Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Does OSM have a similar concept as the "Organisation" from Mappilary?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 07/07/2020, Donal Hunt  wrote:
> https://osmcha.org has a teams function which allows you to see changes
> over time. See https://osmcha.org/teams
> Pascal Neis also has some tools. e.g. you can visualise by hashtag here:
> https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=osmirl#8/53.475/-8.015
>
> I quite like the missing maps leaderboard which can be found here:
> https://www.missingmaps.org/leaderboards/#/osmirl (Kudos tshedy!!)

Has https://dev.mapping.team/teams gained any traction ?

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Summits imported from mountainviews.ie

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 29/11/2019, Donal Hunt  wrote:
> The latest major revision of WGS 84 is also referred to as "Earth
> Gravitational Model 1996" (EGM96), first published in 1996, with revisions
> as recent as 2004. This model has the same reference ellipsoid as WGS 84,
> but has a higher-fidelity geoid (roughly 100 km resolution versus 200 km
> for the original WGS 84).

Hopefully the 2004 revision is close enough to the 1996 one, as it
seems that osm is defaulting to 1996.

> The tl;dr is that you need to reference which model your peak height is
> measured against. EGM96 is preferred (I'm assuming) because it has higher
> definition and more refined model.

AIUI from the wiki and taginfo, in an OSM context, the naked "ele" tag
refers to EGM96, and there are subtags like "ele:wgs84" or even
"ele:local" for "whatever's printed on the local signpost".

I've figured out the overpass query I had in mind:
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/OCb but it finds basically every peak we
have with an elevation.

See also 
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/15397/elevation-of-irish-mountains-why-the-discrepancy-osmwikipedia
which complains the the issue ireland-wide, and notes that the osm
data in other countries is fine.

All the mountainviews imports basically have
ele:local/ele_local/ele:tm75 (3 keys with first value) and
ele/ele:wgs84 (two tags with second value). I couldn't find a
definition of the "tm75" coordinate system that we got from the
mountainview export, I'm guessing this is an irish-specific
coordinates system, and I have doubts that it is equivalent to the
egm96 that we would like.

At this point, I have a few questions:
* Are the "tm75" values usable for the naked "ele" tag ?
* If not, can we convert tm75 to egm96 ?
* As a bonus, I think we should remove "ele_local" where we already
have "ele:local"
* Is it ok to edit 790 as a single changeset (once we agreed with the
changes) or do we want to check each individually ?

* Second bonus (probably for a second stage): is there's any point in
keeping the iemv:* tags ? Might have been a requirement for the import
? It was done in 2009, maybe it's time to see if they have updated
data.



Cheers.

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[OSM-talk-ie] Summits imported from mountainviews.ie

[moltonel 3x Combo]

Hi,

I've just fixed Lugnaquilla's "ele" tag to use the EGM96 system, as
opposed to the WGS84 one:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77737107
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ele?uselang=en

That one was reported by an OSM note, but I wouldn't be surprised if
most of the natural=peak have the same issue. I think it's possible to
find those using an overpass query that would return all natural=peak
where ele == ele::egs84, but I couldn't figure that query out straight
away and there may be a lot of stuff to carefully fix, so I'm turning
to the mailing list.

Might get a solution tomorrow during the Kilkenny meetup, but I
figured I might as well ask here so I don't forget about it.


-- 
Vincent de Phily

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Duplicate townland nodes

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 03/10/2019, Mark O'Donovan  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The two items below have the same tags and appear twice in the FDroid
> version of Maps.me.
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5910219
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3524289126
>
> locality : townland
> name : Knockrobin
> place : locality
>
>
> In these situations should the node be removed?

Yes. One OSM object for one real-world feature.

The node was created before the relation. It's pretty common to
"upgrade" a node to an area once more time or information is
available, and sometimes we forget to remove the original node.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Raths / ringforts

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 06/09/2018, Rory McCann  wrote:
> I mapped a lot with historical=earthworks earthworks=rath. A few years
> brianh came up with a tagging scheme for historic objects like that in
> Ireland, and that was the tagging for ringforts, so I used that. I have
> no strong attachment to it, and would be willing to change to something
> else.

Thanks. I've gone ahead with some earthworks->fortification retaging
in Kilkenny : https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/62348383

* I've removed the " (rath)" that was sometimes appended to the name.
It should probably go in name:ga but I haven't the skill.
* Some notes refer to the ringfort as "plough-leveled", maybe that's a
better wording than "razed" for the ringfort_type key ?
* It would be nice to tag forts that consist of multiple rings, like
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/538754476, but I'm not sure that
ringfort_type=dun is the right choice.
* Not all earthwork is a ringfort, see
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/536904479 - I guess this should also
change from earthworks=motte to fortification_type=hill_fort, like
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/357271010 ?


> The Archeological Survey of Ireland has all these (and more!) mapped,
> and I believe there's some attempt to ask the Dept Culture, Heritage &
> Gaeltacht to open that out, but nothing yet. That would certainly aid
> mapping.
>
> https://www.archaeology.ie/archaeological-survey-ireland

Is it worth pinging them again ?

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Raths / ringforts

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 05/09/2018, Donal Hunt  wrote:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringfort
>
> In Irish language  sources
> they are known by a number of names: *ráth* (anglicised *rath*), *lios*
>  (anglicised *lis*; cognate with Cornish
>
> (...)
>
> Based on the above definitions, nodes should tagged with ring_fort but
> detailed mapping could use ráth and lios.

From that wikipedia article it seems that ráth is just the irish word
for ringfort, there doesn't seem to be added information ? For ráth vs
lios, see below.

I don't care much about ring_fort vs ringfort, but the later is what's
currently in the db and wiki.

> I assume a relation tagged with
> ringfort would be appropriate for locations that have the ráth and lios
> mapped.

The distinction between ráth (the actual ring) and lios (the inner
area) is interesting, but I couldn't find any mapping that made that
distinction. Similarly, we rarely map the building walls separately
from the building rooms. The vast majority of ringforts are mapped as
ways. The ~10 that are mapped as relations seem to be so because a
townland boundary follows a portion of the ring.

If we want to do detailed mapping, there are some characteristics that
we could identify:
* does it use (at least some) stones or just earth ? See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworks_(archaeology). The wiki's
tagging scheme starts with usage (fortification), we could refine
further with nature (earthwork).
* Has it been razed ? In my reviews I found a lot of ringforts that
got flattened (typically for agricultural reasons) but that are still
visible as ground discoloration on imagery. I don't want to start an
"abandoned railway" debate, but I guess there's a whole spectrum of
"still exists".
* height, public access, signposted, paid access, etc.

How about ringfort_type=rath/caiseal/dun/razed to differentiate
between earth, stone, large, and destroyed ringforts ?

Dun Aengus (on Aran More) is currently tagged as 'historic=castle
castle_type=defensive'. Should we switch it to the above-mentioned
scheme ? Any other comparable fort we should look at ?

> p.s. I have no other knowledge / opinion other that want I've read above. I
> do think they are cool and worth mapping. 50,000 is a lot of work!!!

~2500 done, 47500 to go :)

I've got other things on my plate, but from now on I'll try to map
ringforts when I stumble upon them.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Raths / ringforts

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 05/09/2018, Colm Moore  wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:fortification%20type=ringfort?uselang=en-GB
>
>
> Was someone running a project on mapping / tidying-up raths / ringforts? I
> notice many are mapped in Cork and Kilkenny, but few elsewhere.

User b-unicycling has added most of the Kilkenny ringforts (from some
external source, I can't recall exactly but I had checked with her
that it was ODBL-compatible) and I then fixed the tagging and reviewed
a few using Bing and GSGS.

See https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/52885942
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/55717926
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/55718276

> I haven't come across many of these until the last few weeks. In that time,
> I seem to have been tagging them incorrectly.
>
> Can I check the correct tagging is:
> historic=archaeological_site
> site_type=fortification
> fortification_type=ringfort ?

Yes, that's what I've been going for after looking at taginfo and the
wiki, but see discussion below.

> I checked http://stat.latlon.org/ie/latest/ for the word "fort", (I didn't
> check for name~fort or description~fort) and there are many tagging
> variations (not all of these will be ringforts).
>
> archaeological_site=earthworks
> archaeological_site=fort
> archaeological_site=ring_fort
> archaeological_site=ringfort
> castle_type=fortification
> castle_type=fortress
> earthworks=rath
> earthworks=ringfort
> earthworks=ringfort (rath)
> fortification=ring_ditch
> fortification_type=hill_fort
> fortification_type=hillfort
> fortification_type=ringfort
> historic=fort
> historic=fortification
> historic=hillfort
> historic=ring fort
> historic=ring_fort
> inscription=Ring fort
> military=fort
> note=Ancient fort
> note=Ancient ring fort
> note=Fawney (fainne) means ring, maybe the site of a ringfort? Was also
> slang to kiss the King/Lords ring. Very interesting as the road is called
> the Royal Oak
> note=Fort
> note=Not sure if these are Barrows or rath, or what the difference is! Ring
> fort
> note=Not sure if these are Barrows or raths, or what the difference is! Ring
> fort
> note=Ring Fort?
> note=Round Fort?
> note=ring fort
> note=ringfort
> ruins=fort
> ruins=ringfort
> site_type=earthwork
> site_type=earthworks
> site_type=enclosure
> site_type=fortification
> site_type=ring fort
> site_type=ringfort
> site_type=ringfort;megalith
> type=ringfort
> wikipedia=en:Ringfort
> wikipedia_1=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringfort

I last looked at the taginfo numbers about a year ago, let's look again :

There seem to be a split between
historic=archaeological_site,site_type=fortification,fortification_type=ringfort
(~850 uses, Cork and Kilkenny) and historic=earthworks,earthworks=rath
(~1750 uses, Kerry). While the later is more popular, I prefer the
former for these reasons:

* The former seems to fit the OSM worldwide consensus better, and is
documented in the wiki.
* Everybody knows what a fortification is, but earthwork isn't as
clear (sounds like clay pottery to me).
* Most Irish people know what a ringfort is, but a rath... I've only
encountered the word in OSM.
* Maybe earthworks/rath is a better word from an archaeologist's POV.
Maybe a ringfort is subtly different from a rath. But I don't know and
I expect the average OSM contributor doesn't either, so it seems safer
to stick with layman-level "ringfort".

> How should I proceed?

Rorym seems to be behind most of the earthwork=rath objects, so let's
get his opinion first (I'll ping him).

From then on, if we agree on the "ringfort" scheme, I'd say use
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/BFD to locate the "earthworks" objects,
then load them into josm to check and retag.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Is data being corrupted?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

That changeset was a newbie's first, under my supervision. I was
making an introduction to OSM at my coworking space, which is located
right there by the train station. When reviewing the session's edits I
noticed the strange "delete one POI and edit another identical one"
behaviour but not that the car park had been broken as a result, and
mistook that for a POI de-duplication edit.

