' parcel. There
were public hearings in 2016 regarding the planning (slides at
https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/lands_forests_pdf/haydenpubmeetaug10.pdf)
but as yet no formal publication of any conclusion. I've simply mapped
the area as a multipolygon, and intend to conflate borders where it
shares a border with the Catskill Park - but have not yet done so.

In conclusion, I agree with you that the wilderness area is indeed
part of the National Forest (or in my case, State Forest Preserve)
that contains it.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] National Forests and Private Ownership

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 1:30 AM Michael Patrick  wrote:
> And size is no determination of importance, because the 'rules' are 
> dramatically different for different agencies and departments. Some of these 
> provide access, The Magruder Corridor easement is basically the width of the 
> track, between two wilderness areas, similarly various boat landing on lakes 
> etc. Other very small areas, which have VERY nice gravel roads leading to 
> them, will result in an armed response. "There have been 12 Minuteman missile 
> sites constructed on the ( Pawnee, Forest Service ) ) grassland. These fenced 
> areas (approximately two acres each) are  US Air Force and public access is 
> not permitted."

It's the same as any land use multipolygon that has an enclave that's
a different land use. Map what an area *is*, not what it *isn't.*

Tag the missile site (and the road and right-of-way, if appropriate)
landuse=military access=no. (Use a multipolygon if necessary). Have
the military area's boundary be an inner way of the multipolygon
representing the National Forest holding (as opposed to the larger
administrative boundary).

Camp Santanoni https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6396527 shows a
state historic site that comprises four parcels of land plus the
right-of-way of the access road, which in turn is for most of its
length the boundary between Vanderwhacker Mountain Wild Forest and
High Peaks Wilderness. (It's within the huge administrative boundary
of the Adirondack Park.)  To the east of it, MacIntyre Primitive Area
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/8430831 comprises a pair of
corridors snipped out of High Peaks Wilderness in order to allow
access to private holdings over existing jeep roads. (It's complicated
- the High Peaks Wilderness was expanded by land purchase a few years
back, and there are still some unexpired leaseholds within it, and
former leaseholds being dismantled, requiring occasional motor vehicle
access for the demolition.) The legal rights-of-way of the roads that
are cut out extend two rods (about 10 m) on either side of the road
centerline; a right-of-way one chain wide is pretty much the default
for rural roads in New York, so that's where the cutout runs. There
are inconsistencies in the mapping here, and I haven't been able to do
the field work needed to resolve them, but I think these examples, if
you squint, show how it's meant to work. Camp Santanoni has a
different landuse from the surrounding wilderness, and that's
indicated by making it a separate feature.

I can't readily find an example of a military area embedded in forest
land, but I've got a couple where they abut, and the approach to the
topology is pretty much the same.  West Point
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175474 abuts and shares
boundaries with numerous outher land uses, including three state
parks, an NGO-managed forest, a cemetery, a country club, and a river.
There are cutouts in the military area for the rights-of-way of four
or five highways, and a railroad. Across the river, Camp Smith
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6440291 is a military area
surrounded on three sides by state park. I used a shared border there,
as well, and discuss the reasoning in
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/42951. West Point has a
number of subsidiary land uses (recreation grounds, stadia, parking,
residences, schools, houses of worship, theatres, even a golf course)
embedded in it, but these are all for military use only so are not cut
out of the landuse=military area.

Really, once you accept the approach of "the administrative area is a
large outer (multi)polygon, and the holding in fee (or in allodium in
the case of the state land I'm working with) is a smaller
(multi)polygon within it, and any inholdings are inner ways of that
(which in turn may have their own tagging if they are also mapped
features), it comes together to represent an arbitrary topology. In
the Camp Santanoni case, we have the Adirondack Park
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1695394 as the (outermost)
administrative boundary; the Vanderwhacker Mountain Wild Forest
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6362588 as the state-owned
forest tract, and Camp Santanoni
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6396527 being a near-enclave
within that.

I don't assert that this is 100% the 'right' way to do things, but it
works well enough that I can plan a trail-less trip and know whether
I'll be trespassing, whether I need to bring my New York City
watershed access card, and so on. And nobody's been offended enough by
the way it's been done that thye've reverted or brought the wrath of
the DWG down upon me.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] National Forests and Private Ownership

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 16:39 Mike Thompson  wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 2:28 PM Bradley White 
> wrote:
>
>> Yes I understand that, that is what the landuse tag is for. Private
>> land should tagged as private. Public land should be tagged as public.
>> The 'access' tag is probably preferable for this, and it's what I use.
>> My point is that none of this involves the NF boundary, and to please
>> leave it alone because it's a pain to fix problems with it.
>>
> I understand and generally agree.  One point is that the NFS may have made
> arrangements with the landowner such that some access by the public is
> permitted.  I say this because an official USFS trail (Crosier Mountain
> Trail)[1] crosses private land and there are no signs saying "No
> Trespassing"
>

Once again, I deal with what I think is an exact parallel in New York. If
there's a public-access easement on private land, I outline the easement or
map the trail and put the appropriate access constraints (and
boundary=protected_area+protect_class, if appropriate) on it.

I haven't done very many of these for want of reliable data.  One set that
I have done is that there are a good many public-access lands in the
Catskill Mountains for which New York City's Bureau of Water Supply is the
'private' landowner. These are mapped (within the boundary=national_park of
the Catskill Park) as things like leisure=nature_reserve
boundary=protected_area protect_class=12 protection_object=water
access=private foot=yes. (There are other tag combinations, once again,
because there are regulations pertaining to specific parcels).

Sample situations:

Administrative border of the Catskill Park:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6265477

New York City public-access inholding within the Catskill Park:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/424227080 Note that the highway
right-of-way is a state-owned inholding within that. (The road is private
once you cross onto New York City lands and the gate is ordinarily locked
to prohibit motor vehicle traffic. They unlock it in the winter to allow
snowmobiles through)

One parcel of public-access land that the state owns in allodium (being
sovereign, the state does not hold in fee), within the park. Note exclaves
of this holding, plus private inholdings mapped by exclusion:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6367009

A single-purpose recreation area (again, state-owned, although privately
operated) within the Park, again with private inholdings:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6373343

A private inholding (untagged) within a Wild Forest area (one tier below
Wilderness), within the Catskill Park:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/428667447 within
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6375713 within
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6265477

A public footway mostly on public land, but with portions that cross
private inholdings: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/286143201

What sort of thing am I failing to model here?
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] National Forests and Private Ownership

[Kevin Kenny]

Once again, I think that New York state lands offer a parallel.

The administrative borders of the Adirondack and Catskill parks are mapped
(boundary=national_park protect_class=2). This has been discussed
elsewhere; for these two specific regions, national_park appears to be a
better fit than a mere protected_area.

The state-owned and -managed land within the regions is mapped as well.
boundary=protected_area protect_class=1b leisure=nature_reserve foot=yes is
one combination, but there is a whole zoo of land classifications with
different land use and access constraints.

The private inholdings are mapped only by exclusion.

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 15:30 Mike Thompson  wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 1:12 PM Bradley White 
> wrote:
>
>> No, this is incorrect. USFS administrative boundaries and USFS managed
>> land are not the same thing, though the latter is always inside the
>> former. The boundaries currently in OSM are administrative boundaries,
>> and are tagged correctly as such. It is perfectly fine to have private
>> land within a USFS administrative boundary, in the same way it would
>> be okay to have private land within any other government-defined
>> jurisdictional boundary.
>>
> Ok, so how to tag the parts that are within the administrative boundaries
> but which are not owned by the US Government? Or, how to tag the parts that
> are both within the boundary and owned by the US Government?
>
> This is important information to prevent trespassing.
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] National Forests and Private Ownership

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 3:10 PM Mike Thompson  wrote:
>
> Not all of the land within US National Forests is owned by the US Government, 
> there are private "inholdings" [1].
>
> The boundaries between government land and private land are often marked by 
> signs, e.g.[2]  The above photo is geotagged, and if you drag it into JOSM 
> you can see that it is quite far from the overall National Forest boundary as 
> currently depicted in OSM[3].
>
> The wiki mentions "inholdings", but it is not clear how these should be 
> mapped[4].
>
> How should these be mapped?
> access=private/permissive?
> ownership=private?

New York has a precisely parallel situation, with government-owned,
public-access land that has private inholdings. (Or odd cases where
the inholdings belong to a county or municipality, or to a different
government department.)


At present, I don't specifically map the inholdings - eventually they
probably ought to have mapping for some combination of landuse and
landcover. Instead, I simply have them as inner ways in the
multipolygon that represents the forest (or wilderness area, or park,
or whatever).

https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6362588 is a typical complex
case where a forest has both inholdings and exclaves. Many of the Wild
Forest areas in the Adirondack and Catskill Parks are similarly
diffuse.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360488 is a large wilderness
area that is considerably more compact, but still has some inholdings,
as well as travel corridors for certain roads.

Of course, if an inholding is also an identifiable feature that
deserves tagging on its own, then it gets tagged.  The Rollins Pond
campground https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/429190169 has an outer
way that is also an inner way of the Saranac Lakes Wild Forest
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6362702

Mappers across the border in Vermont seem to have been approaching the
problem in the same way for National Forests. The Green Mountain
National Forest https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1610352 is a
multipolygon that has a great many inner ways, one of which is tagged
separately as the George D. Aiken Wilderness
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/116060605.  (This is a case where
I'm not positive that the mapping is right; I thought that the Aiken
Wilderness was part of the GMNF, but the topology seems to indicate
that it exists independently. Not my turf; I'll let the locals deal
with it.)

This practice can handle cases of almost unlimited weirdness, sich as
a National Park corridor that partly traverses a State Park, but is
itself broken up by rights-of-way for roads and power lines.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6523267

By the way, I also make cutouts if I know that a right-of-way is NOT
part of the feature being mapped.  Woodland Valley Road,
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/20213204, although it exists as an
easement for the inholding to the west, is part of the campground, and
it's obvious when you're driving it that you're "in" the campground.
By contrast, Red Hill Road where it runs through the Dinch Road unit
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6304739 remains the property of
the Department of Transportation, not the Bureau of Water Supply, and
there's a distinct sense that you're leaving and re-entering the
forest unit when you cross the road. Stewart State Forest
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6367564 is cut away for the
rights-of-way of the power line and the state and county roads, but
not for the logging roads or the residential access easement to the
east.

This tagging practice is controversial, and many mappers feel that I
should conjoin the regions if the forest unit exists on both sides of
the highway. I'm following the practice of the managing agencies.

(Ignore the alignment problems on the highways in these examples for
now. The cadastre in this part of the world is ... approximate. I'm
doing what I can with the data I've got.)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Opinions on micro parks

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 2:40 AM Michael Patrick  wrote:

> > "It is a park in the sense of American English as of 2019. Whether it is
> > a park according to OSM may be debatable, as it is an "unimproved" park,
> > meaning it is under development as to improvements like restrooms and
> > other amenities.
>
> In Seattle, there are efforts to un-improve certain parks to restore them
> as close as possible to native conditions, especially for salmon run
> restoration, wildlife corridors, and plant species preservation.
>

Here, too. I tag them `leisure=nature_reserve` and
`boundary=protected_area` with an appropriate `protect_class`. According to
OSM's view, they are not `leisure=park` even if they have 'park' in their
names. (The US actually has relatively few objects that match the European
definition of 'park' - which is an extensively human-sculpted landscape
chiefly for visual enjoyment.)


> > Note that it (IMHO correctly) explicitly mentions and excludes urban
> forests.
> See Las Wolski example at
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=park?uselang=en <
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=park?uselang=en>
>
> LoL!  " Forest within a city. This is not a park, as greenery is not fully
> controlled"
> Most of the Seattle Parks would not be parks, then. Also, that national
> parks are " Parks in isolated, rural locations covering large, usually wild
> areas" is not true, see https://www.nps.gov/subjects/urban/index.htm
>

Quite possibly. Are the things in question nature reserves? In any case, in
an earlier thread discussing
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/390260 there was quite a
broad consensus that they are at least protected areas, and tagging them as
such should be relatively non-controversial. There's also a proposal in
process at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:_Named_protection_class_for_protected_areas
that
needs some final tidying before I can call for a vote. (I expect it also to
be relatively non-controversial; nobody likes the numeric protect_class
that we have today.)


> > Case 3:  http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/case3.png
> > The highlighted area in the middle of the picture straddles a street and
> > parts of an amenity=parking north and south of the street and seems to
> > rather arbitrarily cut through the woodland at its northern edge.
>
> Our county sometimes requires developers to provision for green space. A
> friend of mine recently bought a house, and their owners association is
> currently collecting ideas for theirs.
>

Yes, If these conservation easements for green space are private, I simply
mark them as `natural=wood` or whatever the appropriate land cover might
be, overlaid on the `landuse=residential`. If they're open to the public,
once again they become `leisure=nature_reserve`.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7391814 is an example of the latter,
where the developer was required to grant the township a public-access
green space easement. I mapped part of the landcover as well. (I usually
don't bother with mapping landcover, since when I render maps, I get it
from other sources, but I make an occasional exception to micromap nature
reserves or neighbourhoods.)

(Remaining discussion about micro-protected areas snipped.)

It is obvious that in multiple areas of the USA, these parks that are not
'parks' by the European definition are of intense local interest. If UK
English is the official language of OSM, we may lack appropriate tagging,
because the UK doesn't have very many features like them and doesn't really
have a phrase to describe them that is succinct enough to use as a tag.

If there is a local community of mappers that does have an intense interest
in including a feature of a given type, it is profoundly disrespectful to
that community to suggest that the feature ought not to be mapped. In this
particular case - which everyone on this list knows I've been trying to
address for at least a couple of years now - I strongly suspect that there
is a fundamental objection in some quarters to mapping these 'parks' - no
matter how much local interest they've generated.

I'm not sure that I've retained all the emails, but when I did the import
of New York City watershed recreation areas, I saw the same arguments -
culminating with 'lack of field verifiability.'  When that argument reached
the height of absurdity, I'd posted examples of the signs posted at
intervals on the areas' boundaries (such as
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ke9tv/14018132286). One of the regular
objectors - I forget which - emailed me and stated firmly that since there
was no continuous marking of the boundary (such as a fence) the boundary
was still not verifiable, and the area could therefore still not be mapped;
he said that the only way it could be included in OSM was to map the
individual signs and ignore the area for which they are a demarcation.

This argument made it clear to me that at least some individuals on this
list are opposed 

Re: [Talk-us] Opinions on micro parks

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 12:04 PM Bill Ricker  wrote:
> In many other matters we say we map the signage.
> That is not a bad place to start here.
> So a rule of it needs at least a name and/or a physical sign would be 
> internally consistent and predictably OSMish.

> An exception to allow for un-named de-facto parks when someone (official or 
> guerilla) is engaged in improvements and maintenance of the de-facto park 
> would be wise, to cover the corner cases where it's legally a vacant lot but 
> in reality it's a public good.
> (I type while looking out the window at one such, and no, it's not my doing.)

In my area, there are also town 'parks' that are intentionally left
undeveloped, and some of those are unsigned. They are in the town
plan, intentionally to support passive recreational activities such as
walking and bird watching, and to preserve the forested appearance of
the community. There are groups of volunteers who maintain things like
walking and MTB trails in them. I tag those 'leisure=nature_reserve
boundary=protected_area protect_class=21' for want of anything better.
I don't use 'leisure=park' for those (but I also don't disrupt the
tagging of other mappers, so if I see one tagged 'leisure=park' I
leave it alone. They may have names like 'Fieldstone Drive Park' or
Ĺock 7 Park' in the plan - but those are really just the names of
other features that front on the parcel. The green space east of the
shopping mall in https://tinyurl.com/yyyj2m3l is an example. I don't
recall there being a signed entrance. When I've gone there, I've just
parked on one of the residential streets and hopped over a guard rail
onto a trail - knowing full well that it was lawful because I'd
researched the matter..