What I think happened:
* There was no duplicate POI as I initially thought.
* The user didn't intend to edit the POI; maybe he played with the
undo button a bit, but his changeset was about editing a completely
unrelated feature.
* For whatever reason iD deleted node 3754515929 (the original POI)
and assigned its tags and location to node 1165425462 (a corner of the
car park)
* I could blame an iD bug, or I could blame a total newbie selecting
two nodes and merging them by mistake and without noticing anything.
* User uploads his intended edit along with the iD data mixing.

I don't think there's anything to be gained in not cleaning up the
current data, so I'll do that as cleanly as possible. The database
isn't getting corrupted randomly. It could be an iD bug, but it's also
easily explained as a newbie boo-hoo.

Thanks for the heads-up.

On 22/01/2018, Marc Gemis  wrote:
> the last edit date of ways or relations are only updated when their
> tags or the list of their members change. Not when the members in the
> relation of way change location or tags.
> So the error you describe is only 6 days old, and Vincent de Philly
> wrote a changeset comment 5 days ago
> (https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/55504147)
>
> m.
>
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 10:53 AM, Colm Moore 
> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Please don't correct this error until we know what is happening. :)
>>
>> Of late, I've noticed some mapping errors, e.g. a node on a road that has
>> been dragged off-road by a few hundred metres. When I check the last edit,
>> it might not have been edited in 5 years. I thought it implausible that
>> such obvious errors would remain in place for so long. Indeed, I had
>> sometimes edited in the area and would have thought that I would have
>> spotted an obvious error (I readily admit I make errors also). Many of the
>> issues are thrown up by OSMI http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/
>>
>> Today, using OSMI, I see that the car park in Kilkenny train station is
>> wonky, but it hasn't been changed in two years. The boundary wall hasn't
>> been edited in 4 years. The thing is, I viewed that area recently (I don't
>> recollect why) and had to do a forced refresh of the browser (Ctrl F5) of
>> the area to make the background map match the object outline. Several
>> users have edited in the area in recent years and surely one of us would
>> have spotted the error. Interestingly, the car park is now attached to a
>> node for a shop.
>>
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/216942338 Edited about 4 years ago by
>> Vincent de Phily Version #2 · Changeset #20131140
>>
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/100847087 Edited about 2 years ago by
>> wheelmap_visitor Version #7 · Changeset #35421480
>>
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1165425462 Edited 6 days ago by Reilsky
>> Version #4 · Changeset #55504147
>>
>> --
>>
>> It may be justifiable for the last edit date not to be updated where an
>> object within a relation is edited, but the relation itself isn't edited.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> Colm
>>
>> PS Thanks to OSMI people for the service they provide. :)
>>
>>
>> ---
>> Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
>> change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret
>> Mead
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Re: [OSM-talk] Changing Bing to bing

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 6 March 2017 5:41:01 PM GMT+01:00, Andy Townsend  wrote:
>On 06/03/2017 07:32, Werner Poppele wrote:
>
>  I'd also suggest that
>whatever it is in JOSM that's recommending this be changed so as not
>to.  A couple of times in the past I've suggested that JOSM's rules be
>relaxed in this way and I've always found the JOSM developers to be
>extremely helpful with this sort of issue.

Done: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/14554

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap merchandise

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 30/01/2017, Paul Johnson  wrote:
> Do we have any cycling shirts or t-shirts available for sale?  Wouldn't
> mind wearing one while I'm doing surveys out on my bike.

And I'm looking for an OSM beany hat to hide my balding head on 360
survey photos :p Plenty of "custom embroidered/printed hat" companies
online, but they only print the front of the hat, not the top.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Beware Pokemon users

[moltonel 3x Combo]

For what it's worth, I tested the hypothesis that Go uses OSM by
walking http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142843552. It's a
highway=footway inside a leisure=park, which I added in OSM years ago
and still isn't in Google, Bing, ESRI, or HERE (they do have the rest
of the town mapped). This town is generally pretty boring to play Go:
no gym, 3 stops very far apart, and rather few spawns. I've been
playing Go regularly for a few months, here and in a much more
Go-friendly town.

While this is only an anecdotal result, there are clearly a lot more
spawns on this walk than in the surrounding area (I regularly get
10-15 spawns on this 700m footway, but only 1-2 covering the same
distance along the primary to get there).

IMHO, the biggest news here is that (a subsidiary of) Google is using
OSM data in a high-profile product. If this is true, this is a very
big "switch2osm" story and it'd be great PR for OSM. I encourage other
OSMers to test suitable areas. If the OSM community (which is IMHO
better suited at asserting this than the Go community) can gain enough
confidence that Go is indeed using OSM data, a friendly and public
request from the OSMF to get OSM credited in Go would be in order.


Concerning the fear that Go players will deteriorate the OSM data to
suit their Go needs, I'm not too worried. Being aware of potential bad
edits is good, but we've dealt with problematic user groups before
(bitcoin shops for example).

Having more OSM contributors is always good, but contributors coming
from the Go community would be particularly so, because it is has
demographic that differ from the OSM average (most notably by being
63% women), and OSM sorely needs more contributor diversity.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Viewing pre-redaction OSM tiles?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 15/07/2016, Rory McCann  wrote:
> On 14/07/16 20:49, Michał Brzozowski wrote:
>> I would swear I saw a page doing exactly that (with a comparison slider).
>> The reason is I suspect that some website uses old cc-by-sa OSM data
>> (due to its nature, with their own updates) without attribution nor
>> with modified map data released.

If you dig through the history of
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Remapping you'll find lots of urls
that showed what impact the data redaction for the license change was
going to have. But probably none of those are still functional.

> I'm not sure, but could you download & use the files from here:
> http://planet.openstreetmap.org/cc-by-sa/ ? Import with osm2pgsql and
> display it yourself with openstreetmap-carto ?

I think that's the best bet at this stage. There a a few websites that
render OSM at differents snapshots in time, but I don't know of any
that have snapshots pre/post odbl.

Contributors have put a lot of effort into making the diff as small as
possible, and even in areas where the loss was significant (parts of
Australia for example), OSM recovered amazingly quickly afterwards.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bicycle GPS traces - more opendata

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 25/04/2016, John Whelan  wrote:
> could the cycling fraternity come up with a process to
> store this type of data as open data?

Have you tried using OSM's existing trove of traces ? There's no
metadata to say wether it was a bicylcle ride or something else, but
most traces have timestamps that enable measuring the speed, so if you
filter out traces that go faster than ~35km/h or consistently slower
than ~10km/h, you should have bicycle traces.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] State of the Map 2016 call for sessions - Thinking of suggesting a townlands lighting talk...

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 22/04/2016, Dave Corley  wrote:
> I was planning on submitting a full talk on it, instead of a lightening
> talk. There's a lot to cover

Maybe we could collaborate on GoogleDoc or similar to write the talk ?

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Landuse

[moltonel 3x Combo]

Landuse is a bit tricky in OSM because it has a large part of
subjectivity. The residential/retail/commercial/industrial split is a
common issue. How wide does a street need to be before we stop
including it in the landuse ? How all-encompassing should
landuse=farmland be ? Should we have lots of single-house
landuse=residential in the countryside ? What's up with landuse=forest
vs natural=wood ? Should I start using a multipolygon or stay with
shared-nodes closed-ways for now ? These existential questions explain
why landuse in OSM is just ok-ish.

FWIW, I tend to trace buildings first and landuse later (though
sometimes I lose patience). Having a landuse=residential polygon
double as a place=locality/neighbourhood is great when you can. I
stoped worrying about spliting residential/retail exactly right. For
better or worse, the townlands project is making Ireland
multipolygon-heavy, so I hesitate less than I used to about using MPs.
Most of our landuse=farmland has apparently been mapped by
single-contribution landowners and is often of poor quality, but so
far I only bother improving it when it interferes with the rest. I
adopted the POV that landuse=forest means forestry activity and
implies natural=wood when nothing else is tagged.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [BOT] [RFC]: water surfaces

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/03/2016, Frank Villaro-Dixon  wrote:
> Maybe it's an higher priority, but that doesn't interest me. If someone
> wants to, good for them.

Fair enough, we all have different priorities.

> Now, the lower priority 'redundant tag deleting'
> is still needed, and if it can be done automatically (nobody still hasn't
> given me a fuckup example), then why not ? It's still usefull if you want
> to extract all the lakes of the world, for example.

How do redundant tags prevent you from extracting all the lakes of the
world ? It should be harmless, you'll just have some objects that will
be selected by two different criterias. For better or worse, any OSM
consumer has to deal with some level of redundant data.

As for problems with your algorythm, people in this list _have_
pointed out potential problems, such as missing non-duplicated tags
that are on the way rather than on the relation (To properly fix that
you need a human eye. Fix the automatically-detectable part of the
problem only and you've just succeeded in making the other problems
harder to detect). There's no need to point at actual osm objects with
those issues that your script changed when the failure case are so
easy to come up with.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [BOT] [RFC]: water surfaces

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 22/03/2016, Pierre Béland  wrote:
> This is a good proposition to look at unclosed polygons and see if a
> potential incorrect keys to fix.
>
> I agree with others that using a Bot is not a safe way to handle these
> problems. Could a script to extract such unclosed polygons be proposed?
> This way, each local community could take care to fix data for their area,
> importing and examining the data in the JOSM Editor. The Todo plugin could
> be used to go through the items to correct.

I was going to point you towards
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance_Tools_script but
for some reason it doesn't support OSMI's multipolygon checks. Might
be worth pinging the qat devs.

Possible alternatives:
* Load OSMI's multipolygon checks as an imagery layer. If only it
didn't flag type=boundary as an error. As it is it's a bit noisy :/
* Use the OSMI website directly
(http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=multipolygon). You can tweak the
error types to display, and load object via remote command.
* Use the qat plugin but with other sources than OSMI. For
multipolygon errors, it's IMHO not as good.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [BOT] [RFC]: water surfaces

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 22/03/2016, Frank Villaro-Dixon  wrote:
> On 16-03-22 10:23:51, Nicolás Alvarez, wrote 1.2K characters saying:
>>
>>> El 22 mar 2016, a las 10:10, Frank Villaro-Dixon 
>>> escribió:
>>>
>>> # First goal:
>>> First goal is quite simple. The idea is to work only on relations which
>>> have a natural=water .  Then, it will:
>>>* Delete natural=water from all the ways if they are NOT closed or
>>> ring 0.
>>
>>What if there is a way legitimately with natural=water that isn't closed
>> because of an error? The correct fix is to close it, not to remove the
>> tag. This cannot be done automatically.
>>
> It doesn't matter because this way will also be referenced by a relation
> which has the natural=water tag. Thus, it can be removed from the way.

If the way being closed or not doesn't matter, then it shouldn't be
part of your criterias ? I see this as a red flag indicating you
didn't think long enough about the problem, and that doesn't bode well
for an automated world-wide edit.