I've not yet mapped the little area that the township owns at a corner
where two streets meet at a very acute angle (that used to be across
the street from the town hall before they built the new one). The town
keeps it pretty; it's big enough to hold a flagpole, a fountain, a
couple of flower beds and a bench or two, but it's really just a tiny
wedge of land that couldn't be put to any more profitable use. A
policeman comes out daily to raise and lower the flag. I don't think
it has a name.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Historic 66 as highway=trunk in OK

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 8:11 AM Paul Johnson  wrote:
> The larger cities in southern Alaska.  Most are gravel, including a paper 
> interstate.  I think Alaska's the last state to still have gravel state 
> highways.

Not just southern Alaska. It's kind of hard to pave over permafrost,
so there's a lot of gravel Up North as well.  Used to be that most of
the AlCan Highway was gravel.
--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Historic 66 as highway=trunk in OK

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 8:09 AM stevea  wrote:
> The topic begs the question as to what such (usually very) old, 
> poor-condition (where they ARE poor) roads should be tagged (we limit 
> ourselves to US roads here because this is talk-us), and at what granularity. 
>  (Volker COULD do detailed tagging, but I hear loud and clear he prefers 
> high-granularity tagging, as do I, though we all recognize how tedious this 
> can be).  And "old 66" is a quintessential example, many segments are a 
> century old or older:  it is known as "the Mother road" by many.  BTW, many 
> public agencies under the umbrella of Southern California Association of 
> Governments are working on developing USBR 66 in California for cyclists (the 
> route number choice is no coincidence as some alignments follow the old 
> Mother road).  This was actually in OSM as an early proposed route, but was 
> removed to conform to USBRS proposed route conventions.  If/as USBR 66 turns 
> into a Caltrans (DOT) route proposal to AASHTO, OSM will re-enter these data. 
>  It makes sense to pay close attention to the underlying infrastructure 
> tagging (tertiary, surface, smoothness...) as we do so since these are 
> important to cyclists.

It really depends on what we're talking about here. Are we talking
about the places that are bannered with the 'Historic US 66' sign
(with the appearance of a US Highway banner from the 1930s), roads
named 'Old US 66', or the actual ways comprising the historic route of
the road.

'Historic US 66' is a bannered and numbered route because of its
history, not because of its current importance to the road system. The
constituent ways should be tagged as whatever they are currently in
the road network. In many places, 'Historic US 66' no longer follows
the historic route of the road because the road is no longer passable
or no longer has good connections to the highway network. For example,
from Flagstaff, Arizona to the New Mexico state line (except for brief
detours through Winslow and Holbrook) the bannered 'Historic Route 66'
is highway=motorway because the construction of I-40 obliterated or
disconnected the old route.  (I don't know whether I-40 actually bears
the signage anywhere.)

There are places where the old road exists on the ground and bears the
name, but are not bannered because a road fails to connect or is no
longer reliably passable to low-clearance automobiles. The route can
be followed for some distance east and west of Exit 303, for instance.
It's at most an 'unclassified' road and connects mostly to tracks. At
the east end of that run, there's no crossing of I-40, and the road
simply turns right onto another track. On the other side of the
freeway, the pavement resumes, but in Petrified Forest it's
unmaintained and has deteriorated to where it is neither safe nor
lawful to drive. East of there, it's a track at best, and again ends
at a freeway crossing without an interchange.  On the far side, it's a
minor rural road (County Road 7385)
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/16792461, then crosses the freeway
at McCarrell and becomes the freeway frontage road in Chambers. If
memory serves, some of the tracks that remain in use are no longer
public rights-of-way, and neither the ranchers nor the Navajo Nation
welcome visitors on them.

In western Arizona, from Kingman to Seligman, the historic way is in
service, is bannered 'AZ 66' and is at least 'secondary'.  East of
Seligman, it exists as Crookson Road and 'Old US 66, but diminishes to
a track and disappears at a corner where it crosses neither I-40 nor
the Phoenix spur of the Santa Fe. Between there are Flagstaff, there
are fragmentary tracks, and some, such as
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/16792461 are entirely isolated from
the road network. West of Kingman, it's County Road 10, and at least
it used to be challenging to drive because it was a narrow and badly
deteriorated road in mountainous terrain. The only community on the
route is Oatman, which has enjoyed something of a resurgence as a
tourist destination, "come see the ghost town where wild burros roam
the streets." I'd say it's probably 'tertiary' because in that desert,
it doesn't take much to make a road important.

For the whole route, I'd say, 'tag the constituent ways as what they
are, and maintain the 'Historic US 66' relation only where the
historic route is marked, or at least named.'  The 'Old US 66' concept
is best left for OHM.

> Are there any fresh, eager readers of this list who wish to delve into a 
> fairly tedious sub-project in OSM:  tagging "their" portion of 66 (and its 
> many remnants, bypasses, used-to-be-segments...) that they know?  The right 
> classifications (as they render) and surface=* and smoothness=* tagging 
> (though, they do not render) would be very welcome ongoing improvements to 
> our fine project.  It could be a state-at-a-time effort to drum up OSM 
> community, it could become a "WikiProject" (though that concept seems to have 
> 

[Talk-us] Tagging of State Parks in the US

[Kevin Kenny]

Summary: I propose that the unifying feature of the typical State Park
is its protection status, and propose that one tag combination that
ought to appear on its boundary is `boundary=protected_area
protect_class=21`. I solicit community feedback before trying to
stitch this idea into the Wiki or opening a ticket requesting that
OSM-Carto render these areas.

(I wrote a much longer diary entry about this at
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv/diary/390260 that presents
some of the background and argues in much greater detail. I hope that
it could serve as the foundation of a Wiki description. I make a
briefer discussion below.)

Over the few years that I've contributed to OSM, I've seen several
quite acrimonious controversies erupt over the tagging of State Parks
in the US. The controversy seems to stem from the fact that although
State Parks are named and signed as unified wholes, a typical State
Park is multiple things according to the OSM data model and therefore
'ought' to be mapped as components: this part is a recreation ground,
this part is a nature reserve, this part is indeed a 'park' in the
sense of a sculpted landscape for visual enjoyment, and so on. There
is no place for the whole.

Likewise, 'boundary=national_park' has been controversial for State
Parks. While some 'quack like a duck', many more don't look like or
perform the same function as our National Parks. Moreover, some
mappers object to 'boundary=national_park' for any feature that
doesn't have National Park in its name, or any feature that is not
administered by the National Park Service.

Recently, it occurred to me that one aspect that does unify a State
Park is the idea of protection. A State Park is a protected_area. None
of the classes 1-6 fits it, because, generally speaking, it is not a
nature-protected area. Rather, it is a community-protected area. It
may be extensively developed with recreational facilities, but it is
protected against someone buying the land and strip-mining it or
building condos. In fact, on the Wiki page,
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dprotected_area#Social-protected-area
- I see class 21: 'community protected area', listing typical
protection objects as, religious, sacred areas, associative areas, and
recreation. We therefore already have appropriate tagging for this
type of protection! (Unfortunately, it doesn't yet render. That's
fixable, I presume.)

In fact, some time ago, I had gone through New York State facilities,
and tagged the recreational ones with exactly this combination. At the
time, it was not with the intention of floating a proposal such as
this, it was out of ignorance - I saw what appeared to be the
appropriate protection class on the Wiki, and used it. At the time, I
didn't check taginfo or Overpass, and so was entirely unaware that I
was virtually the only mapper to use the `protect_class=21` tag. New
York therefore could provide a test case.

Of course, we can continue to have a healthy discussion over
`landuse=*` and `leisure=*` for these areas, but I wonder if all the
parties can at least agree that tagging these features as protected
areas is correct and appropriate? If so, we can ask that the renderer
work off the protection status and at least have some common ground to
start from, allowing the features to appear on the map without dispute
even as the taxonomic arguments continue.

Given the amount of heat that has surrounded the tagging of State
Parks, I raise this idea with some trepidation, but ... what do other
mappers think? (For what it's worth, I've run the idea in private past
a few of the more strident voices, and while there has been the
expected quibbling over details, nobody seems to have a real objection
to the broad contours of the idea.)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Mapping rail trails

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 9:36 AM Phil! Gold  wrote:
> The "state at a time" pattern, as I have always understood it, exists to
> keep vastly distant objects from being linked with each other.  It makes
> it much less likely for someone, say, updating I-95 in Florida to get an
> editing conflict with someone else who made a change in Massachusetts.
> State borders provide convenient locations for the division of overly-lond
> relations.

It's mostly, as I understand it,  "huge routes cause editing
conflicts, make validation difficult, and otherwise make trouble for
the tools," combined with, "if you're going to break up a route, break
it in places that make some sort of sense."

When I created the (still incomplete, sorry!) relation for the Long
Path hiking trail, I found that the tools were struggling with the
number of way segments. (I switched to Meerkartor briefly at one point
because JOSM would crash on me!) I made the totally arbitrary decision
that the best points to break it up were the county lines.  I then
made the even more arbitrary decision that I'd lump in the George
Washington Bridge and 179th Street in with Bergen County, because it
just didn't feel right to create a New York County trail section for
that short a distance over city streets.

If it turns out that the sections will indeed have distinct attributes
(this includes Richard Fairhurst's observation that different states
treat their bicycle routes with different levels of respect), it'll be
easy to break them apart.

Merging route relations is harder, because when two relations merge
into one, one of them is deleted, damaging the ability of some of the
history tools to track changes. I'm therefore inclined to say, "if
it's already split in the database, leave it split; create a group if
necessary". The tools deal with routes-inside-routes pretty well.
https://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/#route?id=919642 manages to
assemble the sections into a coherent whole.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Website showing the best time to survey with GPS.

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 6:20 PM Eric H. Christensen via Talk-us
 wrote:
> I was told there was a website that forecasted the best times to do survey 
> work with GNSS based upon diversity of satellites in the sky, solar activity, 
> etc. Does anyone know what site this is?

Nowadays, the constellations are dense enough (particularly if you can
use GPS/GLONASS/Galileo/BaiDou) that a consumer-grade GPS receiver is
unlikely to see a difference based on satellite diversity. (It's
different, possibly, if there's a failed satellite and no on-orbit
spare, or the on-orbit spare hasn't been moved into position, and
there the sites like https://www.gnssplanning.com/ will give you
useful information.)

The GPS signal is more stable by night and in clear weather.

A bigger effect is signal absorption.  There's one trail near me for
which my mapping involves considerable guesswork, because there's
dense coniferous tree coverage (nothing viisible even in winter
aerials), and the trail goes down into a couple of itty-bitty slot
canyons where all the sky that the receiver can see is directly
overhead, and a little patch to the north where the satellites seldom
cross. There are also cliff faces that set up nice reflections of the
RF signal, so sometimes the receiver's computed position is false.
It's pretty wonky. I bet I could control the effects by using a
survey-grade GPS receiver, setting it on a solid tripod, and giving it
an hour or two of integration time, but I don't have such a device,
nor do I have the time to do that for each trackpoint.

Space weather is another significant effect, but right now we're close
to sunspot minimum, and space weather is mostly quiet.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ provides forecasts.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/alerts-watches-and-warnings alerts
to significant conditions.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/impacts/space-weather-and-gps-systems gives
an idea what to look for, and
https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2012/comberiate.pdf is a more
advanced discussion of the same thing. The bottom line here for the
Lower 48 + Hawai`i is probably 'don't worry about it unless Kp gets
above about 5 or there's a class M or X flare in progress.'

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Mapping rail trails

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 10:50 AM Richard Fairhurst  wrote:
> OSM was founded in 2004 on the principle of "if they won't give us the
> data, we'll make it ourselves" and that still holds true. I've started
> on making sure all rail-trails of a reasonable length (say, 5 miles
> upwards) are actually mapped in OSM, using route relations.
 [...]
> So why not have a go? It's easy work and you get to see the routes
> appear on http://cycling.waymarkedtrails.org pretty much instantly.

Yes, please!

I try to do my part locally. I'm a hiker rather than a cyclist, so
that affects what gets mapped, but I also watch what other people are
mapping around here and try to repair the relations when they get
messed up. People keep beating me to it, though;
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6133160 got done before I made
it down there. Repairing the relations when someone inadvertently
conflated https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1738631 with
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2692590 was quite a chore! (I
found out about that one because 'Genesee Valley Greenway' showed up
in my neighbourhood, near Albany and nowhere near the Genesee Valley.)

I have never tried to import data on rail-trails, or indeed any other
sort of trail. Not only are the external data sources frequently
subject to aggressive copyright enforcement, but also they are
frequently of abysmal data quality. I map this stuff with literal
boots on the literal ground. (I *have* been known to use the external
data sets as a "to do" list. I'm comfortable with that level of
external dependency. Some of the hardliners here would say that once
I've consulted such a data set, I'm permanently mentally contaminated
and can't map the features that it shows, but that way lies madness!)

There are too few of us. I keep seeing the same half-dozen names
locally. More would be welcome.

And route relations are important for sites like Waymarked Trails - it
totally ignores walking and cycling routes that are not indicated with
relations, which is why I wind up doing routes for even relatively
trivial stuff like
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4836600.(although that
certainly meets Richard's five-mile threshold).

To reiterate: yes, please help!

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] WikiProject United States Public Lands

[Kevin Kenny]

I surmise that Steve intended to include a link:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States_Public_Lands

On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 6:34 PM stevea  wrote:
>
> I have burnished this wiki to attempt to be comprehensive with Public Lands 
> at federal, state, and county levels (even a bit city-, though here we blur 
> with leisure=park).  Much of what is here mimics 
> https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dprotected_area#Protect_classes_for_various_countries
>  United States' row, though much more comprehensively:  i.e. the Public Lands 
> wiki doesn't include simply a number-value for the protect_class key, it 
> tries to describe ALL of the tags Public Lands should receive in the USA.
>
> It is quite likely I've missed some federal-level (some "park-like," some 
> likely not) Public Lands, though it's also possible all are listed.  If you 
> have comprehensive knowledge of the many categories of (federal, especially) 
> Public Lands, please take a look at this wiki and see if it is or isn't 
> comprehensive / complete.  You might also agree or disagree with the tagging 
> schemes that are there, feel free to edit them if you disagree, they are sort 
> of "wet ink."
>
> Thank you,
> SteveA
> California
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Ashuwillticook Rail Trail in Massachusetts

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 10:14 AM OSM Volunteer stevea
 wrote:
> I appreciate it!  I'm now/soon scouring more aerial/satellite imagery before 
> I MIGHT (with trepidation) enter this.  I do think it would be better if 
> locals who are more certain about this were to enter it.  Though if MassDOT 
> asserts a USBR 7 re-route through here, "it must exist."

North Adams is about an hour-and-a-half drive from here. If someone
convinces me it's important enough, I might be able to make time this
summer to head over there and scout it out.  There's a big stretch of
the Taconic Crest Trail north of Route 2 that remains unmapped, so
that would be another project while I'm over there. (Or I could just
not worry about other mapping and go climb Mount Greylock - I haven't
been up there in years.)

Steve, ping me in a month or so if it's not sorted by then.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 5:12 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
 wrote:
> I myself have also used landuse=conservation (long ago) and/or 
> leisure=nature_reserve (neither of which render, not really the point).

My understanding is that landuse=conservation is deprecated in favor
of boundary=protected_area.

leisure=nature_reserve does indeed render.

boundary=protected_area, I am given to understand, renders if the
protection class is between 1 and 6 (with 1a and 1b also rendering).

> > I think the entire "national_park" tag is unfortunate, as it wraps up a
> > lot of concepts that vary by country, and makes people understand things
> > when they don't.  In the US, it should mean "preserve the land while
> > allowing access and enjoyment", there is a notion that the place is
> > relatively distinguished, and it doesn't really have a connotation of
> > size.
>
> Some say "size matters" with national_park, some say it's too confusing for 
> size to matter.  It doesn't seem we're going to eliminate 
> boundary=national_park anytime soon, as even though this shouldn't have 
> mattered, it did:  this was a tag that rendered, so people used it.  (How 
> rendering — presently, eventually, politically-within-OSM... — gets coupled 
> to tagging is another chewy topic).