You're conflating two different problems:

1) Some multipolygon relations have improper geometry, such as non-closed rings.
2) Some tags are "needlessly" repeated between the relation and its members.

Neither of those problems are specific to water features.

The first problem has many QA tools to point it out, for example
OSMI[1]. Maybe some of them can be fixed automatically, but I'd much
rather go through them manually[2] because some cases are strange, and
often when one MP is broken there's lots of other bugs in the same
area by the same user that deserve a fix.

The second problem actually has the community a bit divided (last I
heard of it), as some people *want* to have the actual ways tagged
(usually for ease of consumption, but also for historical reasons). I
usually delete the superfluous tag when I happen to be editing the
object, but I wouldn't dare do this automatically on a global scale.
And as long as those duplicate tags aren't contradicting each other,
they are harmless.

[1]:http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=multipolygon
[2]:http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance_Tools_script

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Problems with the irish boundaries preset and josm

[moltonel 3x Combo]

A new stable version of josm has been released (version 9900,
https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Changelog). So if you are following
stable versions and haven't changed anything else, you'll see that the
townland preset doesn't recognize existing MP relations anymore (it
only offers to create a new relation).

There is a fixed version of the preset, but that version prevents
previous josm-stable version (9329 and earlyer) from starting. This is
a bigger annoyance than an unrecognized relation type, so we'll wait
until most people have updated their josm before switching to the new
version by default.

In the meantime, you can change your preset settings (menu preset ->
preset preferences -> active presets) to match your josm version:
* use http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/josm/irishboundaries-dev.xml if you
have upgraded.
* use http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/josm/irishboundaries-9329.xml if
you intend to stay with the old josm version for a while (why ?).
* do nothing if you aren't affected by the bug or can wait until we
change the version for you.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OsmAnd financially rewarding mappers

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 03/03/2016, Richard  wrote:
>> Even without talking about nefarious schemes, even well-meaning users
>> will tend to change their mapping behavior because of this. In this
>> case it's about uploading more often, potentially making changes
>> harder to follow.
>
> imho it would be good if people would upload more often. Easier to revert
> if it is wrong, more likely the changeset will fit into a reasonable
> bounding box.

There's a happy middle. Some people make too many tiny changesets,
others make too few huge changesets. And nobody make the right amount
of correctly-sized changesets, because that's subjecctive :p

Analysing (perhaps even reverting) a swarm of small changesets is as
much a PITA as huge changesets. Avoid editing very distant points in
the same changeset. Avoid mixing very different tasks (say pure
armchair stuff and survey results) in the same changeset. Avoid doing
5 changesets in an hour for the same location/road/object. Rule of
thumb: if writing a reasonably-precise changeset comment is
complicated or if you used the same comment 20 times today, you should
review the size of your changesets.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OsmAnd financially rewarding mappers

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 03/03/2016, Marc Gemis  wrote:
> My point is that it might attract people that just upload data without
> any benefit to OSM (wrong data or data that is added in many
> changetsets (because that determines the ranking) instead of 1, as you
> would normally do..
> You can even write a script that creates a point in one changeset and
> deletes it in another. Over and over again.

Even without talking about nefarious schemes, even well-meaning users
will tend to change their mapping behavior because of this. In this
case it's about uploading more often, potentially making changes
harder to follow. Choose a differnet metric, and it'll have a
different problem. The HR industry has tried to find metrics of worker
productivity for decades, but most do not work.

Plenty of OSM projects have done various levels of edit gamification,
and this is fine as long as (counterintuitively) it doesn't push too
much contributors to edit. And when your start bringing money (even a
tiny amount) into the picture, behaviours can change drastically.


But encouraging contributions to OSM is a great idea, and OsmAnd is in
a nice position to do that. Some examples that probably wouldn't hurt:
* Give access to the paid version of OsmAnd if the user has passed
certain editing thresholds. This is similar to the original idea, but
there is no money directly involved, and most importantly this is a
once-off perk.
* Popup notifications about nearby QA issues, like Vespucci does.
* Look at the heatmap of the user's editing/visiting locations, and
prompt the user to go (re)survey if there is a nearby cold spot.

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[OSM-talk-ie] Problems with the irish boundaries preset and josm

[moltonel 3x Combo]

Hi all,

there's currently a problem with the irish boundaries preset and josm,
depending on your version of josm. The current version of the preset
has been tweaked to work better with recent josm versions, but that
change breaks josm-stable (9329) and earlyer. There doesn't seem to be
a way to write the preset file that works well with both versions of
josm.

So if you get a parsing error when you start josm, I suggest you fetch
a josm-latest build. Alternatively, you can undo the modification to
the preset file before starting josm: open the
cache/mirror...irishboundaries.xml file and search
",multipolygon" with "". If you're on linuxor osx, you can do this by
running "sed -i ~/.josm/cache/*irishboundaries.xml s/,mutipolygon//".

Sorry for the inconvenience (I'm the one who fixed/broke the preset
for recent/old versions of josm). If you can't update your josm or
tweak your cached preset file, contact me here or on irc for more
help.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Glanagow Power Station

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 04/11/2015, Colm Moore  wrote:
> In this changeset: http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/35086504
> In tweaking / adding o the power station, I inadvertently deleted the power
> station itself (Way 263812982).

Way and relation restored.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Terms of Use Issue? - MapMyRide

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 28/09/2015, Mike Thompson  wrote:
> Ian, Hans,
>
> Thanks.  I will write them an email this evening.

Complying with the OSM copyright just requires attribution, but
complying with the Google TOS is more complicated, because you can't
use Google's API (javascript library) to display non-google maps, and
you can't access Google map tiles using an API that isn't Google's:
https://developers.google.com/maps/terms sections 10.1.a and 10.4.e

Google is strong-arming people into using their api+data and nothing
else. My understanding is that legally the only way to display both
Google and non-Google maps on the same page is to use a different
javascript library for each. But of course in practice, everybody
ignores that and blissfully infringes the Google TOS ;)

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Re: [OSM-talk] recent changes in rendering the map make it worse

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/09/2015, henk van der laan  wrote:
> Now I'm really getting confused. osm-carto is the current version and
> gsoc the new one, right?

There's been a tremendous amount of discussion, feedback, a tweaks
about this change:
* https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1736
* http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz Konieczny/diary
* various calls for participation on this mailing list.

OSM, and osm-carto in particular are developed in the open. If
anything, they are often flooded by feedback. Please use open source
to your advantage and check the process, the challenges and the
compromises before passing judgement, and contribute using those
channels if you can.

Osm-carto is full of compromises trying to reach a balance between all
the requirements, it is no easy task. For example, the tertiary roads
styling you bemoan has been heavily debated before reaching the
current conclusion; a tough requirements was keeping a high enough
contrast for non-ideal viewing conditions.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Ireland EEZ boundary

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 22/09/2015, Stephen Roulston  wrote:
> Yes, sorry about that :(
>
> I automatically thought that such a short list is bound to be wrong. I was
> very embarrassed to see the posting later.

No worries, it was quick to redo and it showcased the problems that
the old EEZ caused :)

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Ireland EEZ boundary

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 20/09/2015, moltonel 3x Combo <molto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Done:
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34148691

Reuploaded in http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34157957, as
Stephen mistakenly undid the changes when he encountered an upload
conflic while working on townlands. Precisely the kind of problems
that should occur less often with the simplified EEZ :p

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Ireland EEZ boundary

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 18/09/2015, Colm Moore  wrote:
> You will probably find that there is a statutory instrument that defines
> much of the EEZ boundaries.

Yes, the corresponding document and points can be found at
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2014/si/86 and its title is tagged
on the osm objects. I have no intention of touching these coordinates.
But they only describe the boundary at sea. Nothing is said about the
coastline/inland boundary, which is the one I'm addressing in my
email.

> I think islands should be included within the EEZ - its all the one
> territorial claim - as islands change in size.

That would fit with suggestion b) or c).

> What is the OSM standard for this?

http://overpass-turbo.eu/?w=%22border_type%22%3D%22eez%22+global is
interesting. All kinds of layouts exist:
* border-only (no area) boundaries (eg between Japan and Korea)
* area encompassing the land (eg Philipines)
* area following the offshore country border rather than the exact
coastline (eg South Africa)
* area crossing the land very roughly (eg Italy)
* the Irish EEZ seems unique in OSM in following the coastline precisely

Following these observations, and the fact that the irish statute
document's points actually start at sea very near the territorial
water boundary, I suggest a new option : make the EEZ follow its
current offshore boundary, and the territorial boundary (which starts
at http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/144387894 and ends at
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/92987647). This follows the South
Africa model, and actually results in a very lightweight and
standard-conforming osm object.


Thanks for pushing me to do these extra checks Colm, this new solution
looks much more satisfying to me. Unless there's a contrary opinion
I'm going to enact it this sunday (schedule permiting), but a couple
of "+1" replies wouldn't hurt either.

Cheers.

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[OSM-talk-ie] Ireland EEZ boundary

[moltonel 3x Combo]

Hi,

the EEZ boundary is a maritime exclusive economic zone. It is mapped
as relation 4121287 in OSM:
http://localhost:8111/import?url=http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/4121287/full
(using a josm/mercator remote-control link instead of a website link
because the website is likely to timeout).

There are a few problems with it:
* At ~4000 members, it is enormous. JOSM validator takes over a minute
to check it on my machine. It's the biggest relation we have, even the
four regions are about half the size.
* It only has a fraction of the islands it ought to have, and most of
those are mistakenly tagged as outer instead of inner.
* It keeps breaking (non-closed ways), and the more members a MP has
the more laborious it is to fix it.

What should we do with it ? Either...

a) Add all the missing islands, fix their roles
  pros: that's the best theoretical way to map a maritime area
  cons: will exacerbate all the size-related problems

b) Keep as-is but drop all the islands
  pros: reduces the size strain a bit
  cons: not a true maritime area anymore. Boat navigation will surely
not get fooled by this, but other tasks like for example area
calculation gets more complicated.

c) Same as b) but follow the ROI-NI border instead of the coastline
  Same pros and cons as b), only stronger

d) Only keep the maritime ways
  pros: simplest version
  cons: not much can be done with it appart from rendering (for
example a bot can't determine wether it is navigating within the EEZ
anymore)

e) Use multilinestring relations to simplify the geometries
  pros: great reduction in member count. Same technique could be used
to simplify the other county and region MPs
  cons: not all tools support multilinestring relations (what about
nominatim ?), they are used in France for example but are not yet a
standard osm feature. Islands still need to be supported, as in a).



I'm leaning towards solution c), but could be convinced of either.
What do ye think ?

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Re: [OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 15/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
> thing is, a dismantled railway has no end_date, it only has a start_date and
> will continue to be a dismantled railway, till the end of time

Yes.

On 15/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
> railway=dismantled on the other hand is not a past feature, it is a
> dismantled railway now, in the present. In the past it was a railway=rail
> etc.