Some say that 'level of government matters' or that 'title matters' as
well, but I think that the right way to think about it is function.The
two parks in New York that enjoy constitutional protection effectively
function as if they were national parks in other countries, as do many
facilities in the US that are titled, 'National Monument' or even
'National Forest'. They conform with the Wiki definition of 'national
park'. I suspect that relatively few, even among the tourists who've
been there, could distinguish among the coterminous 'Sequoia National
Park', 'Giant Sequoia National Monument, and 'Sequoia National
Forest'.
There was a proposal in the 1960's to transfer control of the
Adirondack Park to Uncle Sam, which would have created the nation's
largest National Park at the time. It was tremendously unpopular and
never went anywhere, but it was recognition that the two systems serve
a similar purpose. Baxter State Park in Maine is more stringently
protected than the adjoining Katahdin Woods and Waters National
Monument, and its scenery is considerably more spectacular.

For New York's confusing array of facilities, I've been careful to
retain protected_area tagging, in case we should lose all the
arguments and have no other consistent tagging left to us.
Unfortunately, to have that make sense, I've had to choose
protect_class=21 protection_object=recreation, since they aren't
generally nature-protected areas. (I try to tag them case by case -
I've not done a massive botched import.) Since that protection class
doesn't render, we're little better off from the standpoint of showing
something on the map.

About half the array of facilities is represented in the table on
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NYS_DEC_Lands. Nothing there is
tagged 'park', it's all nature_reserve - with a handful of exceptions
(fish hatchery, historic site, and notably state forest). Multiple Use
Area probably *should* be the same as whatever we wind up deciding is
right for the typical 'state park' but right now they're nature
reserves.  The remaining half of the facilities are the State Parks,
State Historic Sites, and State Recreation Areas (maybe other titles,
too, I need to check my notes) that are administered by a completely
different department of the state government.

My personal worst case of 'city park' is one that would fall solidly
within the European definition of 'park' - except that, well, it's
sort of also a cemetery.  https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/1438926 I
made the somewhat arbitrary decision of using multipolygons that
follow the land use rather than the property line.

It's a mess, and it's what I've got.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Someone from Boston, MA?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 11:01 PM Kevin Kenny  wrote:
> I'm not a Bostonian, but I've been to Copley Place.
> Copley Place is a named building: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/240501783

more information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copley_Place - the
building complex, in addition to the shopping mall, has office
buildings (tenants include the German and Canadian consulates, on the
fourth and fifth floors respectively of tower 3), hotels and a parking
garage, all connected.

There's a detailed plan of the first few levels at
https://www.simon.com/mall/copley-place/map#/ - the menu at upper
right will let you select the levels, and the entrances to the towers
are on 'Sky Level'.

I'm not familiar enough with indoor mapping to be able to direct you
how to map a suite within the towers.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Someone from Boston, MA?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 10:40 PM Wolfgang Zenker
 wrote:
> I tried to add the German Consulate General in Boston, MA, but could not
> find the address "Three Copley Place, Boston, MA 02116" in
> our data. That place is apparently somewhere near Boston University.
> Anyone local who could check if this is a missing street name in our
> data?
>
> consulate website: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/240501783

I'm not a Bostonian, but I've been to Copley Place.
Copley Place is a named building: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/240501783

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

[Talk-us] Fwd: Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

oops, sent to wrong list
-- Forwarded message -
From: Kevin Kenny 
Date: Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 2:36 PM
Subject: Fwd: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type
To: OSM Tagging mailing list 


Using a British dictionary (Living Oxford Dictionary), the first
definition of 'park' is:

1 A large public garden or area of land used for recreation.
‘a walk round the park’
‘a country park’

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/park

The 'or public garden' implies that the area *may* be human sculpted,
but there is no separate definition to encompass 'regional park'.
There is a separate entry for 'national park', and under 'park' there
are entries to cover the 'park' of a country house, a 'wildlife park',
'park' as another word for 'playground', 'park' as an informal word
for 'football pitch' (borrowed from the American usage) and the
Americanism 'sports park' - and then a second sense of any area
devoted to a specific purpose ('industrial park', 'office park'), plus
a third designating the 'park' position of the gear selector on an
automatic transmission.

I'm fine with 'leisure=park' being more specific, but we have to be
very clear what we mean because it's more restrictive than even UK
English (to say nothing of CANZUS, where 'park' for the large regional
parks is surely common), and we have to expect mistagging,
particularly in light of the fact that the rest of the
English-speaking world has tagged a lot of parks with the looser
language that used to be on the Wiki.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

[Talk-us] Fwd: Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

oops, meant to send this to the list...

-- Forwarded message -
From: Kevin Kenny 
Date: Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 2:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type
To: Mateusz Konieczny 


On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 12:06 PM Mateusz Konieczny
 wrote:
> It is supposed to be about both, I attempted to check both but I open to 
> discovering that I am mistaken.
> In case of British English I attempted to consult with people who are native 
> speakers of BE
> and people better in English than myself but maybe my questions/examples 
> failed to capture
> cases of what should be described park (and or leisure=park).

The earliest use of the word 'park' in English is attested to in the
13th Century - in which it means 'enclosed preserve for hunting.' The
great estates would maintain 'parks' that they would stock with beasts
of the chase.

The use of 'park' in its urban meaning entered the language some four
hundred years later, as London was being rebuilt after the Great
Plague and the Great Fire.  It began to sprawl, and tracts of land
were reserved to be kept in a quasi-natural state, or at least
protected from urban development, for public recreation. The name
extended in this way partly because the laws that had established
royal hunting preserves were repurposed to protect land in this way.
Civic pride made these parks highly sculpted, displaying an idealized
landscape, hence the urban use of the word 'park.'

'Park' in the sense of 'baseball park' - a sporting field - is an
Americanism dating to the 1860's.

'Car park' came from the fact that people visiting cities would use
the public parks as a place to leave their carriages, and later their
automobiles, and so 'parking' was born.

'Industrial park' and so on are 20th-century innovations, I suspect
from the advertising agencies and real estate agents.

> Neither of them is tagged leisure=park and it seems that
> "national park" is in some way similar to "business park" or "industrial park"
> - word park is in the name but it is not considered as a special case
> of "green human-sculpted landscape" that is commonly referred to as
> a "park".

'Park' in the sense of 'preserved natural land' (originally for
hunting, but the sense broadened as natural areas were preserved for
other purposes) and 'park' in the sense of 'sculpted, idealized
landscape' march hand in hand through the last 350 years or so, and
'preserved natural land' is the earlier sense of the word.

> This one is not surprising to me, it is probably result of compromise/conflict
> resulting in potected area with some objects that are contrary to any
> nature protection attempts.
> Poland has cases of legal large-scale active logging in Tatra mountains
> that is result of conflict between local people and desire to protect nature.
>
> See 
> https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wsp%C3%B3lnota_Le%C5%9Bna_Uprawnionych_O%C5%9Bmiu_Wsi
> - conflict dates back to creation of the Tatrzański Park Narodowy (=Tatra 
> National Park).
>
> See also motorways going sometimes through protected or "protected" areas.

One reason that the boundary lines in New York's big parks are such a
mess is that transportation and utility corridors, well fields,
cemeteries, and similar land uses are officially cut out of the
protected areas.
Much logging happens in the areas of lesser protection. They are
protected from development - the land owners can't build on them, or
are restricted to extremely low-density development - but sustainable
logging practices are permitted on many of the inholdings. In many
cases the timber companies also have easements against them requiring
public access when active logging is not in progress.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 11:24 AM Mateusz Konieczny
 wrote:
> Why not simply call anything which is a 'large public area for recreation', a 
> park, and specify it additionally with additional tags?
>
> That would require redefining leisure=park and while would match use of word 
> "park" in USA
> it would start mismatching use of work "park" in UK. It would also start to 
> mismatch how
> leisure=park is used in Europe.
>
> Generally British English is preferred in OSM and redefining popular tags is 
> deeply problematic.

Are we talking about the use of the *tag*, or the use of the *word* in
British English?

If we're talking about the use of the tag, then we get to define it,
but if it is too far removed from a word's commonly understood
meaning, we have to expect extensive mistagging.

If we're talking about the use of the word 'park' in common speech,
the British Isles have ample examples of 'park' being used in a sense
much like the US one: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/359617831
happened to be the first one I noticed, but
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/421685070 and others are also
present. If these aren't 'parks' in UK English, why do they exist in
the UK with 'park' in their names?

I also notice that Great Britain has similar situations to the US
national parks, where other land uses are embedded. I see that
Cairngorms National Park
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1947603 embeds at least four
villages (Avlemore, Ballater, Grantown-on-Spey and Kingussie).

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 9:05 AM Greg Troxel  wrote:
> The other case is a large area with subareas that are each clearly one
> or the other.  Consider:
>
>   1000 acre parcel, almost entirely forest in a natural state, with dirt
>   hiking paths
>
>   a 40 acre sub-piece of this on the edge, that is different:
> - paved parking lot
> - visitor center / bathroom building
> - grass and a few trees (city park like)
> - picnic tables, grills
>
>   probably there are different rules for the two pieces.  Dogs might be
>   allowed in the 40-acre chunk, but not in the larger forest, for
>   example.
>
>   the entire thing is called "Foo State Park", owned by a state
>   government.  Legally it is one parcel, and run by the same state
>   agency.
>
> I think the basic issue is that we tend to focus on the larger
> definition of area and think we must give it one tag, so we frame the
> question: "Is this 1000 acre place a =park or a =nature_reserve?".
> Stepping back, I see a park and a nature_reserve as separate and related
> things.
>
> So, I'd be in favor of having a way on the parcel boundary, and another
> denoting the park-type sub-piece, calling those outer and inner and
> tagging:
>
>  outer: name="Foo State Park"
>  inner: leisure=park
>  relation wtih outer/inner: leisure=nature_reserve
>
> Or, perhaps not having a relation and putting leisure=nature_reserve on
> the outer, with the expectation that renderers/etc. will resolve the
> overapping landuse to the smaller geometry.
>
> (As I see it this applies to many National Parks too, but we don't worry
> about that because we just call them national_park.)

That's more or less what I've been doing - tag the outer ring, but
without cutouts for the inner ring(s). (It's also slightly more
complicated than you describe, since the developed areas are
frequently, if indeed not usually, on the margin of the larger park,
but I do understand multipolygon topology and can deal with that case
readily as well.) There's nothing wrong with embedding a
protect_class=1b or a protect_class=4 within a protect_class=2.

The reason for avoiding cutouts is to make it clear what is and is not
part of the named park. Many of the parks that I deal with have
private inholdings that are not part of the park but may be completely
surrounded by it. Those do get cutouts.

I haven't even attempted yet to map the strange intermediate beasts
like public-access conservation easements - common on lumber-company
land - or private leaseholds of public land - common to allow the
larger parks to embed facilities like youth camps that restrict public
access. I'm doing what I can manage!

The smaller state parks - the thousand-acre type that you contemplate
- are often not what IUCN considers to be protected areas, and so I've
taken to using protected_area tagging, but with protection classes
such as 21 (which woud be accompanied with
'protection_object=recreation').  That doesn't render, so as a
stopgap, I've been tagging them 'leisure=nature_reserve' or
'leisure=park', whichever seems to fit, recognizing that further
developments are likely eventually to make the dual tagging
unneccessary. https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6442393 is
typical.

What I struggle with is are more complex situations - that may always
necessitate some 'abuse' of tagging. The thousand-acre park with a
forty-acre developed section is handled quite nicely with your scheme.
When you have a 'park' comprising hundreds of thousands, or millions
of acres, operated in public-private partnership, things start to
break down. This is true of New York's two huge parks; of the USA's
larger National Parks; and of US National Monuments, National Forests,
and BLM recreation lands. The outer ring - the legally designated area
- may not really enclose anything recognizable as a 'park', while the
stricter 'park' land management may be somewhat diffuse, in many
discrete protected areas. The larger area is also protected, but
limited sustainable development is often permitted.

Looking at the IUCN definitions, the only class that fits these large
parks is '2' - 'national park'. IUCN, like our Wiki, doesn't actually
require that 'national park' be constituted by a national government.
It simply embodies a hidden assumption that only a nation-state has
the resources to constitute one. leaving the bigger state-defined
facilities in terminologic limbo.

Another odd case that I've mapped a lot of are the undeveloped
recreation areas owned by New York City to protect its water supply.
The city bought them to protect them from development, and allows
public access (in some cases requiring that the user apply for a free
permit, in others, "come one, come all!") I've tagged these with
boundary=protected_area protect_class=12 protection_object=water, and
then added leisure=nature_reserve as a rendering stopgap (because
class 12 doesn't render either).

One reason that I disfavour 'leisure=park' is, simply, the renderer.
(I 

Re: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Apr 28, 2019 at 2:43 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
 wrote:
> 1)  As states are as sovereign as the federal government (for purposes of 
> saying "what a park is around here"), the tag boundary=national_park has 
> rather widely been applied to state parks and state-park like lands.  (I know 
> Kevin Kenny has made a good case for why he uses this tag on certain New York 
> state "lands" of a certain sort.  And a lot of state parks in California and 
> other states get this tag.

More or less repeating my earlier argument:

I've applied this tag in exactly two instances: the 'blue line' that
surrounds the Adirondack and Catskill Parks. This line delineates the
portion of the state legally known as the Forest Preserve, and
enshrined in article XIV of the state constitution:
> The lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the 
> forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest 
> lands. They shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any 
> corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed 
> or destroyed.

Note that this land is an entirely different kettle of fish from the
areas entitled 'State Park' in New York.

Article XIV confers a sui generis protection, being enshrined at the
constitutional level. Unlike any of the US National Parks, which could
be wiped out by a simple Act of Congress, altering the Forest Preserve
needs a constitutional amendment. The *easiest* way to pass such a
thing is a supermajority vote of both houses of the state legislature,
in two consecutive sessions (with a general election intervening),
followed by a majority in a popular referendum. A number of amendments
have been passed to Article XIV, but they've all been relatively
small-scale changes to the state's holdings, to allow for construction
and maintenance of highways, well fields, utility lines, and similar
facilities. Generally, the amendments that concede land have all been
accompanied by adding land of greater value elsewhere.

The Forest Preserve plays a similar role to a large National Park. The
Catskill Park is of a similar size to a medium National Park like
Joshua Tree; the Adirondack Park would be able to fit Yellowstone,
Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon and Yosemite, with room to spare.
LIke some of the National Parks, the state landholdings are complex,
with many inholdings and leaseholds where the state does not own the
land (but highly regulates its use, including in many instances
mandating recreational access when active logging is not in progress).

The definition that appears in the Wiki:
> A  national park is a relatively large area of land declared by a government 
> (just as boundary=administrative are declared/recognised by governments), to 
> be set aside for human recreation and enjoyment, as well as the protection of 
> the natural environment and/or cultural heritage of an area. This would 
> normally also come with restrictions on human activity, particularly 
> development, for the protection of wildlife and scenery. National parks are 
> often named "X national park" (with translation).

is apposite. If US 'National Parks' are 'relatively large', then these
two qualify. The Adirondack Park is larger than any except for the
Alaska mega-parks; the Catskill Park is about of a size with Joshua
Tree or Yosemite.  They are set aside for the purposes mentioned in
the Wiki article. They come with stringent restrictions on
development. They simply are not administered by the Federal
government, because they were established in 1885, thirty-one years
before the National Park Service was established. The only National
Parks in existence were Yellowstone (Wyoming was not yet a state),
Mackinac (turned back to the State of Michigan in 1895), and Rock
Creek (an urban park in the DIstrict of Columbia, and so likewise
outside any state). Yosemite and Sequoia were in existence, as
California state parks.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 10:33 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
 wrote:
>
> I'll try to be brief, but there's a decade of history.  The leisure=park wiki 
> recently improved to better state it means "an urban/municipal" park, while 
> boundary=national_park (or perhaps leisure=nature_reserve, maybe 
> boundary=protected_area) works on large, national (and state or provincial in 
> North America) parks.  As the sharper wiki focus means a "city_park" (a 
> sometimes-found park:type value, I've written brand new wiki on park:type) 
> certainly qualifies as a leisure=park, this leaves county_parks (and their 
> ilk, like county_beaches) in a quirky "how best do we tag these now?" 
> quandary.