I don't understand how a feature can be both "dismantled till the end
of time" and "in the present". The only state that you can keep
forever is the state of not being. To me, "dismantled" as used in OSM
rails is a much stronger definition than "dismantled legos", it is a
synonym for "fully gone". Saying that something is "fully gone in the
present" is a roundabout way of saying that it is in the past.

The start_date of the railway=dismantled is the end_date of the
railway=abandoned/rail. So why not tag the railway=rail/abandoned with
the date of its demise (not with a trolltag like end_date, but with
something that doesn't trip up presentfans) instead of
railway=dismantled ?

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Re: [OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 14/09/2015, EthnicFood IsGreat  wrote:
> I guess we're asking that an exception to the "verifiable features only" rule
> be made for these features.

IMHO the exception that you are asking for is not to the "verifyable
only" rule but to the "presently existing" rule. All the
abandoned/dismantled railroads I've seen in OSM were verifyably
"previously existing" but also (where the conflict arrises as far as
I'm concerned) verifyably "no longer present".

This is not a rejection of your plea, just trying to make sure of what
we are talking about.

> Simply confining abandoned railroad
> features to OHM is not a good solution, because without being able to
> view them in the context of existing features, they lose a lot of
> their value.

Agreed, OHM is currently not very usable.



I've suggested that early on, and again in my latest reply to Russ : I
think that maping the past in OSM would be acceptable, if done
properly. Some kind of "OHM done right". Doing things really right
might require a modification of the data model, a cross-db
synbchronisation tool, or some other cool technology... But that's
just too far off, too hypothetical. The next best thing is a tagging
system for the past.

If it wasn't clear already, railway=dismantled, end_date, or any
system that mixes past and present in the same namespace is IMHO not
acceptable. Consumers, editors and tools should be able to filter out
historical data with a simple rule. I've suggested using "past:" as a
key prefix, with an optional " @ date - range" as a value suffix.
Didn't see any reply, what do people think ?

As for opening the floodgates of historical mapping, I do not like it
from a very personal POV, but I can recognise that there is a need,
that OSM might be the best tool to fill that need, and that it might
ultimately strengthen the poject. I just hope (and believe and work to
make it true) that it won't be too much of a nuisance to my usecase.
And if we do open up to maping the past, I don't think that it should
be reserved to railroads.

I've argued against maping no-longer existing railroads in way too
many emails at this stage, but I suggested this escape route early on.
Nobody picked it up but I think that's the only thing that currently
stands a chance of reaching consensus. EthnicFoodIsGreat, can you see
the working compromise that Russ cannot ?

That's it for me, bye bye railroad thread, I hope. Of course I'm only
one contributor, not a highly prolific or influential one, not an
authority, just a voice. Others have been less noisy but more dogmatic
than me on the subject. The community as a whole must decide wether
"we map the present" is still a hard OSM rule.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

TL;DR: argument repeat, sorry.

On 09/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
>> OSM is map of the current state of the world - not map
>> of the world how it was yesterday, 10 years ago or five thousands ago.
>
> Nobody is advocating to map the past, what is discussed is mapping those
> elements of the past which somehow have lasted or have had a strong impact
> that is still observable today.

Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
or has had a strong impact that is still observable today". Whenever I
looked at some examples posted by Russ, these kind of sections weren't
far.

When stuff have been contructed over the former railroad like this,
there's no need for a local survey to see that nothing is left. IMHO,
at most a section of Albert Street could have railway=abandoned as an
additional tag. I have my doubts about the sections under the forest
too, but that requires a survey to assert.

So there is at least one contributor who "is advocating to map the
past". I have a feeling Russ is an exception in this respect (Lester's
view are close but more nuanced), but he is so passionate that this
thread keeps resurecting.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 09/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Am 09.09.2015 um 13:14 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo <molto...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
>> most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
>> or has had a strong impact that is still observable today".
>
> how could I tell without going there?

I thought I had preemptively answered that :

On 09/09/2015, moltonel 3x Combo <molto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When stuff have been contructed over the former railroad like this,
> there's no need for a local survey to see that nothing is left. IMHO,
> at most a section of Albert Street could have railway=abandoned as an
> additional tag. I have my doubts about the sections under the forest
> too, but that requires a survey to assert.

The line is going through multiple buildings and a wide low wall.
That's as unambiguous as it gets. The lack of any other sign on the
grass and highway areas are an additional good hint. If you're mapping
a railroad here, you're mapping the past.

Or are you saying that the imagery might be too old, the railway could
have been restored since ? The imagery was taken around the same time
as the first changeset, and the changeset sources either say nothing,
or bing, or osm wiki (!).

Talking about past features, tagging gauge=* on a railway=abandoned
way (which by definition does not have any tracks left) should be an
impossible combination. Tagging electrified=* is also a funny idea.

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Re: [OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 08/09/2015, Fabian Schmidt  wrote:
> On 09/08/2015 12:16 AM, Dave F. wrote:
>> I fail to understand why railways are singled out as a special case. If
>> roads, buildings or woods get demolished, they get deleted.
>
> please have a look at the tag definition in the wiki: "where the rails
> have been removed but the route is still visible in some way" [1]

Please have a look at previous discussions, the conflict is not about
railway=abandoned as defined in the wiki but about mapping
completely-disappeared railways where no feature (bridge, cuting, etc)
remains, and sometimes incompatible features (houses) have been built
at that location.

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Re: [OSM-talk] old_name

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 08/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Am 08.09.2015 um 17:58 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo <molto...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> It would
>> be a silly thing to do, as these names definitely are not a current
>> property of Dublin.
>
> I would bet most of them can still be found in today's city, e.g. in pub
> names or other business names.

Probably. Didn't find one in OSM data, but the same exercise with
"Lutèce" yields a lot of results in Paris. So what ? The name is a
current property of those businesses, not of the city the businesses
are in.

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Re: [OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 08/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
>> Am 08.09.2015 um 13:58 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny :
>>
>> Historical data should not be added and if present - removed.
>
> what do you mean with "historical data", where do you draw the line? What
> about the old_name tags, do you advocate to remove them?

IMHO old_name is fine because it can actually describe the present. As
long as a place is still called or remembered by its old_name by some
living people, that name is a currently-existing property of the
place.

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Re: [OSM-talk] old_name

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 08/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
>> Am 08.09.2015 um 14:46 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny :
>> But I would not add old_name that is currently completely unused.
>
> there's one area where old names will be used for sure: old documents,
> books, film, signs, ...
>
> There is no such thing like a currently  completely unused old name,
> otherwise it wouldn't be an old name.
> Or maybe I don't understand "currently". Everything I may encounter now?

If you go that route, there's no limit to how far back an old name can
go. That'd mean that we should add, for example, all of [Dublin's old
names][1] to the osm object, since they are well documented. It would
be a silly thing to do, as these names definitely are not a current
property of Dublin.

IMHO the cuting point should be that the name is used by a living
person, with "used" defined as "when he thinks (out of some document
context) about that place, he (at least sometimes) thinks of it using
that name". It sounds really convoluted when you try a formal
definition, but I hope the ide is clear ? If some joking friend offers
to meet me in "Lutèce" I'll know in which city to go, but I certainly
don't expect OSM to know.


[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin#Toponymy

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Re: [OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 07/09/2015, Nicolás Alvarez  wrote:
> 2015-09-07 13:36 GMT-03:00 Maarten Deen :
>> On 2015-09-07 17:31, Russ Nelson wrote:
>>>
>>> https://www.facebook.com/groups/abandonedrails/permalink/1044885352211646/
>>
>>
>> It's on facebook and I have to log in to see it. I don't have a facebook
>> account, so could someone post here whay it says?
>
> "Added a Google Earth map of New York Central RR this morning. It
> includes construction history of each line based on ICC valuation info
> if you click the line. It includes abandoned routes, so it may be
> helpful in exploring those. I still have to add trackage rights in
> places. You must have the Google Earth program downloaded on your
> computer for it to open."
>
> And a link to a .kmz file for Google Earth.

I don't have Facebook either to check, but AFAIU this person has just
created his own data layer )in kmz format) separate from Google's main
map data (even if hosted on the same platform) ?

If that's it, it's something for which OSM is already well suited for
(uMap being the most directly-comparable tool) and I don't see why
that person would not feel comfortable in OSM (plus the usual benefits
of contributing to OSM rather than GM). And the fact that he's not
entering that data in GM proper IMHO an argument *against*
railway=dismantled in OSM (but a very weak argument to be sure).

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Re: [OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 07/09/2015, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> We need an authoritative statement that says that deleting abandoned
> railroads is vandalism, and that people who do so in spite of being
> warned not to, will be banned from the project.

Please stop the name-calling. Two contributors disagreeing on what
should be mapped doesn't make one of them a vandal because he acts
uppon his opinion, whichever side of the fence he sits on. Vandalism
implies a purposeful deterioration of the map. But everybody who took
part in this railway debate actually wants to improve the map.

> Until I get that, I
> cannot in good conscience encourage any railfan to map railroads,
> because of the threat from vandals to delete their edits.

You're making this an all or nothing decision, but it isn't. I'm
convinced that most railway enthusiasts would be happy to add the
still-existing parts of railways into OSM, and use a different DB for
sections not suitable for the main map and extra info (like Tony Howe
seems to do).

> I could go through the discussion over the last month and identify a
> grand total of five people who reject mapping abandoned railroads.

And I could go back and find even fewer people who embrace mapping
dismantled railways (please note the abandoned/dismantled
distinction), and a lot of people who sit somewhere in-between. I'm
sure we're both biased, and anyway respondants on the mailing list are
not a democratic sample anyway.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Lester Caine <les...@lsces.co.uk> wrote:
> On 02/09/15 11:30, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
>> you know of any osm data which records property ?
>
> So I should remove all the detail on
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=wr12%207ep#map=17/52.04851/-1.85665
> rather than adding the missing detail to the right?

Sorry, I see residential areas, hedges, postcodes, etc, overall a well
maped area with usefull detail, but nothing mapping land property ? I
never suggested that this kind of data was out of scope for OSM,
please go ahead and map more of it. When I mentioned "land property"
I'm talking about legal ownership, parcels, cadastre, etc.

> And the 'Abandoned Railway' to the left is a protected route which HAS
> encroachments onto it, but which is still potentially re-enstatable once
> the line to Broadway becomes active again. Using the ground for a long
> period does not always allow to take possession of it and rail routes
> are one of those documented exceptions.

Sure. It looks well mapped to me. Again, I don't see how your answer
relates to the subject of mapping land ownership, there's no ownership
mapped on these osm objects.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale  wrote:
> Are you suggesting that parcel boundaries have no place in OSM, or that
> only verifiable sources should be used? Suppose there was a suitably
> licensed source of such boundaries, with authoritative provenance. Would
> you be against this being in OSM on principle? Or is it only your
> supposition that such information cannot be sufficiently verifiable
> which gives rise to your concern?
>
> Anyway, fences, signs etc are not reliable indicators of parcel
> boundaries (where there are land registries), unless the boundary is
> legally described with reference to these physical artefacts.