TL;DR - Tag the land use, not the land ownership. A city, town,
county, or state park may be virtually indistinguishable urban green
spots, recreation grounds, nature reserves, whatever. The level of
government that manages them may be of interest and worth tagging, but
ought not to be the primary determinant of 'park type'.


I think that the Wiki definition leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm
groping in a fog, much as you are, so please don't take anything that
I say here as a confrontational pronouncement.

My read on "urban/municipal" is that it describes setting and land
use, rather than the operator. To me a "park" in a
urban/suburban/front-country setting connotes a certain type of
facilities. It will likely have adequate parking, or else access to
public transportation. It will likely have public toilets.

Some are designed as restful spaces within the urban environment. Such
a park may have walking paths, benches, manicured gardens. Or it may
have a part that's allowed to run a little bit wilder, but often in
those cases it will have developed nature trails, perhaps with
placards identifying species or discussing the local ecosystem. They
may have elaborate landscaping, public art works, topiary, and other
features to add visual interest.

They will often have developed picnic facilities, perhaps even with
gazebos or pavilions that can be reserved for parties.

Some parks have further development. It's common to have playgrounds.
Playing fields, swimming pools or beaches, grandstands for spectators
to athetic competitions, and the associated facilities for athletes to
bathe and change clothes are often found. It's not unusual for a park
to have an outdoor theatre or music performance venue. Entertainments
such as carousels or miniature trains are not unheard-of. If a park
has a waterfront, then punts, rowboats, canoes, or pedal-boats may be
among the attractions offered. Concessionaires hawk their wares.

A park on a natural waterbody may well offer a boat launch and docks or quays.

All of these features make for what is essentially a human landscape.
It's one that's designed to be relaxed, focused on being a respite
from the hurly-burly of the city, but it's still relatively densely
developed - with many users concentrated in a relatively small area -
and definitely human-sculpted.

Whether the park is managed by a private conservancy, a city, a
county, a state or province, or a nation doesn't affect this
fundamental character.

A 'national park' typically exists to protect and display some
particularly valuable landscape feature. While more enlightened
management tries to protect the rare species that inhabit such a space
and the rare landforms found therein, what makes national parks so
very popular are the striking viewscapes that can be obtained over
large tracts of undeveloped land. Management will usually try to
concentrate gawkers into a few 'sacrificial' areas, so there will be
paved roads, parking, concessions, campgrounds and the like, and there
will be relatively accessible 'front country' trails, often with staff
conducting interpretive tours.

Beyond that 'front country' development, recreations in national parks
typically are strenuous outdoor pursuits: hiking, mountain biking,
riding of horses or mules, canoeing, fishing and hunting where
allowed, mountaineering, climbing, backcountry skiing. There's a far
greater sense of solitude, and a much greater need for preparedness -
if things go wrong, you're likely to be on your own for quite a while.

Virtually all National Parks in the US (in contradistinction to
National Recreation Area, National Monument, National Historic Site,
National Scenic Trail, National Seashore, and the rest of the zoo of
NPS-managed facilities) have just this sort of structure - a
relatively small, developed 'front country' environment which most
visitors never leave, facing a scenic, wild back country that is
available to more intrepid travelers. Often the backcountry also
partakes of the characteristics of 'nature reserve' in that it is
managed for conservation and research.

It's common for large 'parks' - both National Parks and the large
state and county parks - sometimes to have mixed uses. Many National
Parks, and many state and local facilities near me, have extensive

Re: [Talk-us] Footway tagging

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 4:31 PM Michael Sidoric via Talk-us
 wrote:
> Another consideration is accessibility.
> Not taking sides but besides aesthetics and nomenclature seems there needs to 
> be some way for routing and tags to reflect whether a route is ‘safe’ or 
> accessible.
>
> I map for several blind friends and many paths have unexpected (and 
> dangerous) overhead hazards that a cane cannot detect.
>
> Thoughts?

Accessibility for people with impairments, of whatever sort, is really
complicated to characterize, because it depends so strongly not only
on the nature of the impairment, but on the compensating abilities of
the individual, and the other available resources.  For instance, a
blind person who works with a dog may have no trouble with the
overhead hazards if the dog is trained to alert at them.

I have heard of profoundly blind hikers completing some of the longest
and toughest trails in the USA with the assistance of their assistive
devices and dogs. On the other hand, I know other partially sighted
individuals who have trouble with the most trivial of barriers and
will hardly leave their homes without a health aide.

For many paths, which have had no attention paid to accessibility, it
would mean characterizing the specific hazards, their location and
dimensions, or else the system would degenerate into, 'this path
wasn't designed for accessibility, so persons with any (unspecified)
impairment shouldn't be there." Which is like far too many busybody
social workers telling people, "people with your impairment can't do
that!" instead of working out what they *can* do and what sort of
accommodation can make it possible.

I don't know enough about the field to characterize what the obstacles
and hazards are, but it's surely more than a binary "blind people
should/shouldn't do this".

Alas, with the state of the map as far as I can foresee, the default
for many paths will almost have to be that virtually any barrier or
hazard may exist until asserted otherwise, so the tagging would have
to be 'free of barrier XYZ (except as noted?)' rather than 'warning:
barrier XYZ here.' Too many mappers are like me and wouldn't know how
to make the assessment.

Unfortunately, that isn't the sort of path that I mostly map, except
in my own neighbourhood. Many of the paths that I've mapped have
guidebook descriptions that include language like 'Grade 2. The trail
is relatively level, but stout waterproof boots are recommended in all
but the driest of seasons, and hikers should be prepared to detour
around beaver activity,' or 'Grade 3+/4. The rock is sound, holds are
plentiful, and route-finding is easy. Nevertheless, the exposure is
dramatic and less confident parties may wish to bring a rope.'

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] trail tagging

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 7:22 PM Rihards  wrote:
> On 19.04.19 19:34, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> > (There's also a law that snowshoes or skis are required
> > once the snow is 20 cm deep, but I follow "don't tag the local
> > legislation". There's nothing in that law regarding crampons, but any
> > time I've been using crampons and met a ranger, the ranger was also
> > using them and said nothing about it.)
> This seems a bit uncommon (the law, not you meeting the rangers). Got
> any reference or more detail on it?

6 CRR-NY 190.13 (f)(3)(vii) "In the High Peaks Wilderness Area, no
person shall [...] fail to possess and use skis or snowshoes when the
terrain is snow-covered with eight or more inches of snow"
https://tinyurl.com/y2bbfjad

There are other areas with similar regulations. Moreover, failing to
use snowshoes is regarded as very poor trail etiquette because it
shows little consideration for the safety of those behind you.
Tripping over a posthole (mountaineer slang for the hole left when
someone's boot breaks through the compacted snow on a trail) could be
very dangerous indeed on a trail like
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tYTfwHvO37c/VJnbELXajCI/Bnc/FdT5BrIX1Is/s1600/DSC_3854.JPG.

You can't always see the postholes. They fill with light drifted snow
that gives no more support than the same quantity of air.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] trail tagging

[Kevin Kenny]

> Everywhere I've been in the US or Canada a dirt 'way' too narrow for a 4 
> wheel vehicle is called a trail, path, or single track.   For the most part 
> they are appropriately (IMO) tagged as path.   Unfortunately the wiki says 
> this for highway:path (the highlighting is mine):
>
> A non-specific path. Use highway=footway for paths mainly for walkers, 
> highway=cycleway for one also usable by cyclists, highway=bridleway for ones 
> available to horse riders as well as walkers and highway=track for ones which 
> is passable by agriculture or similar vehicles.
>
> I think it makes no sense to call a dirt path, open to more than 1 user 
> group, anything other than a path.Since about 98% of the trail tagging 
> that I've seen seems to agree, Is there consensus on this?   Perhaps if the 
> international group likes the description as is, a clarification on the US 
> road tagging wiki page?
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging

TL;DR: As a mapper, I'm willing to map it according to others'
preferences. As a data consumer, I need to be prepared to accept
either scheme.

Here in Upstate New York, when I got started tagging trails not
knowing any better, I used highway=path, througout, with access tags
as appropriate for foot, bicycle, ski, horse, ATV, and snowmobile, and
surface=ground for the trails that are on variable natural surfaces.

I found that the early ones I mapped were being routinely edited to
'footway.' When I consulted the Wiki, like the others here, I found
enough conflicting information that I simply decided to adopt
'footway' for those that are single-use hiking trails (plus adding
ski=* when appropriate), since obviously some local mapper felt
strongly about the issue, and I didn't.

I still use 'path' for the not-too-rare situation around me where the
way is intended as a hiking trail, but MTB use is permitted or at
least tolerated, and relatively skilled MTB riders are seen fairly
frequently. (The ones I have in mind are obviously not for beginners!)
It seems very odd to call such a thing a cycleway, and highway=footway
bicycle=yes is kind of a strange combination.

The winter situation is complicated; I use foot=conditional:no @ snow
(I may have misspelt) for the trails that exclude snowshoers in the
winter. Otherwise ski=* and snowmobile=* cover most of the issues.
Many of the trails are open to skiers and snowmobilists in the winter.
Some, but not all, snowmobile trails exclude snowshoers for safety,
and some, but not all, ski trails exclude walkers so as not to mess up
the surface. (There's also a law that snowshoes or skis are required
once the snow is 20 cm deep, but I follow "don't tag the local
legislation". There's nothing in that law regarding crampons, but any
time I've been using crampons and met a ranger, the ranger was also
using them and said nothing about it.)

As a data consumer, I treat 'highway=path foot=yes motor_vehicle=no'
and 'highway=footway' as synonyms.Since both are in common use, I have
to be prepared to accept both. Not a huge worry for me, since I know
about it.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Is there any value at all in tiger:MTFCC and tiger:FUNCSTAT tags? (Kevin Kenny)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 4:02 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
 wrote:
> The usage of a tag (via taginfo) does give some indication of its usefulness 
> (e.g. school can't be that important a boundary tag if there are only nine or 
> ten of them in all of OSM), unless massive numbers of them were imported, as 
> from TIGER and these MTFCC and FUNCSTAT crufty stuff.  But when we can hardly 
> figure them out (although Kenny did a great job explaining what they MIGHT 
> mean) AND they are from a "hoary old import" (as TIGER is often called), 
> there really is good argument to remove them.  I'd vote to do so in a 
> heartbeat (if were collecting votes, and we don't appear to be doing so).  
> Hence, my logic-outline instead.  If they are essentially useless — and many 
> seem to agree they are — I believe it is prudent to remove them.

I don't disagree. Ordinarily, though, I don't advocate removing tags
or objects unless they are clearly wrong, and not just useless - hence
my agreement that the (historic) GNIS points are actively harmful.

Still, given the amount of trouble that I had figuring out FUNCSTAT
from the documentation, it might cross over into 'harmful' since my
guess is that every reasonable interpretation of that confusing schema
is misleading.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Is there any value at all in tiger:MTFCC and tiger:FUNCSTAT tags?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 11:58 AM Mateusz Konieczny
 wrote:
> Any info about meaning or use of 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:tiger:FUNCSTAT
> would be useful.

https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/funcstat.html

What those phrases mean is not immediately clear.
https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_area_attr.html is another
treatement of functional status and indicates: "Functional status
describes whether a geographic entity is a functioning governmental
unit, has an inactive government, is an administrative area without a
functioning government, or is a statistical area identified and
defined solely for tabulation and presentation of statistical data." -
the observation that A and S predominate is in keeping with the
definition that 'A' is a functioning governmental unit, and 'S' is a
statistical entry only.  I'm not sure what areas would have an
'inactive' government or be 'nonfunctioning' legal entities, and I
suspect that they're weird.

'Special-purpose functions' are so that TIGER can represent boundaries
such as school, library, water, sewer, sanitation, fire protection,
police, ... districts - whose boundaries may not match other
administrative hierarchies.  'Partially consolidated' refers to
situations like the boroughs of New York City, which have largely
ceded the executive and legislative functions of counties to the city,
but retain an independent judiciary.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Michigan Forest Land

[Kevin Kenny]

I did another round of extracts to cover state parks and state
wildlife areas.  You can see the geometry of everything now in the
.osm files inside https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/tmp/mi_sf.zip.

The tagging is still pretty sketchy - you guys need to discuss what
tagging can be created automatically (as with
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import:_NYCDEP_Watershed_Recreation_Areas)
- I think that at least 'boundary=protected_area' 'protect_class' and
'protection_title' can be worked in, and there may be others.  There
are a few validation errors in the data that are probably best patched
manually. Then there needs to be a plan for how you plan actually to
do the work of conflation, produce coherent change sets, and offer a
limited-scale sample for review. (And once there *is* an import plan,
then we need to go over to 'imports' to discuss it more broadly)

The next immediate step, I think, is for the locals to review the
extracts that we have and provide feedback. That's certainly a part
that I can't do. I'm willing to be on this project as a programmer,
but can't be a local mapper - I'm not familiar enough with Michigan.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Proposed mechanical edit - remove objects that are not existing according to source of GNIS import that added them

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 12:27 PM Mateusz Konieczny
 wrote:
> Is there way to mark challenge as for armchair users/requiring local survey?
>
> And show from the second group only when explicitly required?
>
> I remember that on my attempt to use MapRoulette many were not doable without 
> local survey.

That's supposed to be what the selection, "too hard" is for - too hard
to do in MapRoulette.

The problem with that selection is that it appears to return the
object to the pool, and the users who chase numbers and standings view
that as a challenge. Selecting "too hard" appears to be a virtual
guarantee that someone else will map the object incorrectly. (I've
seen this happen, when I've selected "too hard" because I've known
from local knowledge that there was new construction and road
relocation that didn't show up in the aerials!)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Proposed mechanical edit - remove objects that are not existing according to source of GNIS import that added them

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 10:31 AM Martijn van Exel  wrote:
> The benefit is that it gives mappers a reason to examine places - not just 
> the disappeared feature itself but also the area around it - that would 
> otherwise go unexamined. Since we have so much unexamined space in the U.S., 
> any opportunity to spark mappers’ curiosity about some of that space, is a 
> welcome trigger.

I need no incentive like that, and no mapper that I've corresponded
with does.  I'm still in the middle of an area where TIGER mapping is
absolutely atrocious, and I've cleaned only small corners. I've found
that it's the best use of my very limited time to confine my edits to
places that I've visited or intend to visit, which is why you'll see
most of my mapping taking place in my own neighbourhood, in the
vicinity of hiking trails, on the roads that I've travelled to get to
the trails, and the imports that I curate with respect to the
boundaries of public lands.

I've edited and conflated a bunch of GNIS points. I have yet to see
one marked as (historic) that was of the least bit of use. For the
best of them, they designate a building that is still standing but has
been repurposed. If I'm mapping buildings, I'll get around to that one
in any case. If I'm not micromapping to the level of individual
buildings, the information that "the private house here used to be a
two-room schoolhouse," is simply a distraction. Even if I am mapping
buildings, often the remodelling is so extensive that I can't spot any
indicia that it was once a schoolhouse, and can't even state with
confidence that the building wasn't demolished with a new building
constructed on the site. For the limited sample of (historic) GNIS
points that I've encountered, there is simply zero value to OSM
(beyond possibly the spot elevation, which is also often of
questionable quality.)

I can't speak to OHM. I've never contributed to that project. I
propose to let those who do contribute to it manage their own data
imports, and judge the value of (historic) GNIS data only with respect
to OSM, the project at hand.

> It may feel like a time sink for some, but my hope is that others will feel 
> it’s an interesting exercise to improve the map.

I understand in principle - but I don't see bad GNIS data as being any
greater incentive than bad TIGER data - and the anti-import crowd hold
the failure of the bad TIGER data to recruit mappers to fix it as a
model for why imports in general have a negative impact on the
community. Moreover, I've tried MapRoulette a few times, and every
time, come away with a mix of, "I don't have enough local knowledge to
do a good job here," and "I can make better progress cleaning other
things up closer to home." Most of the things it gives me, I wind up
clicking "too hard," while possibly tidying something else.