I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
you know of any osm data which records property ?

IMHO verifyability is a major issue here. Real-world barriers don't
match the legal ones, borders change regularly (that's a major
difference with admin boundaries), and even the authoritative source
is often murky (I'm now 3-4 months into the process of figuring out
wether I own a piece of land at the back of my garden).

On top of that, whenever you need to know about land ownership, you
are legally obliged to refer to the authoritative source. Looking up
the info in a crowdsourced db, even if it was completely correct,
would most often be a waste of time.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> Too bad for that guy that he didn't check OpenStreetMap first, because
> there was an abandoned railroad mapped in his back yard.

Lots of former railway land is now privately owned, sometimes even
before the rails get removed. So the fact that there was an abandoned
(dismantled ?) railroad in his backyard didn't, on its own, mean that
he didn't own the place.

In many countries (not sure about the USA), there's also a legal
concept of "if you build on a piece of land and nobody complains for X
years (with X being quite high), then that piece of land defacto
belongs to you". This leads to people sometimes building on land with
a unclear ownership status, chancing it and hoping for the best.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Lester Caine <les...@lsces.co.uk> wrote:
> On 02/09/15 12:56, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> Sorry, I see residential areas, hedges, postcodes, etc, overall a well
>> maped area with usefull detail, but nothing mapping land property ? I
>> never suggested that this kind of data was out of scope for OSM,
>> please go ahead and map more of it. When I mentioned "land property"
>> I'm talking about legal ownership, parcels, cadastre, etc.
>
> The boundaries mapped are property boundaries as are the field
> boundaries around them.

When I think of mapping properties I expect a multipolygon, hopefully
following many physical objects such as hedges and fences, is that
what you have in mind ?

> Ideally I would like to add the NLPG reference
> to each but currently that is blocked by possible licensing problems. It
> WOULD be nice to complete the 'hidden' data

Assuming the license issue gets resolved, how will you import it,
conflate with existing data, tag ? How will you keep it up to date
when a field or a chunk of garden changes hand between neighbours ?
Who do you expect will make use of the data ?

I'm not saying that this data doesn't belong in OSM as much as I am
saying "I won't touch that kind of data with a 10 foot pole, it's too
hard to import/maintain, it's a huge amount of data (bloat) that will
complicate editing, and anyway it won't be usable for most usecases".
Go ahead and map the fences and anything else that gives a visual clue
as to where the property ends. But the actual legal property data ?
It's not worth it.

> in much the same way the
> postcode is added here so that searches can be done properly. Just
> because a post has not been put in the ground to identify a location,
> the location still exists if properly documented.

Postcodes, like all address components, are always welcome in OSM even
though they are not always phisically visible. Addresses are a major
OSM usecase. A postcode has a much lower granularity than a parcel. It
doesn't have to be exact and authoritative, it only has to lead to the
correct location.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, p...@trigpoint.me.uk  wrote:
> We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
> massive privacy and data protection issues.

In many countries, the geometry of land parcels is public data. Not
"this bit of land is owned by Phil Trigpoint" nor "this and that
parcel are owned by the same guy" but just how the land is
geographically divided.

I'm not saying that property data should go into OSM (:p), just that
it's probably not the privacy issue you think it is.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale  wrote:
> I see two separate issues getting mixed up: firstly, what types of data
> "belong" in OSM as a matter of principle, and secondly what quality
> criteria would apply. Clearly for the second point the data needs to be
> suitably licensed (if it is externally sourced) and it needs to be
> verifiable so "Joe Public" without any form of privileged access can
> verify its correctness. These are clearly principles which have existed
> in OSM for a long time. But a statement that certain whole categories of
> data do not belong in OSM *because* it sometimes might not be easily
> verifiable, is going a bit far.

Saying that land property has no place in OSM is just a conclusion
that comes from the observation that this kind of data generally poses
big chalenges to verifyability and corrrectness, and that its
usefullness in osm is limited because ownership is one thing where you
have no choice to use the official authoritative source.

If there's somewhere in the world where those concerns are not valid,
then go on and map properrty data there. Again, do you know of any
property data in osm ? What's the tagging schema ?

The principle of "what data belongs in OSM" is about the propeties of
that data, not what kind of data it is. But as it happens, a given
kind of data usually has the same properties, so "this kind of data
doesn't belong in OSM" is a usefull simplification.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 31/08/2015, Christoph Hormann  wrote:
> I would be careful here - 'dirt' is essentially a very vague term which
> probably originates from the concept of 'dirt roads' here.  'Soil' in
> the other hand is fairly precise, see
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil
>
> Only parts of the earth surface are actually covered by soil so if a way
> is correctly tagged with surface=soil (and i don't know if that is the
> case for the 400 cases you mention) this is something specific and
> potentially useful and should not be degraded by turning it into
> something as vague as surface=dirt.
>
> In general i think surface=ground is the most sensible tag for tagging
> ways that are just established somewhere without notible construction
> work when you can't be more specific - it implies that the way surface
> is essentially the ground there in its natural state.  surface=dirt
> OTOH can mean anything from the remaining tracks of a car driving
> across a wayless area to a solidly built gravel road.

Agreed.

Between soil, dirt, ground, earth, and mud, dirt is the worst defined
of the lot, and I would hesitate to use it for anything.

If you do want to consolidate tags, "earth" is a much better synonym
of "soil" and you should probably use that instead.

"Ground" is earth+rocks+sometimes_vegetation. "mud" is earth with a
lot of water and clay.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Carto v2.34.0 release

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 30/08/2015, Dave F. dave...@madasafish.com wrote:
 Is man_made=bridge meant to be used on ways that represent disused
 bridges such as railways where all the track has been removed?

Meant to be used on any bridge. It gives the shape of a bridge, as
opposed to the highway(s) that it supports. There's also a type=bridge
relation to help with complicated multi-highway cases. Rendering
bridges even if the corresponding highway isn't rendered (such as
railway=abandoned) is one reason to render man_man=bridge, but
depending on who you ask it may not be the main reason.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

Sorry in advance, this mail just rehases arguments that I made before,
but it seemed polite to reply.


On 29/08/2015, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 moltonel 3x Combo writes:
   One can often assert that something was here even when nothing is left
   of that thing. And is nothing is left of that thing, it shouldn't be
   mapped.

 What about point A?  What about point B? The *endpoints* do indeed
 continue to exist, so nothing is left of that thing is not true
 about most dismantled railways.

That's precisely it, point A and B continue to exist, they can be
mapped as abandoned/disused. What's between A and B did not continue
to exist, and should not be mapped. We know perfectly where New York's
World Trade Center used to be but there's no tower=dismantled at that
location.

 Should the map look like this (A)?  ___   __ 

 Or should it look like this (B)?___---__-

 Some people are arguing for A. I argue that B is a better
 representation of what is there (the underscores) because it includes
 the dismantled portions (the dashes).

And unsurprisingly, I argue for A. Because it reflects the current
state of the railroad.

I do understant the appeal of being able to create a relation where
each member follow the previous one without holes. But if reality has
holes, so should the relation.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 27/08/2015, Andy Townsend ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:
 Back in
 https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-August/073669.html I
 had a look at what caused the current flurry of discussion.   Part of
 the line in question was deleted by a mapper new to OSM; it was their
 second and last OSM edit.  I find it hard to believe that this new OSM
 mapper had a thing about deleting abandoned railways. Likely they just
 didn't understand something, were confused, and it somehow got deleted.

Good catch, sorry I forgot about it. I agree that
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/259134943 should not have been
deleted, and that it certainly was just a mishap that the contributor
didn't even notice. So restore the way, send a watch out message to
the newbie, and call it a day (well, do also improve the tagging of
that abandoned railway : some sections are dismantled and some have
been converted to various types of highway, etc).

But I doubt that Russ would have had such a strong reaction if it was
just for that case. I'm sure there were other willfull deletions, and
lacks of communication.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 27/08/2015, Paul Johnson ba...@ursamundi.org wrote:
  I believe we're talking about abandoned railroad rights of way that still
 mark the landscape, not something that no longer has a trace.

No :

Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com wrote Thu Aug 20 05:12:49 UTC 2015
 Here's a perfect example of how a railway should be mapped:
 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.92237423246795/-75.8534094581493

There is no real-life trace left of
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (amongst others) but it is
currently in OSM.

At we're not least not exclusively about still-visible abandoned; the
OP hasn't given a list of guilty deletions so it's hard to judge how
justified each deletion was.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Preserving History ...

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 25/08/2015, Blake Girardot bgirar...@gmail.com wrote:
 But in general if you want to map from scratch, make a new layer, map,
 merge layers, replace geometry, done, history retained and you mapped
 from scratch.

I wonder if JOSM could do that automatically. Before uploading, JOSM
would look at all objects deleted during this editing session,
fuzzy-match new objects at the same location and tags, and perform the
replace-geometry tag automatically.

 Same thing with roads that need updating, you just remap it and then
 replace geometry or use the improve way tool, either one will preserve
 history.

Another tip for preserving history in JOSM: if you split a way in two,
the start of the way is the one that retains history and the end of
the way (where the arrow is) is new. Reversing the way before spliting
it can help keep the history on the important section.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 25/08/2015, Blake Girardot bgirar...@gmail.com wrote:
 I am not a railway enthusiast, but I do recognize the important role
 they play in the development and landscape of the US and probably other
 countries.

 I really appreciate those who map in-use, disused and abandoned
 railways, thank you for adding important, rich and useful data to the map.

 I think part of this conversation should be reprized: Abandoned railways
 are recognizable by people who know what they are looking at, they are
 in essence there on the ground currently, just because I don't have
 the knowledge to recognize and map them, does not mean they do not exist.

For the record again, lest people think that my views are more extreme
than they are, I agree with the above.

Where I draw the line is against railway=dismantled, which by
definition don't exist anymore. Typical examples are going thru a
housing estate, a demolished (and rubble cleared) bridge, or a field
where the former railway isn't even visible in crop groth differences.
When the state goes from not obviously there to obviously not
there.

 All I understood Russ to be asking was to stop deleting and suggesting
 deletion of abandoned railways without checking with the person or
 people who know what they are doing in regards to mapping them and I
 agree that should stop.

Heavy changes to someone else's work should come with a message to
that someone else, but I'd argue that whoever deleted a railway=*
going thru a housing estate knew what they were doing.

 As mentioned above, I see no harm to mapping an abandoned railway, even
 if it is based on two end points and knowledge of the railway system.

One can often assert that something was here even when nothing is left
of that thing. And is nothing is left of that thing, it shouldn't be
mapped.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 24/08/2015, Richard Fairhurst rich...@systemed.net wrote:
 cycle.travel's rendering is 1300 lines of CartoCSS, 1400 of .mml, 300 lines
 of Lua preprocessing, and 350 lines of Ruby/PostGIS postprocessing.

 Of this, the code required to show only operational railways is 100
 characters - a rounding error. It's a detail in a 1400-character line of
 .mml and it was copied directly from OSM-Bright, the base style used by
 switch2osm. In other words, anyone setting up an OSM tileserver from the
 canonical instructions already gets this for free.

Fair enough, it's easy to get a bootstrap (for the record, I was
talking about knowledge, not lines of code). The bootstrap might not
have been used or might not be available for a particular usecase, but
I get your point. Sorry for placing the principle of least surprise
bar too high.

 There are plenty of issues with OSM railway tagging that make decent
 rendering, routing and analysis hard. (railway=station covering both
 mainline stations and preserved heritage attractions is the first that
 springs to mind.) railway=dismantled is not one of them.

 As to whether utterly dismantled railways belong in the OSM database, I
 couldn't really care less. In terms of doctrine, they probably don't, though
 let's not overstate the issue: I suspect more bytes have been spilled in
 this thread than it would take to encode a dump of current
 railway=dismantled in .pbf format.

I'm aware of that (and skewing the ratio even further as I write
this), but this is about more than just railways. Sorry for the
fearmongering, but letting one kind of nonexistent objects into OSM
opens the door to more. Countering with existing crap in the db
doesn't justify adding more crap hasn't worked well in the past.

To be honest, I too could live with a few railway=dismantled in the
db. The bigger issues are the idea of allowing some data in even when
you agree it shouldn't be there, protecting that data for political
rather than technical reasons, and the precedent this would set.

 But Gregory, Greg and Jason have it
 right. This is not about some precious notion of purity, it's about
 community.

 Outside the two fundamentals of openly licensed and crowdsourced, OSM is
 characterised by its pragmatism. We do what works. What works is a community
 of people who feel respected and empowered.

By preventing contributors to fix errors in the db (as miscommunicated
as they were, I'm sure  the deletions that started this thread were
meant as fixes) just because they come from some kind of Most Valued
Contributor, you're disempowering the community as a whole to empower
a fraction of it. I'm not going to pull statistics out of my magick
hat, but to me this looks like a net long-term loss.

 And bearing in mind that we're
 talking about the US here, we need all the community we can get.

 Read Minh Nguyen's excellent new diary post
 (http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Minh%20Nguyen/diary/35646). Even in the
 super-affluent, super-educated Bay Area, OSM is barely at the stage that
 Europe reached five or more years ago. It is an endless parade of outdated
 street configurations, missing landmarks, test edits.

 But, he notes, there is plenty of rail and bike infrastructure.

 This is what characterised OSM adoption here in Britain. The enthusiasts are
 the first to get it: the railfans, the cyclists. Widespread take-up comes
 later, once the enthusiasts have built something good.

 The last thing we want to do in the US is drive away the few enthusiasts we
 currently have.

I know :( I'd hate to see someone leave because of that discussion.

I'd love to see improvements in the OSM tooling and/or schemas so that
we can properly map historical features. So that dismantled railways
(amongst other no-longer-existing features) can be mapped without
hurting present-day mapping, which was initially OSM's only usecase.
So that entering that kind of data isn't a deletion-worthy error
anymore, but a normal usecase.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 24/08/2015, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc wrote:
 buildings are usually
 replaced much faster than maps are expected to last, and the work of
 updating it twice, once for the empty space, dem. building and the
 future new building outline is better done only one time.

It's nice to avoid unecessary version churn, but if a mapper keeps up
with the real-world changes there's nothing wrong with updating OSM
too. If you search the archives you'll find plenty of discussions on
mapping temporary features and how ephemeral a feature needs to be
before it loses its mapworthyness. For example a road closed during a
weekend is a clear no-map, but construction work is usually considered
mappable if it'll last a few months and there is a local mapper to
keep track of the updates.

how long a map is expected to last is a tricky question especially
for OSM. Paper maps are often updated yearly but kept for decades in
people's homes. Google Map has TOS that mostly forbid cacheing data
yourself for later. Data on osm.org is updated minutely, but the osm
data on a satnav may never get an update at all.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/08/2015, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc wrote:
 I don't think so. Wrong data happens to Bing Maps, to Google Maps and
 probably to any other map we can obtain, electronically or in a paper.
 Maps have dates attached to them - or should have, most of the time. The
 fact is that: if I browse around my city, looking for streets and
 brindges created in the last fews years, I will see mistakes (as I did
 before).

Yes, all maps have errors, wether it is outdated data, data that was
never right, or missing data.

 But it's better to have there what existed, as it was before,
 than have just an emptyness in the area.

How so ? Say I'm walking along an old railroad which OSM led me to
believe continued for 10km, but is impassable at various points
including a wheat field and a housing estate. Or I'm heading to the
convenience store only to find it has closed years ago. Outdated data
is wrong data, it is misleading and lowers the overall quality of the
map.

 Until someone fix it
 (hopefully) or at least mark it as old, potentially wrong (without
 deleting until an update is made!).

That's just the normal mapping workflow, nobody is arguing against
this. Nobody is proposing to delete first, improve later. We make
the best map we can, within the bounds of our knowledge and time
constraints.

 In the context being discussed here, recent changes should also cause
 data deletion, but that's wrong, in my opinion. Data may be *replaced*
 with newer data, with everything that's needed.

Same thing here, we improve the map as much as we can. But maybe you
don't have enough time right now to map everything, or meadows are so
far off in your todo list that you never bother with them. But leaving
known-outdated data in place just because you can't yet make a fully
detailed mapping of the area doen't make sense either.

 If people are doing something that is fiercely against the community
 idea of OpenStreetMap, that it could be deleted. But that really seem
 far from the truth.

There are very few rules in OSM, but one of them is that we map on the
ground and that we don't map historical features/events
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Map_what.27s_on_the_ground
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don.27t_map_historic_events_and_historic_features

Ways like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (and presumably
many other railway=dismantled) fail these checks.

 So that should be preserved, and its deletion, if
 decided to be made, should give a reasonable opportunity for the data
 contributors to backup that data - so their work is not lost, but may be
 used somewhere else.

Yes, giving a heads-up to a mapper when you edit a lot of his work is
good etiquette. As for backup, the data is versioned in the db, you
can always get the old data back.

 Further, I'm not one of the users that would be confused with that. I
 would find it unsual to see in a map. But being tagged and noted
 somehow, should not be a problem at all. And to say the users who would
 be confused with it are the majority of them, is an vague argument you
 do just to give some apparent strength to your idea. And I repeat: I
 would not be confused with it, I don't think the majority of users would
 be.

Since OSM has always had a policy of containing only current data, it
stands to reason that the majority of users only expect to find
current data in OSM (or rather that anything that isn't current
anymore needs to be fixed, and that it was current when it was added
to osm).

Wether you get confused when stumbling uppon data which violates that
rule depends on what you're doing with the data. Remember that
interpreting osm data is actually a lot of work. Very few people have
the manpower to verify what railroad=dismantled actually mean to
decide wheter they want to use or filter out that data. Most of them
will just match railway=*, plus perhaps some special cases for
railway=rail and railway=subway. Now they're looking at historical
data without even knowing it. They are confused.

 P. S.: this mailing list does not add a Reply-to header to mail
 messages, as I'm used to. So I initially sent the answer to just one
 person. This should be changed - may it not confuse the majority of
 users!?

It normally does, not sure what happened here.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/08/2015, Mike N nice...@att.net wrote:
 On 8/23/2015 2:03 PM, Dave F. wrote:
 Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
 you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?

 In my case, I've begun to do just that, adding a note to alert the 'Bing
 tracers' that something has changed.  But I would eventually remove it
 after Bing is updated.   Only historic or notable buildings would go
 into OHM.

That's actually something I do as well:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2554879309 but I only add a note=*
node, I certainly don't keep any building=* closed way.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/08/2015, mick bare...@tpg.com.au wrote:
 On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 00:09:43 +0100
 moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com wrote:
 Do people actually do this ? It sounds like a strawman argument to me.
 I do a fair bit of walking and cycling, and when planing a trip I look
 at the global topographic data but it never occured to me to look for
 railroads. Why use the local railroad hint when you've got the global
 DEM data ?

 How fine is the granularity of the DEM data?

Between 30 and 90m depending on location, when you look at the most
common publicly-available data. Most of the world is at 30m now, and
most of the really bad artefacts have been fixed.

30m is plenty of granularity when you're planning a walk or a cycle.
It can miss a cutting or an embankment, but those areas are normaly
flat enough to begin with that you wouldn't have been put off by the
DEM data alone. I'm sure there are extreme cases where this isn't
true, but you still want to mainly look at DEM most of the time.

Tags that I actually look at when choosing an osm path/footway/track
is surface, tracktype, and sac_scale.

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Mission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Spaceborne_Thermal_Emission_and_Reflection_Radiometer

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 22/08/2015, John Eldredge j...@jfeldredge.com wrote:
 So, if you are looking for a route without steep grades, a former
 railway is a natural choice.

Do people actually do this ? It sounds like a strawman argument to me.
I do a fair bit of walking and cycling, and when planing a trip I look
at the global topographic data but it never occured to me to look for
railroads. Why use the local railroad hint when you've got the global
DEM data ?

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 21/08/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 Am 20.08.2015 um 14:59 schrieb Pieren pier...@gmail.com:

 where is the railway here ? were are the rails ?

 there aren't any rails, but there is a railbed, this cutting wouldn't make
 sense for a cycleway, would it? (inappropriate effort)

IMHO (and I've been arguing against mapping railway=abandoned in many
cases), I think that in this case tagging railway=abandoned (along
with highway=cycleway and cutting=yes) is acceptable, meaning that I
don't think the tag should be deleted, but I wouldn't add it myself.

For: even an on the ground unmoving observer would easily figure out
that this was a railway.

Against: it is neither a railway nor abandoned, it is a cycleway, the
characteristics of which can be fully described without refering to
its railway origin. There has to be a point in a way's physical
evolution when we can stop tagging railway=abandoned, where do you
draw the line ? The it was a railway fact can if desired be kept in
a relation with start/end tags (a rare case where these can work).

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 20/08/2015, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 moltonel 3x Combo writes:
   But it's equally annoying and tiring to repeatedly encounter the
   ludicrous kind of railway=abandoned,

 Then tag it as railway=dismantled. You won't find me defending
 incorrect tagging of anything.

If 'dismantled' is meant to be used for cases like going thru
buildings in a housing estate then no, this data just doesn't belong
in OSM.

 moltonel 3x Combo writes:
   To me the distinguishing criteria between disused and abandoned is
   wether the rails are still present or not.

 Indeed. disused means the rails are still there. Abandoned means that
 the rails are gone. Dismantled (or some people use razed) is when a
 section of the railbad cannot be seen. Railways that were never there,
 placed by mistake, should be deleted.