> Stepping back a bit, the urge to fix previous automated edits with new 
> automated fixes is understandable, but it may lead to a more casual approach 
> to imports and automated edits, because we basically say with each fix that 
> ill-informed automated map edits can always be fixed with more automated 
> edits later. We’ve already gone down that path in the U.S. quite far, so we 
> should proceed with extra care - unless we as a community decide that that is 
> the nature of OSM in this country. It isn’t to me.

Merciful heavens, no! Still, the fact remains that we have a bunch of
botched imports from the early days of mapping in the US. No,
'botched' is too strong a term. They were done well according to the
practice of the time. They significantly advanced the usefulness of
the map when they happened. Still, in light of what we've learned
since that time, they fall catastophically short of the data quality
that we now expect of an import. Few, if any, of us argue in favour of
importing at even close to that level of carelessness. Are you really
arguing that making it as laborious as possible to repair _known_ bad
data in these early imports is desirable, in order to discourage
future reckless imports?  That doesn't strike me as the way to make
forward progress.

For what it's worth I speak as someone who's, on a much smaller scale,
taken on the repair of an early import that was of unacceptably loiw
quality by today's standards. Check out
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ke9tv-nysdec-lands/history for how
much work *that* was. Without developing significant automation (a
script that worked off PostGIS queries and connected to the JOSM API
to set everything up for manual conflation), I'd not have been able to
complete the task. I won't say that the results are perfect - nothing
ever is - but it's a whale of a lot better than what was there before,
and I use the result with confidence for guidance in the field. (And
yes, the project was discussed on talk-us and imports, and wikified at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NYS_DEC_Lands - so I offer at
least the semblance of due diligence.).

So - don't tolerate 

Re: [Talk-us] Gated communities

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 3:01 AM Mateusz Konieczny
 wrote:
> For start, "residents only" gate is for me clearly access=private.
>
> "manned main gate" - is access strongly restricted?
> If nearly everybody, including vehicles, is let in I would tag it access=yes.
> It would also mean that access=destination would be better than access=private
> for inner ways of community.
>
> If access is strongly filtered (entrance requires permission from resident or
> guard is likely to resuse) then I would tag both gates access=private.
> Though it means that these gates are again not distinguishable.

In practice, for the gated communities that I'm familiar with, there's
not that significant a difference between access=destination and
access=private at the main gate from this standpoint. If you have
business in the community - pretty much equivalent to 'your
destination is inside the community' - you're extremely likely to have
the permission of a resident or business owner inside the gates.
Nevertheless,  if you're not a resident with a key card, you're not
going to get through the automated gates. So access=destination for
the main gate is in theory no more permissive than access=private, but
gives a router a strong indication that "here is the correct entrance
for visitors."

I agree that access=destination is also better than access=private for
roads inside the gate that are usable by visitors. (access=private is
appropriate for service ways that lead to residents-only parking and
similar things.)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Michigan Forest Land

[Kevin Kenny]

(Is there a Michigan-specific forum that we could take this to? We're
probably boring the daylights out of most of talk-us.)

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 9:16 PM Max Erickson  wrote:

> The management units in the data are subunits of the state forests
> still. For instance, "Gwinn Forest Management Unit" is/was part of the
> Escanaba River State Forest.
>
> The question is which data is better to present to the average end
> user. I guess if the state isn't using the state forest names anymore
> it makes sense to have the management units in OSM. But then because
> people know the older names, does it make sense to also have the state
> forests?

What I see in the data doesn't match your description.  'Unit_name'
appears to be one of sixteen large rectangular regions, and then
'management_name' is a fairly small region.

I've sliced the data both ways, and put the results in
https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/tmp/mi_sf.zip, so that you can open the data
in JOSM and see what's up with it. DO NOT IMPORT - the translation is
very rough and doesn't even pass JOSM's validation - I'm simply
sharing it so that locals can see whether either division makes any
sense in the local context.

Simply coalescing the data led to topological problems, as I
anticipated. I did some jiggery-pokery with ST_Buffer in PostGIS to
force the topology to be consistent. The result is that every parcel's
boundary is set back 2.5 metres from where it was in the original data
set. This is surely no big deal as far as the map is concerned, but
cuts way back on the validation errors.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Michigan Forest Land

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 10:17 Max Erickson  wrote:

> The compartments likely aren't the right data for a general purpose
> map; I'm not entirely sure, but they seem to be the basic management
> unit for state forest land, so when they consider a cut or whatever
> they consider it for that area. For OSM, the right things is probably
> to have individual objects for each state forest, game area, park,
> etc.
>
> Complicating things, the state seems to have moved away from saying
> much about the top level state forests. But I think they are probably
> still the right thing for a general purpose map.
>

Right. That's why I was talking about coalescing compartments that have the
same management type and name. The table in my earlier message shows the
number of compartments to be combined for each facility.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Michigan Forest Land

[Kevin Kenny]

Would it be useful for me to try coalescing the areas, to see what
we're up against with respect to inconsistent borders? Some of these
state databases come in with almost perfect topological consistency,
others are messes where you get self-intersections, slivers, gaps, and
Lord-knows-what-all-else all over the place when you try to merge
parcels.

I can also try to expand the coverage area of
https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html west far enough to
include the whole of the state, which would give me a basemap to
overlay the borders on. That probably can't happen for at least couple
of weeks because life is seriously getting in the way of mapping.


On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 8:56 AM Marcus W. Davenport
 wrote:
>
> Thank you for the information, Kevin!  It does look like all the important 
> information is there to continue writing up an import proposal.
>
> Looks like ROD is "Record of Decision".  I was able to open that database 
> table in LibreOffice and a google search for the first filename in that field 
> shows the 2010 YOE decisions:  
> http://www.michigandnr.com/publications/pdfs/ForestsLandWater/Cmpt_Reviews/Gladwin/2010/gladwinROD.pdf.
>   While interesting to read, I don't think that would be relevant to end 
> users of OSM.
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 10:28 PM Kevin Kenny  wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 11:31 AM Marcus W. Davenport
>>  wrote:
>> > I'm a decently experienced mapper from the Lansing and Hillsdale, MI areas 
>> > and noticed the same issues with state owned land in OSM.  I've been using 
>> > State of Michigan data to draw and maintain the two State Game Area's that 
>> > I hike regularly: the Portland State Game Area (on the Grand River just 
>> > south of Portland) and the Lost Nations State Game Area (just south of 
>> > Pittsford; sometimes known as "Pittsford State Game Area").
>> > One issue I've found with the State Forest Compartments shapefile that was 
>> > originally linked is that JOSM does not seem to import this file with the 
>> > metadata required to make any addition without local knowledge. Other 
>> > State of Michigan shapefiles will open names and superfluous data as keys 
>> > and values, but his shapefile appears to be outlines only.
>> > Also, it's my understanding that SGA's and forests would be either 
>> > "protect_class" = 4 or 5 (depending on whether the enclosed species or 
>> > landscape are of greater importance).  That is solely my interpretation 
>> > based on reading 
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dprotected_area.
>>
>> I downloaded the data set and queried it with GDAL, and what I see is:
>>
>> INFO: Open of 
>> `Michigan_State_Forest_Compartments/Michigan_State_Forest_Compartments.shp'
>>   using driver `ESRI Shapefile' successful.
>>
>> Layer name: Michigan_State_Forest_Compartments
>> Geometry: Polygon
>> Feature Count: 2462
>> Extent: (-90.057938, 41.732556) - (-82.486685, 47.475682)
>> Layer SRS WKT:
>> GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",
>> DATUM["WGS_1984",
>> SPHEROID["WGS_84",6378137,298.257223563]],
>> PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],
>> UNIT["Degree",0.017453292519943295],
>> AUTHORITY["EPSG","4326"]]
>> OBJECTID: Integer64 (10.0)
>> OBJECTID_1: Integer64 (10.0)
>> MANAGMENTT: String (80.0)
>> Management: String (80.0)
>> UNIT_NAME: String (80.0)
>> FC_key: String (80.0)
>> COUNTY: String (80.0)
>> YOE: String (80.0)
>> Acres: Real (24.15)
>> ROD_URL: String (113.0)
>> DDLat: Real (24.15)
>> DDLon: Real (24.15)
>> Shape__Are: Real (24.15)
>> Shape__Len: Real (24.15)
>>
>> which looks as if all the columns that are listed in the metadata are
>> there. I also successfully pushed it into my PostGIS instance:
>>
>> $ ogr2ogr -progress -overwrite -t_srs EPSG:3857 -f PostgreSQL
>> PG:dbname=gis 
>> Michigan_State_Forest_Compartments/Michigan_State_Forest_Compartments.shp
>> -nln Michigan_State_Forest_Compartments -nlt MULTIPOLYGON -lco
>> 'precision=NO'
>> 0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90...100 - done.
>>
>> Would the information in 'MANAGMENTT' (spelt thus!) be sufficient to
>> assign the protect_class? The enumerated values are:
>>
>> gis=# select distinct managmentt from michigan_state_forest_compartments \g
>>   managmentt
>> ---
>>  State Parks
>>  State Forests
>>  Wildlife
>> (3 rows)
>>
>> That seems to distinguish State Fores

Re: [Talk-us] Michigan Forest Land

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sat, Mar 9, 2019 at 1:18 PM Kevin Kenny  wrote:
> > The Michigan maps are lacking the information for state forest land.  I 
> > have noted that the Upper Peninsula does have some state and national 
> > forest areas, but there is much missing here in the Lower Peninsula.
> >
> > I have found the data on the State of Michigan website, and have 
> > successfully downloaded the shapefile for all state forest land.
> >
> > I would like to proceed with adding this data to OSM, with the help of 
> > experienced editors.

I took a look at the data set, and we'd need to do some research
before importing on what the various "ManagementType" might correspond
to in terms of boundary=protected_area protect_class=* tagging.  In
addition, the data set has a large number of parcels where adjacent
parcels are identical except for FC_Key (intended to be a unique ID
for the parcel?), County and YOE.  (I don't know what YOE means - it
appears to be "Year Of" something - and there are dates in both the
future and the past, so I don't think it's "year of expiration").

In some cases, the dividing lines appear to be township and range
lines, but in many places, they're too irregular to be simple PLSS
lines and aren't meander lines either, so I suspect they simply
represent former lot boundaries.  Most parcels appear to be about
three sections in size, and given that they're consistently elongated
in an E-W direction, may simply be consecutively numbered sections.
(If you don't know what township, range and section mean in this
context, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System).

Given the large number of parcels that are named alike, we probably
need to look at coalescing adjacent ones. I suspect the division is
just to keep accounting straight for parcels that were acquired at
different times or from different former owners, and not something we
ought to be replicating in OSM.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Michigan Forest Land

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 11:58 AM David Martin  wrote:
> I'm new to editing OSM, having been a heavy user of OSMAnd for Android for 
> several years.  I primarily use the maps for snowmobiling here in Northern 
> Michigan, and building my own database of gpx tracks.
>
> The Michigan maps are lacking the information for state forest land.  I have 
> noted that the Upper Peninsula does have some state and national forest 
> areas, but there is much missing here in the Lower Peninsula.
>
> I have found the data on the State of Michigan website, and have successfully 
> downloaded the shapefile for all state forest land.
>
> I would like to proceed with adding this data to OSM, with the help of 
> experienced editors.
>
> This is public data, available at 
> http://gis-michigan.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/dfe0bcec31184b57b9f0d96bc02d6548_1
>
> This is high-value data for all OSM users in Michigan, to understand when 
> they are public land and help prevent trespassing onto private land.  I often 
> have to switch over to Google Maps to see if I am on state land.
>
> Please advise as to how I may proceed.

A bit of background: I am the original importer of the 'New York City
Watershed Recreation Lands' data set, and I re-imported and continue
to update the "New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Lands and Campgrounds" data set, so I appear to be the primary
custodian of OSM's representation of about 25000 km² of public
recreational land. I certainly think that representation of State
Forests on OSM is a worthy goal.

With that said, an iimport is a really tricky thing to get right. If
you're imagining a process whereby you could take a shapefile from
Michigan's GIS department and pour it into OSM, it's by no means that
simple!

A few questions and comments, to get us started --

How familiar are you with OSM mapping? In order for an import on the
scale that you're contemplating to be successful, the importers have
to be extremely fluent in the editor of choice - most importers use
JOSM, and many use external tools in addition. In particular, if
you're not familiar with mapping multipolygons, or with 'conflation' -
the process of merging data with what's already there - an import is
likely NOT the place to learn! I'm surely willing to advise and
assist, but I really want to be advising before any major moves,
rather than trying to clean up the massive mess that results from a
botched import.

Anticipating some of the objections: OSM ordinarily does not map land
ownership, but only land use, land cover, land access, land
protection. What we're going to have here is 'land open to the public
- managed by the State of Michigan Department of Xxx -  a protected
area (IUCN class #nnn) - etc." Those are the salient facts, rather
than the fact that the State owns it. Since we routinely map parks,
forests, nature reserves, an objection on the grounds that we are
dealing with land ownership data can be rebutted on these grounds.

How observable in the field is the presence of a state forest?  In New
York, where state land abuts a road, or where a trail enters or
leaves, there is ordinarily signage, comparable to a private
landowner's posters, that looks like
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/NYS_Forest_Preserve_sign.jpg.
In addition, where the road is entering or leaving the forest, turning
off to a parking area, or othewise in need of a 'welcome' sign, there
will be a larger sign like
https://andyarthur.org/data/photo_021252.jpg.  Moreover, in the back
country, while the posters may be absent, the survey line for the
border of the parcel will ordinarily be blazed, either with paint
blazes, or for many of the older lines, axe blazes.  Axe blazes are
visible for decades, even when a tree is nearly healed -
https://howtowilderness.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/blaze.jpg
is an example. In general, while it might be possible to stray outside
a forest parcel unwittingly if the adjacent landowner has neglected to
post, someone who knows the approximate location of a boundary line
and is looking for it will find it. If we have "there is signage
identifying the forest" and "there is at least this minimal level of
field visibility of the boundary", then in my opinion at least, the
import clears the bar of 'verifiability.'

Now comes the issue of compliance with the import guidelines.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines . You're already
well into Step 2, and doing OK so far. I'd recommend that the next
step is to draft an import plan. (This is actually called out as item
2 under step 4, but you'll find that if you approach the 'imports'
mailing list without a plan, you'll not get a favourable response.)
There's an outline for the plan on
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Plan_Outline.  For similar
imports that I did, you can see the plans at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import:_NYCDEP_Watershed_Recreation_Areas
- this one is a full plan - and

[Talk-us] Fwd: Spot elevations collected as natural=peak and name=Point (height in feet)

[Kevin Kenny]

OOPS - meant to send to the list, not the originator...

-- Forwarded message -
From: Kevin Kenny 
Date: Sat, Mar 9, 2019 at 9:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Spot elevations collected as natural=peak and
name=Point (height in feet)
To: Joseph Eisenberg 


On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 11:02 PM Joseph Eisenberg
 wrote:
>
> Natural=peak must be a local high point, so it has to be at least a
> few meters higher than the surrounding land. A natural=peak does not
> have to be the highest point of a mountain, but it has to have some
> topographical prominence. Not all spot elevations on USGS are of
> peaks, some are just a visually prominent part of a ridge, and other
> are saddles.

Once again, map the object, then tag the elevation.

The maps don't ordinarily show spot elevations that aren't associated
with an object that can be recovered in the field. If it's a trig
point, we have tagging for that. If it's a saddle, we have tagging for
that. If it's a highway intersection, tag ele=* on the node and add a
note=* to indicate that the elevation is associated with the
intersection. If it's the surface elevation of a waterbody, we have
tagging for that. If it's a destroyed benchmark, then don't map it (or
give it place=locality without a name if for some other reason it must
be mapped). If it's an object of a kind we haven't discussed, then
let's discuss that kind of object rather than arbitrarily discussing
tagging of spot elevations.  Tagging spot elevations out of context
will serve only to get in the way of integrating with third-party
photogrammetric, radar or lidar data sources - and I think we're all
agreed that OSM is *not* the right place for fine-grained elevation
information.

There are peaks where the elevation is the name in common usage.
Certainly, anyone chronicling the history of the Vietnam War would
recognize Hill 875, Hill 881 or Hill 943 as place names. Even though
those names started out simply as spot elevations on a map, they have
subsequently been written upon the land in the blood of soldiers.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] US map rendering (Was: Re: Spot elevations collected as natural=peak and name=Point (height in feet))

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 5:46 PM Phil! Gold  wrote:
> I started work last year on a better system that generates SVGs on the fly
> from OSM data, so it doesn't need the pregeneration step.  I got bogged
> down with other things before I quite finished, but it's mostly there.
It's really great hearing from you!  I had tried to message you a few
times through OSM and tried to find a working email for you, but never
heard anything back. I definitely had things I wanted to pick your
brain about!

> (There are just a few Canadian routes left to convert; I was having
> difficulty finding official specs for their signs.)

I think that between Minh and me, we have the signs for all ten Canadian
provinces, and a lot of Ontario counties. (The other provinces use a standard
'county highway' sign.)

I'll have a look at your code, but frankly, we've diverged an awful
lot at this point. I got kind of bogged down in the stored procedures,
because the requirement that the PostgreSQL filesystem be visible at
Mapnik's runtime was getting tangled up in the chroot jail on my
server, and the fact that a stock Mapnik now makes a read-only
connection to the database was also a stumbling block. (Even a trigger
firing from a read-only connection cannot update the database.) Rather
than running from forks, I wound up reworking things so that the SVG
generation happens when osmosis runs, rather than when the tile is
built, and that went a lot smoother.

I also pretty much totally reworked the stored procedures for better
readability, and to make them compatible with the GroupSymbolizer.
(Your shield clusters are gorgeous, but I found them to be a bridge
too far and decided to try out Mapnik's stock support.) Could I get
your opinion of
https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/blob/master/queryprocs.sql.in ?
 I think that might be a more maintainable starting point, and it also
appears to be faster - it's pretty zippy at render time.
>
> I don't think this is really documented yet, but I now support four
> different sign styles, passed as the `style` parameter to the Python
> rendering functions:
>
>  * "generic" uses a standard, generic style for every US state and county,
>disregarding their individual styles.
>  * "guide" matches the styles used on highway guide signs.  This is now
>the default, since it seems most fitting to map rendering.
>  * "sign" looks like the roadside reassurance markers.
>  * "cutout" is a modification of the "sign" style to remove dark
>background areas.  This used to be the default with my old system.

Sounds reasonable. I'm making more use of pictorial shields than I
think you were, but in some cases that's a bad idea. I'd like to have
the 'guide' style, for instance, in place of all the pictorial shields
for the NY state parkways - the NY highway shield, but white-on-green
instead of black and white, with the parkway's initials.

> Anyway, the code is here:
>
>   https://gitlab.com/asciiphil/osm-shields
>
> Hopefully at some point I'll find time to finish up my changes.  (And,
> ideally, merge in all of the extra shields you and Minh have put
> together.)

Thanks, I'll have a look!

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

[Talk-us] US map rendering (Was: Re: Spot elevations collected as natural=peak and name=Point (height in feet))

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 11:37 AM Martijn van Exel  wrote:
>
> I agree that a local US OSM map with a *subtly* adapted rendering would be 
> fantastic. Phil Gold did some interesting work years ago on rendering US 
> style highway shields taking into account (sometimes crazy) route concurrency 
> (http://elrond.aperiodic.net/shields/?zoom=13=39.75926=-86.02786=B
>  - note that this is based on years-old data and probably pre-carto-switch 
> stylesheet). Lars Ahlzen created the beautiful TopOSM which is a lot more 
> divergent from the main map style, but another great example of initiatives 
> around custom map rendering coming out of the US community.

I've borrowed ideas (and some limited amount of code) from both of
them in doing my experimental rendering at
https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html. It has North American
highway shields. I say 'North American' because it handles the
Canadian and a few Mexican ones, with concurrences, also.  It has a
lot more than Phil! incorporated thanks to a yeoman effort by Minh
Nguyen (sorry, Minh, no time to go hunting for Vietnamese diacritics
to spell your name correctly!)

It has scalability issues that are fixable, but imply ditching a fair
piece of the toolchain.
I'm tracking a project for it at
https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/projects.  I have a Kanban for
it at https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/projects/1.

The chief roadblocks to scaleability are that the graphics are
generated in what amounts to a batch process, taking several minutes,
triggered by the Osmosis update of the 'northamerica' export from
geofabrik.de. If the process is to scale to minutely updates and the
whole planet, it needs to do shield rendering incrementally in
response to specific updates affecting it.

The fact that osm2pgsql does not and will not ever support querying of
relations at rendering time is a headache, and so the first job will
have to be retooling everything to the table formats used by imposm3.
(This is entirely doable; it's quite a lot of very routine programming
that I've simply not had time to take on.)
https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/issues/13

Then there's the issue that the graphics for individual shields are
being stored in PNG, which is rendered in a batch process that takes
typically several minutes (so could not cope with minutely updates). I
have some sketches for how that could be accomplished, but again, I
keep running out of time.
https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/issues/5

Also, 'carto' does not have support for the GroupSymbolizer in Mapnik,
needed for highway shield rendering, so I'm still stuck with defining
the rendering in Mapnik XML. This isn't a problem for me, but others
might demand better support.

Finally, Mapnik itself would benefit from being able to render SVG's
with template parameters substituted from objects in the database. I
think that the pipeline could be implemented in a scalable fashion
without this last task, but there would be more custom code about.

I've sounded out the maintainers of various of the OSM software, and
get different assessments.
osm2pgsql - Actively hostile to supporting what I need, contend that
osm2pgsql is the wrong tool for the job.
imposm3 - Interested and helpful, and it appears that they wouldn't
actually have to do anything (imposm3 may have everything needed
'right out of the box').
Phil Gold!'s 'highway shields' project - Moribund, but I've extracted
from it what I think I need and put the code at
https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/
TopOSM - Again, moribund, but I have working renderings derived from
it that suit me and could serve as starting points for new
development.
Carto - Maintainers would be very interested in GroupSymbolizer support.
OSM Carto - Little interest, but that's because of the emphasis on
consistent rendering worldwide, and this is really a project specific
to North America.
Mapnik - I've not really needed to approach the Mapnik team yet - I've
been treating it as a black box.

So, it looks as if there's a path forward, but it involves a bunch
more programming than I've had time to take on. I'm very good at
programming, but my time is limited. I'm much less good at project
management, and I'm terrible at recruiting, so I've been unable so far
to form a team to tackle this. A better leader than I could probably
make significant forward progress with my technical assistance. I may
find this thrust upon me, but I hope to dodge any requests to lead
open-source development efforts while I'm still in the paid workforce.
(With luck, retirement is a couple or three years away.)

> Perhaps something for a BoF session at the next SOTM!

Finding the time and money to attend a conference that my employer
doesn't sponsor is hard for me at the moment, particularly since I'm
already committed once or twice a year to conferences on another "free
time" (hah!) project. (Also, I presume you mean SOTM-US? An overseas
conference would add a whole other level of complexity to 

Re: [Talk-us] Spot elevations collected as natural=peak and name=Point (height in feet)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 10:59 AM Martijn van Exel  wrote:
> If it’s just a shortcut to have the main OSM map display elevation in feet, 
> that’s not right, but it indicates a need that is currently unaddressed: 
> displaying elevation in local units on the main map.

Even as a USAian, I'm fine with SI units on the main map. If the
USAians need a map localised to US conventional units, let the USAians
host it.

(and openstreetmap.us miught be a perfect place to put such a thing,
but I know, the infrastructure and funding really isn't there.)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Spot elevations collected as natural=peak and name=Point (height in feet)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 2:38 AM Mateusz Konieczny
 wrote:
> If it is a peak then ele=XXX and noname=yes would be OK.
>
> If it is not a peak it should not be present at all - otherwise it opens way 
> to importing
> LIDAR data into OSM (and there are datasets with resolution of 5 cm, dumping 
> it
> into OSM would be case of unverifiable data making it impossible to edit).

If it isn't a peak, it's a spot elevation of something else. Map the
thing, tag its elevation. Some things don't have names.

If there's a spot elevation that isn't associated with a thing, ignore
it. There are better sources for elevation data. But few maps show
these. In the databases, most spot elevations that aren't 'real'
natural or human features are monumented trig points and can be tagged
as such.

So Mateusz is right, mostly.  Things other than peaks have elevations,
and if there's a real thing with a spot elevation, map it!



On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 4:53 AM Dave Swarthout  wrote:
>
> This is simply a way to get an otherwise unnamed peak to render and also, I 
> suspect, to sidestep the inconvenience of converting the elevation to meters. 
>  AFAIK, there are no peaks with the generic name "Point" on any USGS Topos. 
> In addition, placing the elevation into the name is another trick that should 
> be discouraged.

Agreed that the practice should be discouraged - if that in fact is
what's going on.

On the other hand, in the Catskills there are multiple summits NAMED
'High Peak' and 'High Point'.  The hikers distinguish them by
decorating the names: 'Windham High Peak', 'Kaaterskill High Peak',
'Ashokan High Point', ...  Many otherwise nameless peaks in the
Adirondacks have been given names by hikers, 'Northrop Lake Mountain',
'West Lake Mountain' and so on, and as Kevin Broderick points out,
some simply are referred to by their elevation on old topo maps -
which often is quite inaccurate, but tend to remain the names of
things even after more accurate elevation determinations have been
made.

So don't assume that a 'onesy-twosey' tagging of a spot named by its
elevation is wrong unless there's an obvious mass-tagging going on -
particularly if the mapper who tagged it is responsive!

(Yes, the US has a Board of Geographic Names - but its only authority
is to dictate the names that go on official US Government maps.
Otherwise, in the US, the name of a thing is whatever people call it.
Don't expect to find authoritative answers for many names.)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] armchair mappers putting errors back into the map

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 11:58 AM Richard Welty  wrote:
> i have not reviewed NYS GIS data because there were, in the past
> at least, licensing issues. i do not know if those have been resolved
> so i'm not pitching a fit about that. it might be ok now. i just don't
> know. but from this edit, it appears that NYS GIS contains things that
> were wrong in 2007 when we took in the TIGER data.

Assuming that you're talking about
http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=932 , that
particular data set is OK. The other one that's recently OK (there was
an announcement) is the address point data at
http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=921. They're
both part of a Street and Address Maintenance (SAM) project at NYSGIS.

Generally speaking, NYSGIS data are effectively public domain, but
some data sets were created by contractors or county governments that
licensed the data to the state on restrictive terms. Several of the
data sets that presented difficulties - such as NYS Public Lands -
have been taken down in recent years.

The awkward one is parcel data, where the horrendous Suffolk v
Experian case set an awkward precedent. It left undecided some major
points because the parties settled after the Second Circuit remanded
for further proceedings, but left open at least the possibility that
tax maps are copyrightable. It is the only Federal appellate court
that has reached such an opinion.

Nevertheless, twenty counties http://gis.ny.gov/parcels/ have agreed
to let the state re-release their parcel data. Moreover, the state has
compiled a database (from county records) of the lands that it owns at
http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=1300 - and is
claiming that it has the unquestioned right to release the plats of
its own holdings and daring the counties to sue.  That data set
replaces the no-longer-released "NYS Public Lands" dataset, which was
copyrighted by the contractor that produced it.  (Alas, it no longer
includes county and municipal facilities.)

Incidentally, a year or two ago all NYS parks, historic sites, and
recreation area were compared against that data set and many were
updated accordingly - including contacting the original mappers in
case of conflict. In all cases, the original mappers responded that
their data were traced approximately from aerials and welcomed the
updates. I didn't call this job an 'import' since the lines eventually
drawn were gleaned from a variety of sources and not drawn directly
from the data set.  An extreme example is
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6440291 (note in particular the
'note' tag there).  Notes like this are an important trail to build a
case that data were not directly copied, and hence copyright was not
infringed. A copyright holder has no monopoly over facts, merely the
expression, selection, structure, sequence and organization - and
notes like these provide evidence that our criteria for selection and
organization are different from those of our data sources.

You're right that the SAM data has obsolete data, errors, and streets
that were platted but never built. In some cases, I think they stay in
the database because the state or a municipality still own the
rights-of-way.

A few weeks (months?) ago, there was an announcement of a MapRoulette
project to add streets from
http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=932 that were
not in OSM.  I suspect that's where your offending driveway came from.
I tried a few in Schenectady and Saratoga Counties, but wound up
passing on most as "too hard" because they were things like a
subdivision platted in a wood, where the most recent NYS Orthos Online
were three years old, so it could be new construction needing a field
survey. I don't think I wound up adding anything from the couple of
dozen things that I tried - where I did have local knowledge, OSM was
right and NYSGIS was wrong.  Which was unsurprising, since I'd already
mapped my local knowledge.

I'd classify http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=932
as "best available third-party data" for NYS streets - it's not nearly
as hallucinatory as TIGER. But it's still surely imperfect. I'll
copy-n-paste from it if I have corroborating evidence that it's right,
and I'd investigate significant discrepancies between it and OSM, but
I'd not import anything from it blindly.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Proposed mechanical edit - elimination of old-style Wikipedia links in USA

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 4:05 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
 wrote:
> I'm OK with this as well.  I especially wish to call to the attention to 
> others who may do mechanical wiki edits like this (by Mateusz' good example) 
> that he was careful to:
>
> 1)  Explain the problem; it confuses mappers/map consumers and wiki 
> authors/readers,
> 2)  Offer a polite proposal as well as taking ownership for any potential 
> problems with it,
> 3)  Have wiki-oriented documentation of this (and here is the link),
> 4)  Say that this was done on a "smaller" (though still countrywide!) scale, 
> and it worked.
>
> Outstanding!  Thank you, Mateusz for your example of wiki, talk page and 
> community communication.  OSM has every reason to support such excellent 
> suggestions/proposals.


I'll echo Steve.  It's a sound idea, it's well explained, it's well
documented, it's well executed on a pilot scale, and there's a
convincing plan for scaling it to the full planet without choking the
servers. Let's make it happen!

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Map roulette challenges - Missing named roads [VA, NJ, NY, MN, SC]

[Kevin Kenny]

I've done some of the MapRoulette items for this project, but frankly
I'm not that good at it. For the stuff nearest me, most of the missing
roads are either too new to show on the orthos (which are updated on a
rolling 4-year cycle) or else are old platted rights-of-way that are
now abandoned. I find that I can't do much with them without
boots-on-the-ground knowledge. I was therefore able definitively to
dismiss a few of them with: "I've been there. There's no road," but
that's been the exception rather than the rule.

Finding that sort of thing in the MapRoulette items that I have taken
on makes me wonder what sort of data quality we'll get out of this
effort. Frankly, I've found TIGER review (and this part of the world
is still very much a TIGER desert!) looks to be more fruitful. I find
the NYSDOT database to be an extremely useful cross-check on names and
purported alignments, though. Many ways shown in TIGER around here
were digitized from pencil sketches of census workers and can be
hundreds of metres from the actual locations, but NYSDOT usually has
its information derived at least crudely from survey data.

But perhaps I'm being too much of a perfectionist.

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 11:51 AM Oisin Herriott (Insight Global Inc)
via Talk-us  wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>
>
> Thanks Kevin for the tip! I have updated the instructions to call out the NYS 
> ortho online imagery layer to look at for the NY challenge.
>
>
>
> Also, after some more fiddling with the roads dataset for the project, I have 
> also reduced number of roads to check and updated the New York challenge here:
>
>
>
> New York: https://maproulette.org/mr3/admin/project/2346/challenge/3593
>
>
>
> Thanks again for the tip!
>
> Oisin
>
>
>
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
>
>
>
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Map roulette challenges - Missing named roads [VA, NJ, NY, MN, SC]

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 4:30 PM Oisin Herriott (Insight Global Inc)
via Talk-us  wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> In an effort to make the roads data in OSM more complete in names and 
> coverage, the Open Maps team at Microsoft is going through some available 
> open data sets published by some of the US State agencies, and analyzing 
> these to find gaps where named roads are published in the government data, 
> but absent from OSM.
>
> We're publishing these on Map roulette for the mapping community to 
> investigate and edit accordingly. The map roulette challenges focus on the 
> rural areas where less attention may be paid rather than the urban areas. The 
> coverage is state wide but the published date, and quality differs from place 
> to place. Below are the first few out there, so feel free to jump in - the 
> water is fine!
>
> Minnesota: https://maproulette.org/mr3/browse/challenges/3486
> New York: https://maproulette.org/mr3/browse/challenges/3489
> New Jersey: https://maproulette.org/mr3/browse/challenges/3470
> Virginia: https://maproulette.org/mr3/browse/challenges/3490
> South Carolina: https://maproulette.org/mr3/admin/project/2346/challenge/3487
>
> Each challenge has some more information in the description, and links to the 
> data sources being used.
>
> Please give us a shout with any comments, feedback, questions, or concerns!