The wiki only describes abandoned and disused. Some people have
mentioned cases where the rails are still there but trees are growing
in the middle so it really should be 'abandoned' and/or there should
be a value between 'abandoned' and 'disused'. From what you said
earlyer, maybe 'dismantled' is the new 'abandoned' and 'abandoned'
sits somewhere between 'dismantled' and 'disused' ? Maybe you could
give the wiki some TLC.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 20/08/2015, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 moltonel 3x Combo writes:
   The demolished: prefix only makes sense when there is something left
   of the former feature, typically rubble (useful for example to alert
   boattripers of the hazard). When there is nothing left in reality,
   there should be nothing left in OSM.

 Question: should we tag the aqueduct underneath Sunrise Highway
 between Aqueduct Raceway and Freeport, NY?

I'm not at all familliar with that area, please provide some links.

   Deleting an object is hardly different from editing it as far as
   osm history is concerned.

 Except that deletion excises it from the database that you see when
 make an API call.

So does editing. When you change the geometry or tags of an object,
the old versions are not downloaded/displayed by you editor unless you
take special action. I know that outside of Potlach1 that special
action is a bit more complicated, but that is just an API issue that
will hopefully get fixed someday.

 In the case of dismantled railways, that is not
 accurate. There *is* a dismantled railway there, and you can tell
 because the railway was at point A and at point B, and you can still
 see it there, and so you should expect to see it in-between.

The argument (which is not making any progress so this might be my
last comment on it) is between *is* and *was*, and where to draw the
line. If there *is* an abandoned railway it can be mapped. If there
*was* a railway it cannot be mapped. abandoned isn't a synonym of
was.

See for example http://osm.org/go/esz3FWUuB- (toggle satellite
imagery). There *is* an abandoned railway south of the river, there
*was* a railway north of it. The fact that you can infer that the
railway was indeed there because it's clearly visible again at
http://osm.org/go/esz18LcmF- (and visible all the way in the GSGS 3906
imagery) doesn't matter.

We've discussed a few criterias to distinguish between *is* and *was*
on this thread, but you've dismissed even the most basic A building
has not been constructed at that location one.

On the subject of is/was criterias, I'd like to weight against the
less basic railway grade slope one. Firstly because railways usually
followed existing flat grades instead of following them, secondly
because in other cases the cuttings and embankments should be mapped
for themselves rather than implied by a railway=abandoned. There might
be some cases where that argument still makes sense (montainside
railways come to mind), but it needs to be evaluated case by case
IMHO.

 I understand that most people don't give a crap about map feature X,
 Y, and Z. I get it, really I do. I look at things in OSM myself and
 wonder why the hell did you map that?? Who cares?? And when it comes
 to railways, there's a lot of people who don't give a crap. Fine. Go
 ahead. Don't care. But I do. So don't delete the things that I (and
 other railfans) have added.

For the last time, this isn't about esoteric mapping topics (abandoned
railways is actually quite popular in OSM), but about reconising then
something just doesn't exist anymore and (in another part of this
thread) about wether mapping the past is acceptable in OSM at all.

 From whence comes this impulse to destroy other people's work? Cuz it
 seems pretty anti-community, anti-mapper, and anti-OSM.

Quality assurance. We all want the map to be as correct as possible,
and that sometimes require deleting data. The only anti-* case is when
the decision to modify/delete is controversial but not discussed.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 19/08/2015, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote:
 98% of the history that we are looking to manage properly is currently
 existing in OSM. All that is needed is to add start dates to the bulk of
 the existing data.

What do you do when a road gets upgraded, widened, straightened,
renamed, or some combination thereof at various points in time ?
start/end_date tags are way too crude, they can't capture any
evolution (as opposed to construction/demolition) of the real world,
making their use very limited.

 The SMALL amount of material that
 is a result of new development work invariably maps into currently
 existing objects.

That's just not true, by definition new developments are new objects
(and often a lot of old objects relegated to the past). And the amount
of evolution in the real world is by no mean small.

 Insisting that this data is only available for
 rendering purposes in a second database is just wrong, and even worse,
 the 98% of the supporting data exists in OSM so why maintain a second
 copy of it.

I would actually love to be able to map the past in OSM. But if all
you have to offer me is start/end tags and some renderer/editor
workarounds, I'll say no thanks.

To me OHM's value is not so much in its data as in being a sandbox to
experiment with tooling to map the past, which can eventually be
merged back into OSM. I suppose the OSM data model itself has to be
modified to support a nonlinear history, but this is tricky.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 20/08/2015, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 moltonel writes:
 When they show up, we can have a discussion. In the meantime, I'm
 here, and many other mappers map abandoned and dismantled railways,
 and we would like to NOT HAVE YOU FRICK WITH OUR STUFF.

Please don't shout and curse, it just kills the debate. Your defense
of railway=* mapped thru buildings of a housing estate is something
that I (and AFAICT most of the community) cannot agree with, so that
topic has reached a dead-end and I'll stop discussing it.

Hopefully someday we'll get a proper way to map in the 4th dimention
in OSM (hint: OHM is not good enough yet). In the meantime, if I
happen to be mapping somewhere and see an abandoned/dismantled railway
going thru houses like in your perfect example of how a railway
should be mapped, I'll delete it.



Regards.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 18/08/2015, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 Serge Wroclawski writes:
   TIGER wasn't what I was referring to.
  
   Please don't speak on my behalf.

 Very well. Feel free to point to anything anywhere that people are
 afraid to delete. I want to see 1) something that obviously doesn't
 belong there, 2) which isn't TIGER and 3) evidence that someone
 expressed a reluctance to delete it.

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-August/073819.html

Didn't have to look far. But really this is a commonplace occurence.
Most of the OSM world isn't TIGER, and doubting one's edits (including
but not limited to deletions) is a healthy quality-assurance reflex.


 Is it unreasonable of me to ask for evidence of a claim that you have
 made? I mean, besides TIGER, which is a perfectly reasonable
 assumption for an ambiguous claim.

If I'm following things right, the claim was :

 in other parts, we have an abundance of bad imports, and a general
 timidness around the removal of data that we can't find the owner of, which
 leaves us with data that *we know is bad*, but where the individual mappers
 do not feel empowered to act on because of this exact attitude of needing
 to contact and work with the importer.

 This leaves our project with a problem of lots of data and no one feeling
 empowered to remove it.

I'm sure nobody will disagree that we have a lot of bad data (in
absolute numbers, not in percentage :p), and it's silly to think that
TIGER is the only source of it, or even that all TIGER data is bad.

In that context, arguing that deletions are intrinsincly a bad thing
does harm OSM's QA process. Clearly we should think twice before
deleting something and don't want to reach an extreme of if in doubt,
delete, but what you've proposed is the opposite extreme and is just
as unhealthy.

For what it's worth, the only place I've felt disempowered in OSM
(appart from the lack of free time) is the very high bar set for
automated edits. Wether that disempowerment has resulted in a net
positive or negative for OSM is left as an exercise to the reader.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 18/08/2015, Warin 61sundow...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 17/08/2015 10:48 PM, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
 On 17/08/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 Am 17.08.2015 um 02:39 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com:

 * A broken bridge with just a few meters left on both riverbanks
 I surely wouldn't have removed this one. Isn't this a significant feature
 to
 many people?
 In only deleted the middle bit, not the bridge=yes stumps. At least
 that's what I remember; I couldn't find it again in
 https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/16286467. Maybe it was a
 different railway line.

 Retag the middle bit demolished:bridge=yes would be a better solution?
 Retains all the data. If the bridge were rebuilt then it could simply be
 retagged back.


 On the other hand, there's an instance of a bridge that is the only
 thing left standing (green undisturbed meadows on both sides), and
 that bridge is kept in OSM (while the sections in the meadow were
 not).

 Then retag the ways leading to the bridge using the prefix demolished:

The demolished: prefix only makes sense when there is something left
of the former feature, typically rubble (useful for example to alert
boattripers of the hazard). When there is nothing left in reality,
there should be nothing left in OSM.

Even when we expect the feature to be rebuilt someday (not the case
for this bridge), there's no advantage in keeping the OSM object
around just to simplify restoring it: creating a new osm way is just
as easy as retagging an old one.

Saying that we should retag no-longer-existing objects rather than
deleting them is like saying that we should always use strike-through
in a text document rather than using document history, or that we
should always comment lines in a program rather than using source code
management like git.

Remember that deleted osm objects *are* kept in the osm history and
can even be undeleted (finding the old object id is currently a pain,
but I certainly hope that this'll become easyer someday). Deleting an
object is hardly different from editing it as far as osm history is
concerned. Russ singled out actual deletion as something specific, but
disagreement on if/how to map something happen all the time in OSM
(thankfully rarely with that level of drama), not just when deletion
is involved.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 18/08/2015, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote:
 On 18/08/15 13:04, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
 Remember that deleted osm objects *are* kept in the osm history and
 can even be undeleted (finding the old object id is currently a pain,
 but I certainly hope that this'll become easyer someday). Deleting an
 object is hardly different from editing it as far as osm history is
 concerned. Russ singled out actual deletion as something specific, but
 disagreement on if/how to map something happen all the time in OSM
 (thankfully rarely with that level of drama), not just when deletion
 is involved.

 On OHM these objects need to co-exist ... if OSM is going to create yet
 another version of the historic object if recovering from the change log
 we are going to get into even more of a mess. This is why 'delete' *IS*
 the wrong concept for objects that CAN be authenticated historically.
 The whole problem here is that objects like railways are going to evolve
 over time, and while some elements may no longer be visible, maintaining
 the sequence IS important even if some people think that there is no
 place for that information is OSM.

Are you implying that OSM should do what it can to be easily merged in
OHM ? Currently OHM is a completely different db, with its own object
ids. There's no link between OSM ids and OHM ids to keep track of. The
OSM data model would make that tracking very difficult (way
splits/joins, etc) but maybe it could work. More pragmatically, OHM
could have OSM data as an ever-evolving present day data layer, with
its own ids.

Or are you saying that OSM should take on OHM techniques (and thereby
become OHM) ? With OSM's data model, if you want to keep track of both
today's world and yesterday's, you're going to need to track two sets
of objects, not just two versions of the same object (because of
splits and such). Tracking this using tags is horribly messy at scale.
A better solution would require some data model changes and editor
support, but OHM currently has neither. So we currently say no
thanks to historical data in OSM.

In OSM's data model, deletion is not different from modification. If
your historical project can't deal with that, you need to get back to
the drawing board.


 I repeat what I have said many times before ... we are documenting that
 very history today, ad while the information is available from the
 change log, it ALSO needs to be directly accessible from the OHM view so
 why not simply maintain that information in a format that the CURRENT
 rendering tools can show and the current editing tolls can improve on.
 The change log is simply the wrong place for this data to exist in ...