Any chance that New York State Orthos Online can be added to the image
layers? (iD and JOSM both have it.)  For the most part, it's newer
imagery than the sources that are there. More important, it's 'leaves
off' imagery, and a lot of the roads I've seen so far turn up in this
are at most forest tracks and service ways, hard to see under the
trees in summer.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-ca] [Imports] Ongoing Canadian building import needs to be stopped, possibly reverted

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2019 at 2:54 PM Yaro Shkvorets  wrote:
> JOSM offers very convenient way to do it called "Replace geometry". Select 
> both ways, old and new, press Ctrl-Shift-G, merge any conflicting tags and 
> you preserve the history, tags and have new improved outline in a couple of 
> clicks.

Good point. I use that a *lot* when updating the New York public land
boundaries. Is it in a stock JOSM now? You used to have to install a
plugin (with some uninformative name like 'Utilities') to get it. It's
an absolute necessity for importers.

___
Talk-ca mailing list
Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

Re: [Talk-us] US Bureau of Land Management Boundaries

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019, 11:48 brad  I'm going to start close to home, extend that to the state of CO, & see
> how it goes.
> I've done quite a bit of recreating and boondock camping on BLM land and
> I've never come across any that are leased exclusively, altho I'm sure
> there are some.It's more of a rarity, than 'most of'.


Ok. I knew exclusive leases exist, not how usual they are. I've other
correspondents who've complained about what they see as a trend toward such
arrangements. I personally have the good fortune to live in New York, which
has very little Federal land, but a wealth of state-protected land whose
protection is enshrined in the state constitution.

Politically, your comment that the inhabitants resent BLM ownership is a
> gross generalization.   I'd say that the majority of western inhabitants
> do not resent it.
>

Careless editing! I even thought while typing that message that I needed to
go back and change 'the' to 'some' - but clearly didn't do it!  Sorry!
Still, one of our political parties has latched onto the issue. (Obviously,
not all members of any party share all its leaders' opinions.) In any case,
it's undeniable that a political controversy exists and has garnered media
attention.

In any case, in general we map land use, land cover and land access, not
land ownership. Of course, those attributes often follow property lines, so
cadastre has a way of coming along for the ride, but the focus should not
be on the ownership. There's no consensus about whether cadastre should be
in OSM at all, but boundaries for public-access facilities such as parks
are widely tolerated.  (Hardliners would exclude all cadastral data,
including boundary=administrative, but they appear to be a relatively small
minority.) Tagging with landuse=farmland/meadow/forest/..., with or without
natural=wood/grassland/heath/scrub/moor/... would be appropriate (assuming
that either the use or the cover is coterminous with the parcel), as would
leisure=nature_reserve if passive recreation in nature is the parcel's
purpose. Boundary=protected_area is appropriate if and only if the
protection status is known. For at least some BLM lands, there is not
significant protection; it's 'working land' that happens to be
government-owned. (alaskadave's comments notwithstanding, this last
sentence is not intended to be a comment, for well or ill, on BLM's
stewardship.)

Hey, whad'ya know... I even wikified something about that...
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Parcel#Parcel_data_as_a_secondary_source
. I don't remember writing that, but I still agree with it.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] US Bureau of Land Management Boundaries

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 10:05 PM Michael Patrick  wrote:
> "Multiple uses under BLM management include renewable energy development 
> (solar, wind, other); conventional energy development (oil and gas, coal); 
> livestock grazing; hardrock mining (gold, silver, other), timber harvesting; 
> and outdoor recreation (such as camping, hunting, rafting, and off-highway 
> vehicle driving). ... 36 million-acre system of National Conservation Lands 
> (including wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, national monuments, 
> national conservation areas, historic trails, and wild and scenic rivers); 
> protecting wild horse and burro rangeland; conserving wildlife, fish, and 
> plant habitat"
>
> Also agriculture. Burning Man's Black Rock City is leased from BLM under an 
> Special Recreation Permit (SRP). ... " crop harvesting, residential 
> occupancy, recreation facilities, construction equipment storage, assembly 
> yards, well pumps, and other uses." So, even though it might be BLM, it could 
> also be under a 50 year lease to a commercial entity, so for all intents and 
> purposes be regarded as private property - like massive solar ( 19 million 
> acres  ) and wind ( 20 million acres  ) energy farms. I seem to recall a 
> Nevada brothel was at one time operating on BLM land with a lease and permit 
> - pretty much, as long as you don't leave the land damaged and it doesn't 
> interfere with other planned uses, you can get a lease.
>
> Just saying, one class isn't going to do it. Mostly, 'exploited', not 
> 'protected'.

All that 'BLM land' says is 'this land is owned by the US Government'
- generally because it was Government-owned at the time that a state
was admitted to the Union and hasn't been sold since.

Some BLM land - about 145,000 km² - is 'conservation land' in some
way, and some small sliver is special recreation land.  But large
amounts are simply leased, to mining and drilling companies, cattle
ranchers and farmers, solar and wind energy companies, private
residences, basically, any land use that the Government agrees to.
Some, if not most of these leaseholds are exclusive, so that a ranch
can run barbed wire, put up posters, and treat it as private property
for as long as the lease runs and it pays the rent. (Some timber
leases explicitly require public access in areas that are not actively
being logged.)

Given the political controversy surrounding the BLM (in some Western
states, the BLM owns a majority of the land and the inhabitants resent
it), I'd tend to steer away from a wholesale import. I would think
that a pilot project could start with an import of land in one
specific, limited category of particular public interest (such as
wilderness areas or recreation areas) and use that to study issues of
integration and conflation. Restricting to wilderness or recreation
areas is also safer since these are relatively stable, rather than
other land uses that could change entirely with the next leaseholder.
Most other BLM land designations could be used only to inform
landuse=*. The land in many cases does not enjoy any form of legal
protection. It is simply owned by the government, and any protection
is simply by the policy of the agency that manages a particular parcel
and could change with the stroke of a pen.

Clearly, no land use is 100% guaranteed stable, and the fact that
something might change tomorrow is ordinarily not a reason to refrain
from mapping it today. Nevertheless, given that the justification for
an import is usually that the project lacks sufficient staff to map
the features being imported, importing features that are known to be
volatile seems imprudent.

I say this as someone who has done imports from databases of
government-owned land. In both the rework of New York State Department
of Environmental Conservation lands, and the import _de novo_ of the
New York City watershed lands, I restricted the import to particular
categories. I specifically excluded New York City lands that are
closed to the public (I could have mapped them as
boundary=protected_area protect_class=12 access=private, but decided
that they simply were neither sufficiently verifiable nor of
sufficient public interest to pursue.) Similarly, I excluded several
classes of New York State lands such as private conservation easements
and the bizarre category of "Forest Preserve land underwater".

It's much easier to go back later and import more than it is to
recover from a botched import.

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Wilderness in National Forest?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 10:38 AM Joseph Eisenberg 
wrote:

> I've noticed that federal Wilderness areas in Northern California and
> Southern Oregon are mapped as if they are not part of the surrounding
> national forest(s).
>
> Is this correct mapping? On older USGS maps the Wilderness areas were
> always shown as being enclosed by the surrounding National Forest (or
> other Federal lands).
>

I thought I'd answered this, but I can't find it in my 'Sent' folder.
Forgive me if this turns out to be a duplicate message.

New York has only one (quite small) National Forest, so I can't comment
specifically on embedded wilderness areas in National Forests.
Nevertheless, we have a similar situation with Wilderness, Wild Forest,
Canoe Area, Primitive Area, etc. embedded in the Catskill and Adirondack
Parks. We already have those embedded areas set up with boundary=protected
area (example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6360488) with the
enclosing parks tagged with boundary=national_park (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1695394). The Wilderness areas enjoy
a stronger protection than the park as a whole, but are unquestionably a
part of it. I presume that's how embedded Wilderness in the National
Forests works, too?

Incidentally, I'm comfortable with boundary=national_park for the
Adirondack and Catskill Parks. The Federal government shares sovereignty
with the States, and New York created these two parks acting as a sovereign
entity. They enjoy stronger protection than the US National Parks - a
simple public law could revoke the latter, while the former are enshrined
in the state constitution and would require a constitutional amendment to
change them. They predate the National Park Service, by the way.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Forest Routes

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 12:27 PM Max Erickson  wrote:

> As other have mentioned, there are many numbered roads managed by the
> USFS. They range in development from closed, abandoned log roads to
> well maintained pavement. I map them using the FS prefix.
>
> For the general public one of the main uses is the publication of
> motor vehicle access conditions:
>
> https://www.fs.fed.us/recreation/programs/ohv/ohv_maps.shtml
>
>
I have shaped shields for them. I work from road routes, rather than direct
tagging of the ways (I've discussed in the past why direct tagging of the
ways is NOT workable for the complex overlays of route networks in North
America.) The FS routes that I'm currently capable of rendering are not
quite consistently tagged. I recognize, equivalently, network=US:FS,
network=US:NFSR:*:NFH and network=US:NFSR:*:NFR. In both of the latter
cases, the * has the name of the national forest in question, which is on
the sign.

The shield template is
https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/blob/master/templates/US:NFSR.svg

For the ref=* tagging on ways, again I don't see quite a consistent system
yet. Over in Vermont east of me, I see ways tagged with ref=USFS 70, ref=FS
67 and ref=FR 224; all of these are the same network. Elsewhere in the
country, I also see FSR nnn, NFSR nnn, and probably others.  I'm continuing
to pursue rendering based on route=road, on the 'build it and they will
come' principle.

Many of these roads need unsigned_ref, since many of them aren't signed at
all (with any sort of directional signs, and often they lack hazard signs
as well).I wouldn't advise importing reference numbers without some sort of
verification that they are indeed bannered. (And yes, the Forest Service
will publish closures *by number* on unsigned roads. Go figure.)

The forest service roads range from two-lane hard-surfaced roads that can
support heavy truck traffic at 90 km/h (55 mi/h is a typical posted speed
limit on these) to rutted dirt tracks with far more than the usual quantity
of rocks and roots, requiring an off-road vehicle to navigate.

There are a lot of them.
http://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html?la=35.9283=-81.8602=12
isn't atypical for the national forest road network. (Note that my renderer
does rendering in a style like Carto's if a road has ref=* but is not a
member of a road route - that's where the plain rectangular shields are
coming from.)
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Strange city boundary: Lee, Illinois

[Kevin Kenny]

And another reminder: sparsely populated areas of the US may have
indefinite boundaries simply because nobody ever troubled to survey and
monument them. New York has a few county lines and a good many township
lines like that. They get resolved when and if there's a dispute. The tax
revenue from undeveloped forest lands is so minimal that the municipalities
don't bother as long as both landowners pay their taxes. In these areas,
you cannot assume that there's a definitive reference for the boundary
*anywhere*.

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 11:26 AM Kevin Kenny 
wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 11:07 AM Martijn van Exel  wrote:
>
>> Hmm.
>>
>> I guess https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level is
>> really not correct then where it says: "Census Designated Places (CDPs) are
>> boundaries maintained by the Census Bureau for statistical purposes. CDPs
>> should be tagged boundary=census, ideally without an admin_level=* tag.”
>>
>> Almost all Utah admin8 are in fact TIGER CDP boundaries:
>> http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/DFS
>>
>> Also,
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=administrative#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries
>>  is
>> incorrect where it states that admin8 are "state municipalities: cities,
>> towns, villages and hamlets (infrequent)”
>>
>> Furthermore,
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States/Boundaries is
>> also incorrect and suggests "Census-designated places (CDPs) are
>> statistical, not administrative areas. Project TIGER fixup deletes outdated
>> CDPs and retags relevant ones from boundary=administrative admin_level=8(or
>> 7) to boundary=census, no admin_level=*.”
>>
>> Finally, there seem to be too many wiki pages covering this :) But that’s
>> not unique for this topic.
>>
>
> CDP's do follow administrative boundaries for the most part, because many
> states ask the census to respect administrative boundaries (depending on
> census statistics for their own use).  Where stuff is really untrustworthy
> is where the Census Bureau had to invent the lines because a designated
> place was unincorporated.
>
> That's actually pretty common. New York has a couple of densely populated
> "hamlets" with populations of over 5 that never voted to adopt a city
> charter and so have no municipal government other than the township. Some
> of them even have official boundaries, generally because they are
> completely surrounded by incorporated communities, but sometimes as part of
> the town's bylaws.
>
> There are, nevertheless, a number of cases where the Census Bureau goofed.
> The neighbourhood where I grew up is one - for years the Census and the
> Post Office both placed it inside New York City, but it is not. The
> confusion was caused by the fact that the Post Office found it most
> convenient to sort the mail at an office in a neighbouring community that
> is in New York City, so the neighbourhood had a New York City ZIP code
> despite being in adjoining Nassau County. Residents found themselves in
> court, often, for failure to pay the New York City income tax that they did
> not owe, and so on. The city line is more or less correct in OSM, by the
> way, and I *think* that the Census Bureau had redrawn the CDP by the time
> TIGER was created.
>
> (Lesson: ZIP codes do not designate administrative regions. In fact, they
> do not necessarily designate contiguous geographic regions, or in fact, any
> geography at all. They are nothing more nor less than sets of mailboxes
> that the Post Office finds it convenient to sort together.)
>
> Also, TIGER. Enough said about TIGER.  Please clean the cat box any time
> that you get a chance.
>
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Strange city boundary: Lee, Illinois

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 11:07 AM Martijn van Exel  wrote:

> Hmm.
>
> I guess https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level is
> really not correct then where it says: "Census Designated Places (CDPs) are
> boundaries maintained by the Census Bureau for statistical purposes. CDPs
> should be tagged boundary=census, ideally without an admin_level=* tag.”
>
> Almost all Utah admin8 are in fact TIGER CDP boundaries:
> http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/DFS
>
> Also,
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=administrative#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries
>  is
> incorrect where it states that admin8 are "state municipalities: cities,
> towns, villages and hamlets (infrequent)”
>
> Furthermore,
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States/Boundaries is
> also incorrect and suggests "Census-designated places (CDPs) are
> statistical, not administrative areas. Project TIGER fixup deletes outdated
> CDPs and retags relevant ones from boundary=administrative admin_level=8(or
> 7) to boundary=census, no admin_level=*.”
>
> Finally, there seem to be too many wiki pages covering this :) But that’s
> not unique for this topic.
>

CDP's do follow administrative boundaries for the most part, because many
states ask the census to respect administrative boundaries (depending on
census statistics for their own use).  Where stuff is really untrustworthy
is where the Census Bureau had to invent the lines because a designated
place was unincorporated.

That's actually pretty common. New York has a couple of densely populated
"hamlets" with populations of over 5 that never voted to adopt a city
charter and so have no municipal government other than the township. Some
of them even have official boundaries, generally because they are
completely surrounded by incorporated communities, but sometimes as part of
the town's bylaws.

There are, nevertheless, a number of cases where the Census Bureau goofed.
The neighbourhood where I grew up is one - for years the Census and the
Post Office both placed it inside New York City, but it is not. The
confusion was caused by the fact that the Post Office found it most
convenient to sort the mail at an office in a neighbouring community that
is in New York City, so the neighbourhood had a New York City ZIP code
despite being in adjoining Nassau County. Residents found themselves in
court, often, for failure to pay the New York City income tax that they did
not owe, and so on. The city line is more or less correct in OSM, by the
way, and I *think* that the Census Bureau had redrawn the CDP by the time
TIGER was created.

(Lesson: ZIP codes do not designate administrative regions. In fact, they
do not necessarily designate contiguous geographic regions, or in fact, any
geography at all. They are nothing more nor less than sets of mailboxes
that the Post Office finds it convenient to sort together.)

Also, TIGER. Enough said about TIGER.  Please clean the cat box any time
that you get a chance.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Strange city boundary: Lee, Illinois

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 10:46 AM Martijn van Exel  wrote:

> I looked at a few place boundaries in Utah and compared with current TIGER
> files.. Definitely needs work..
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1113me8y9t1my5/Screenshot%202018-11-14%2008.42.30.png?dl=0
>  (colored
> = current OSM, grey = TIGER places shape file 2018)
>

It may indeed need work, but don't expect admin levels in the US to be
hierarchical, except that typically there will be no administrative region
crossing state lines. (The examples of state-line-crossing cities above, as
the posters point out, are legally separate cities on the two sides of the
line.)

There are lots of weird cases. The Vermont-New Hampshire line does NOT
follow the Thalweg of the Connecticut River - and is monumented by the only
set of trig points placed by the Judicial Branch of the US Government -
their markers bear the legend "THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES" and
are offset from the line to keep them above high water.
https://www.ctriver.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/State-Line-marker-on-Guildhall-shore.jpg
- the Supreme Court was settling, in 1934, a boundary dispute that had been
festering since 1778.

New York has two cities (New York City, which is coterminous with five
counties, and Geneva) that cross county lines, and about 15% of the
villages cross township lines. The rules for New York are:
All counties are mutually exclusive, and all of the state is in one county
or another.
The next admin-level (township, city, Indian Reservation) are all mutually
exclusive, and all of the state is in one or another of these.  But cities
and Indian Reservations can cross county lines (townships cannot).
At the next admin-level all bets are off. No village overlaps a city, but
they cross township and occasionally county lines all the time.

Other states have other rules. There are no really good assumptions to be
made.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Thoughts on a standard "ref" abbreviation for PA Turnpike?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 6:34 PM Albert Pundt  wrote:

> On an unrelated note, thanks for linking that renderer. I used it to find
> and fix some holes in PA's US 119 relation where it defaulted to using a
> plain text rectangle since only the ref tag was present.
>

It may be a while before your changes show up.  I reroll the tiles only
sporadically.

The shaped shields are used only for route=road relations. Putting network
and ref on the way won't get them. (The plain text rectangles are used as a
fallback for routes that have ref=* but are not members of route relations,
or for networks that the code doesn't recognize.)

Even though there are no reassurance markers, I think that map users would
expect to see the Pike labeled as such, with the shield in place.  The
markers at entry and exit are prominent, and it's pretty obvious when
you're entering and leaving since your go through a toll station.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] California is too big ;)

[Kevin Kenny]

For what it's worth, your proposed dividing line sounds as reasonable as
anything else. (Coming from someone who lived in SoCal briefly, over 25
years ago.)

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 4:28 PM OSM Volunteer stevea <
stevea...@softworkers.com> wrote:

> Reminding everybody that whatever Frederik decides to do about California,
> it isn't "authoritative," simply helpful to keep OSM data manageable.
> Sure, keeping "a solution" logical, simple, "politically correct" and
> achieving some consensus (as we have) are all helpful towards that goal,
> but nobody wins or loses here.
>
> SteveA
> California
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

[Talk-us] What is people's experience with OSM import software?

[Kevin Kenny]

I'm looking for people's experience on software that can take data
from OSM and get it into a PostGIS database for rendering and
analysis. For several years, I've been using 'osm2pgsql', but I've
recently 'bumped my head on the ceiling' in that I need the database
to be capable of querying relations as first-class entities. The
schema as given by 'osm2pgsql' has first-class relations only in the
'rels' table, which is one of the 'slim' tables. The maintainers
deprecate using those in the strongest possible terms.

My requirements are few, but apparently tough:

1. Able to import nodes, open ways and closed ways as
points-of-interest, lines, and polygons, respectively, with database
columns derived from the tags on those nodes and ways.

2. Able to import multipolygon relations as multipolygons in the database.

3. Able to import relations other than multipolygons in such a way
that an efficient SQL query can take a single PoI, line, polygon,
multipolygon or other relation, and identify all relations (or all
relations of a given type) of which it is a member - along with
position and role, and similarly, efficiently identify all members of
the relation (or all PoI's, lines, or areas) with their positions and
roles. In other words, it must be taken as given that the association
between relation and member is inherently many-to-many, and the
association must be traversable in either direction.

4. Able, as a current requirement, to handle continent-scale imports
from GeoFabrik with daily diffs from the same source.

5. Scalable, at least in principle, to full-planet imports with minutely diffs.

My current interim solution, which works well enough in the short
term, is to use 'osm2pgsql' with some auxiliary processing based on
the 'slim tables' to address requirement #3. I am given to understand
that there are no immediate plans to change the schema of the slim
tables in such a way that it would break my use case, but am warned in
no uncertain terms that such a use is entirely unsupported and I
should expect it to break at some time in the future.

I am, to say the least, not optimistic that it is possible to develop
an alternative within the osm2pgsql framework that will meet all the
other constraints, irrelevant to my application, that osm2pgsql's
developers face. It appears that osm2pgsql is simply the wrong tool
for the job.

What, then, are my alternatives? Do I, in fact, inhabit a "box with no
inside", or are there alternative data import paths that I ought to be
investigating? In particular, does anyone have actual experience with
using any of the alternatives, and the ability to report on
perfomance, scalability and stability?

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Evacuation Routes

[Kevin Kenny]

Are you tagging the routes consistently with role=forward or
role=reverse?  An evacuation route is essentially a one-way item
(presumably, return after the crisis can be by any open road), and it
would be good to render them with arrows.
On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 7:20 PM Eric H. Christensen  wrote:
>
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA256
>
> I recently finished an update to the evacuation routes feature[0], turning it 
> into a relation (route).  I'll be working on adding hurricane evacuation 
> routes to areas I'm familiar with (Maryland, Hampton Roads area of Virginia, 
> and Northeast North Carolina) but I encourage others to add evacuation routes 
> to their local areas as well.
>
> Currently, JOSM doesn't recognize this route type and I don't think they're 
> being rendered on any third-party software but I'm hoping once enough data is 
> in the system we'll be able to show a reason for rendering such information.
>
> Thanks,
> Sparks
>
> [0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:route%3Devacuation
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: ProtonMail
> Comment: https://protonmail.com
>
> wsFcBAEBCAAQBQJbkGFsCRCAdqveAkuz0QAAxCcP/3+1rn4ocA6BuiLKAkav
> WTWbphhLscfu5JccbQuo4xiPkTebtYBxHlM1FCq6evAhww25kznWTF4G7U81
> OOGhVBqKMuih+O6h2BFane8gLrNIXEjxSx/KoVx8PwlwhySzwGQSQyi6FsLD
> 7CvTsNhxOBQQCT+btFgyrquvm11RZBXwqBBR6M9MDOJUiCdSaeQO23x8Df7U
> LAeRB6wZ8NJ4lwRUqIB0lbji7TLfjTglO3APgrTh1aTY/e66VHqrO7rJcS7g
> 1bB2xew49nIp4vziX6RbXeX9Y+RA0pp6V+P6h+PdOBLpwbEMMBkwPETW+msK
> 5hymqrkX053XXSecdOrn0wdo+nfkOPJFdtAciabMKpo/fZCNMXCdMzrOWFOC
> AuyYJaHdQD2j8XxIXvLLiBkmgXX0/bibrQlXHhbhKlTXWoemAZ+6D7HFpvfy
> caFO6hCHKxREbWY6oNPj4saRaGpjUdgK+en8bBOE39JsTZdeC994xpn58uPw
> l7hkw7GTN7V7mNlBsNzF/7Wrf1ZnqSG9gzvIpXWGb1kNEXQZk3LQJjFgj62e
> VVAsPlERLDS2dJHlsJzbpfgP8OhT6WWjRPpXlsw2qdmrrxp4Czn7lr+y/FBT
> Mbf0hG5At3d6FDLUjZUNTkBz7dY4quRHPSBQ8I3tBfMtc4rlgit45KiAWJJT
> sEee
> =csxh
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>
>
> ___
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Naming numbered roads as "State Route X", "Interstate X", etc.

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sun, Sep 2, 2018 at 4:18 PM Nathan Mills  wrote:
> My personal opinion is that if local practice and the USPS continue to use 
> the old name, that name should stay in the name tag, while the Legislature's 
> political name should be tagged as an alt_name. That said, there are 
> situations in which most/all signage refers to the new name, in which case 
> switching them makes sense. (Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in 
> Fayetteville, AR being an example. Most still call it 6th Street, but the 
> city, nearly all signage, and the USPS' preferred name are all "Martin Luther 
> King Jr Boulevard," and they are going to keep it up until everyone gets with 
> the program)

Heh. Sometimes you have to wait a long time. The signage on 'Avenue of
the Americas' in New York City has said that since the 1950's. The
Postal Service prefers that name on street addresses.  New Yorkers
call it Sixth Avenue, which confuses the tourists no end.  Likewise,
to a New Yorker, Bruckner Boulevard goes over the Triboro[ugh] Bridge
coming out of the Bronx. The signs say I-278 and Robert F. Kennedy
Bridge. The locals never do. When asked about them, the likely
response will be something like, 'oh, yeah, they renamed one of the
bridges for Bobby Kennedy, didn't they?"

> Sometimes, the name really is "Highway 66" or "Route 22." Admittedly, it can 
> sometimes be hard to tell for sure without local knowledge. As long as people 
> do their best and aren't dogmatic about it when someone who knows better 
> comes along in the future it will all work out in the end.

^ This.  The name of a geographic feature is what the locals call it.
Why should 150th Street be a name, but County Road 34 have to be
relegated to noname=yes if it has no other name? (Then again, I come
from a part of the world that has settlements named Number Four,
Township 40, and Thirteenth Lake. Those things all started out as
reference numbers but are now established names.)

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] NYC Name Vandalism

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:39 AM Ian Dees  wrote:
>
> Yes, the original harmful edit was made by user "MedwedianPresident" in 
> changeset https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047 20 days ago. It 
> was then reverted by naoliv a day later: 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585.
>
> naoliv also blocked the user: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/2141

Many thanks to the hopelessly overloaded DWG for handling this.

A problem here is that it gives us a tremendous black eye in the
press.  I wonder how, moving forward, we can lessen the chances of
this sort of hate speech propagating off the project. Other projects
have found that having a mandatory review and moderation process for
new users is helpful, because the sort of person who leaves this sort
of mess is usually creating a one-time account to do it, rather than
having made earlier sound contributions.

If my experience with other open-source and crowdsourced projects is
any guide, it only takes a incident or two like this for The Powers
That Be in many organizations to start forbidding the use of
open-source material "because there's no quality control and too much
legal risk."

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] ref=* tags on links

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 3:46 PM Paul Johnson  wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 14:33 Richard Welty  wrote:
>
>> On 8/24/18 3:15 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
>> > This is a criticism I've had about the Standard renderer for a while
>> > now.  Andy Allan's rendering refs from relations.  Osmand is rendering
>> > refs from relations.  Magic Earth is rendering refs from relations.
>> > Pretty sure Mapbox and Rand McNally are as well.
>> "don't tag for the renderer" - but we lose sight of the fact that there
>> are
>> multiple renderers, and non-renderer data consumers on top of that.
>>
>
> And?
>
> It's been obvious for about a decade now that this exact thing was going
> to happen, let's make it happen already.
>

I'm trying to do *my* part, with a worked example of *how* to render
shields from route relations, what needs to happen with the front
(OSM->database) end of the render stack (or a data analysis stack, for that
matter), why my example of that will not scale to a planet with minutely
diffs, and a sketch of how to fix that.

That's why my discussion brings on TL;DR. It gets a bit (no, a lot!) bogged
down in the PostGIS details, but details are important.

As I said, I'm still having technical difficulties with mailing to
tile-serving, so thus far Senpai has not noticed me.

>
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Shaped highway shields - trying to revive

[Kevin Kenny]

I'm trying to get them involved, but tile-serving rejects my mails. There's
someone on the server admin team looking into it, but no luck yet. There
may have been further progress today, but I've been out hiking and only
just got back to my email. I'm not yet to the bottom of my inbox.

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 2:27 PM Martijn van Exel  wrote:

> Agreed. I think it's really nice to have active thinking and work around
> this. The key is to get the rendering stack people involved. Perhaps Paul
> Norman can function as a liaison?
>
> Martijn
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Aug 24, 2018, at 12:06, Evin Fairchild  wrote:
>
> Really glad to see that someone is reviving this and actually taking the
> step to get it rendered. Frankly, I never understood why Phil didn't do
> this in the first place. I even mentioned this to him at the time (can't
> remember his response though).
>
> -Evin (compdude)
>
> On Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 2:21 PM Kevin Kenny  wrote:
>
>> (I apologize in advance to the tile-serving community if this message
>> is inappropriate. I see that traffic on that list is largely limited
>> to highly specific technical discussions, but couldn't see a more
>> appropriate forum.)
>>
>> For several years now, I've been using the support code for shaped
>> shields in OSM, originally developed by Phil! Gold and Richard Weait,
>> to render North American-style maps. A typical example can be found at
>> https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html?la=41.4143=-74.4233=14
>> In that view, you can see distinct shields for Interstate, US, New
>> York, and county routes, and at least one concurrence (New York 17M
>> aligned with US 6). Incidentally, Phil's is the only renderer that
>> I've seen that can make sense of cases like West Virginia's bizarre
>> double route numbers, as seen in
>> https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html?la=41.4143=-74.4233=14
>> .
>>
>> The visual distinction among highway shields is really necessary in
>> North America, where there are so many different route networks
>> overlaid.
>>
>> In the course of working with the code, I've made a number of changes
>> and become seriously out of sync with the main development line, which
>> appears to be moribund. (Phil! and Richard have not answered recent
>> queries; I suspect that I have obsolete contact information, but the
>> messages also have not been returned undelivered.)
>>
>> Accordingly, I've (quite reluctantly) created my own repository -
>> https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields - with material from the
>> project. The shield templates to be found there are mostly those of
>> Phil! (I added only a handful), but the code to manage shields is
>> almost entirely new. Some significant changes are:
>>
>> The list of shields to be rendered is obtained from the database
>> itself, rather than being predetermined by a configuration file for
>> each network. This has the disadvantage that refs that are known to be
>> problematic may be rendered (but in most cases they ought to be
>> unsigned_ref). On the other hand, it has the distinct advantage that
>> as mappers continue to create the route relations, the corresponding
>> shields appear virtually automatically.
>>
>> The composition of shield clusters, rather than being handled by a
>> stored procedure in the database, is done using a GroupSymbolizer in
>> Mapnik. I suspect, given the dearth of discussion that I find in a
>> Google query, that I'm the first user to attempt to use
>> GroupSymbolizer with actual open-ended shield clusters, and therefore
>> that I've trodden new ground in the path from database to renderer. I
>> encourage developers who are interested in the GroupSymbolizer to read
>> at least
>> https://github.com/kennykb/osm-shields/wiki/Using-the-GroupSymbolizer
>> - it has a number of tricks to structure the results in a way that the
>> GroupSymbolizer can consume and that renders well. The disadvantage to
>> using the GroupSymbolizer is that Phil!'s shield clusters were rather
>> more attractive visually, since they were aligned to lie in the
>> direction of a way. The advantage is that the current approach can run
>> on an unpatched Mapnik, as opposed to Phil!'s original, which requires
>> at least patching Mapnik to use a read/write connection to the
>> database.
>>
>> Managing, reliably, the association between ways and the routes in
>> which they participate requires a couple of database tables that a
>> stock osm2pgsql does not produce. I would very much appreciate any
>> commentary from developers of osm2pgsql and Mapnik, particularly,