Be carefull not to mix up database history and real-world history.
Database history keeps track of the mapping process, as geometry gets
refined, details get added, and blunders get reverted. World history
tracks what the world was like at a specific point in time. OHM has to
keep track of both, but OSM is (at least for now) only concerned about
db history.

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Re: [OSM-talk] landcover=trees [was Re: OpenStreetMap Carto v2.33.0 release]

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/08/2015, Mateusz Konieczny matkoni...@gmail.com wrote:
 2015-08-16 15:27 GMT+02:00 Greg Troxel g...@ir.bbn.com:

 landuse=forest does not imply the area is completely tree covered.

 Note that in typical usage it means exactly this. Maybe original intention
 was for that tag was to mean something else - but it is not changing how
 it is used by most mappers.

If only there was a good way to assert typical usage, we might have
managed to standardise on it and solve the problem by now.

The landuse=forest definition of area where trees are grown for
commercial purposes, expected to be covered by trees by default but
often also natural=scrub for about a decade after logging is fairly
typical too. FWIW, that's the definition I've been using in my
mapping, as all the others (managed, named, size, etc) seemed very
impractical.

If everyone adhered to my POV we wouldn't have a problem (sarcasm).
But I've given up hope of that happening, so the next best thing IMHO
is the landcover=trees reboot, which isn't perfect but which we can
hopefully agree on.


On 16/08/2015, Greg Troxel g...@ir.bbn.com wrote:
 One could argue that natural=trees is a synonym for landcover=trees.

That'd work for me as well, it actually sounds much better. But
pragmatically I prefer to follow the more popular tag, unless I see
some strong consensus for natural=trees elsewhere.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 17/08/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 Am 17.08.2015 um 02:39 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com:

 * A broken bridge with just a few meters left on both riverbanks

 I surely wouldn't have removed this one. Isn't this a significant feature to
 many people?

In only deleted the middle bit, not the bridge=yes stumps. At least
that's what I remember; I couldn't find it again in
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/16286467. Maybe it was a
different railway line.

On the other hand, there's an instance of a bridge that is the only
thing left standing (green undisturbed meadows on both sides), and
that bridge is kept in OSM (while the sections in the meadow were
not).

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Re: [OSM-talk] landcover=trees [was Re: OpenStreetMap Carto v2.33.0 release]

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/08/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 which landuse is good for an area where trees have just been logged and
 will soon be planted again?

landuse=forest, which I've always reasoned of as being landuse=forestry :)

 Which landuse value is suitable for an area
 where the trees have just been extinguished by a fire?

Same landsue as before the fire, if there was any.

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Re: [OSM-talk] landcover=trees [was Re: OpenStreetMap Carto v2.33.0 release]

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 17/08/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 Am 17.08.2015 um 11:20 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny matkoni...@gmail.com:

 Probably landuse=forestry and landcover=trees would be a good idea and I
 would  support such proposal.


 how do you suggest to put names? On locality nodes? On landuse objects?

Usually on the landuse (or leisure or natural or...) area.

 If you do the latter you will often have to make compromises, because of 
 things
 that are part of the named forest but are different landuses, e.g. a lake,
 or buildings, campings, meadows, settlements, cemeteries etc.

That compromise is made all over OSM : we ignore the small areas
inside a landuse such as lakes, buildings, or corner shops in a
landuse=residential. Where to draw the line between too much detail
and too little is a very subjective decision.

 You would also have to have overlapping landuse forest areas.

When would you need that ?

 I believe it's
 impractical to have it all in one tag: forest objects, the information where
 trees grow and where the landuse is forest. Multipoligon relations also
 impose a limit then how detailed you can get without loosing editability or
 even hitting api limits.

The only detailed MP you really need is for landcover=trees, but
there's no reason to give this a name and therefore no reason to have
a single huge MP. You can split it arbitrarily to make it managable.

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Re: [OSM-talk] landcover=trees [was Re: OpenStreetMap Carto v2.33.0 release]

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 17/08/2015, Warin 61sundow...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 17/08/2015 7:20 PM, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
 In that case it is perfectly OK to do not edit map and keep it as it
 was

The problem with that is that the map will be wrong for 5-15 years
(depending on what kind of trees are being grown). I suggest tagging
the logged area as natural=scrub, and leave the overall
landuse=forest(ry) as-is.

 (yes, as I understand it and it seems to be a widely used in this way -
 landuse=wood, natural=wood,
 landcover=trees are used currently for the same objects).

 Err disagree, they are not the same.
 To me landuse=wood (or landuse=forestry) imply that the area is used
 to produce wood products.

 There are areas that have trees .. that are NOT used to produce wood.
 Here I would use natural=wood (or tree/s), landcover=trees.

Martin was talking about an area where the trees have recently been
logged (harvested), so this is absolutely about wood production.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/08/2015, Richard Fairhurst rich...@systemed.net wrote:
 Frederik Ramm wrote:
 What everybody can see is a clearing or change in the surface
 of something. That's fine to map.

 Inferring from that that there must have been a railway there is a
 step too far. We are mappers, not trappers.

 Ok, let's try an experiment.

 Go to http://cycle.travel/map/journey/15120, click the route highlight (in
 purple), and click 'Find photos'.

 I spot a bridge in the characteristic Victorian railway style, a viaduct,
 the remains of a signal box, a large embankment of the type used to build
 railways and nothing else from that period, and A SODDING RAILWAY PLATFORM
 FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

 Tell me again you can't infer there must have been a railway there. I dare
 you. I double dare you.

Sure, no need to be an expert to spot the former railway in this case.
I'm pretty sure Frederik had some less obvious examples in mind. But
that's IMHO not the point : the discussion is more about what's
mapworthy than what's inferable.

The problem with railroads is that because they are so long and
straight, it's easy to spot the missing sections wich wouldn't stand
out on their own. That's surely an important reason why we have more
arguments about dismantled railways than dismantled anything else.

IMHO being able to assert there was a FOO here does not imply that
we should map that FOO. At most, we should map the signs, such as
leftover embankments, sections of the railway that are now highway=*,
tree rows, etc. Some signs that help spot former railways but are IMHO
not reason enough to map a railway=abandoned include
differently-colored crop in a field, and neat long aligments of
various features.

Here are some railway sections that I have deleted, always aiming to
be conservative and giving a heads-up to the other mapper :
* Going through buidlings, a pond, and uneven slopes
* Running alongside (even reusing some nodes of) a perfectly modern highway=*
* Buried under the 15m high embankment of a trunk road
* A broken bridge with just a few meters left on both riverbanks
* Going across a field with just the faintest crop color difference
* Going between fields with just a 1m hedge separating them

I do empathise with Russ being angered at his work being deleted
without discussion. I'm sure most of his railway=abandoned are of the
mapworthy kind (yes, I know we don't have an objective definition for
this) and if those got deleted by an overzealous or badly-advised
contributor, it sucks.

But it's equally annoying and tiring to repeatedly encounter the
ludicrous kind of railway=abandoned, just because the mapper could
infer the location of the former railway using nearby visible sections
or old maps, or because he feels that former railways *must* be mapped
as an unbronken string of osm ways.

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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/08/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 it really depends, this is an example for an abandoned railway where reading
 the traces is quite easy, and which is tagged (IMHO correctly) as abandoned
 railway in osm:
 http://www.dieter-kloessing.de/Berlin/Berlin-Zehlendorf3.html#Anchor-Stammbahn-47857

That actually looks like disused rather than abandoned to me.

 the wiki shows some interesting inconsistencies btw, it currently says
 disused are railways that could technically re-enter into service any time
 without much effort (track and infrastructure are intact), while abandoned
 are railways that railways where tracks and infrastructure are removed. This
 is there since 2012 (or 2011), but doesn't make sense because it leaves out
 at lot of stuff which would then fall between disused and abandoned.

To me the distinguishing criteria between disused and abandoned is
wether the rails are still present or not. This sometimes leads to
strange results (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/223082804 would be
much harder to put back in service than
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/216942301 despite being disused
rather than abandoned) but it's a nicely objective criteria.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Talk-ie Digest, Vol 74, Issue 10

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 19/07/2015, Nick Burrett n...@sqrt.co.uk wrote:
 On 17 July 2015 at 23:08, moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 17/07/2015, Colm Moore colmmoor...@hotmail.com wrote:
 Adding individual Eircodes shouldn't be a problem. Adding the whole
 database
 is another matter. Facts can't be copyrighted, databases can.

 And yet there's little value in mapping just a fraction of the
 Eircodes. Before starting the job, we need to make sure that we're
 leagally allowed to finish it. If we can't have all the Eircodes in
 OSM, we should have none.

 If it helps somebody locate a house, then it is of value: it is just
 an alternative way of referencing a place.

We're no stranger to having partial data in OSM; we know that
partially usefull is still usefull, even for things that need a
certain completeness level before people really start using it.

What I'm talking about is the possibility of not being legally allowed
to have all the Eircodes in OSM. Being not complete yet is very
different from can't legally go above X% completeness, and if the
second case was true we should IMHO not have the data at all, because
it'd be very different from OSM's usual temporary incompleteness. That
said, I'm pretty sure this FUD will disappear once we get a clear
statement from the PMLH.

 The eircodes are of particular value where a house has no name/number
 at all (which many do where I live) -- how am I supposed to find them
 on OSM?

I suggest using openpostcode instead. For the same number of
characters, you get:
* A pointer to all the houses that aren't on Eircode yet (just browse
finder.eircode.ie they really aren't that rare)
* A pointer to non-postal addresses, like a GAA field, a farm, a music
festival, a beach, a terrain for sale, etc
* A dataset that is immediately complete, without having to import
anything to OSM, GM, OSi, TomTom, etc
* No database needed, so it can work without a network connection
* No license needed, so you don't have to pay 5000€ to use it at business scale
* An optional checksum, so that a typo won't direct you 20km astray
* A more easily remembered value, because nearby addresses share the
same first characters.
* The option to give a less precise location, in case you didn't want
to give your exact home address when searching for social services in
your area.

Do not use Eircode. It has zero advantages.

 I strive to map impartially too, wether I like the place or not. But
 postcode are not the same thing, because they're not physical. We
 always think twice before adding non-physical data to OSM. And in the
 particular case of Eircode:
 * It's a list of IDs (useless on its own) created and curated by a
 private 3rd-party
 * It has an impressive list of technical flaws which make it a
 non-starter for many usecases

 Given it's a list of unique codes for all addresses across the
 country,

No. Due to the way it's designed, they'll forever miss some, and will
be playing catchup^W^Wable to charge for updates. Imagine the fun of
not having an Eircode for your property yet and needing something from
an institution that *requires* an Eircode.

Food for thought: Eircode is fundamentally different from every other
postcode in the world because it requires such a level of constant
updating. Most postcode systems define areas rather than individual
points, so that they remain pretty or completely static. Oh, and Yemen
uses an openpostcode-like system :)

 you can use it as a primary key in a table and populate that
 table with other data like a internally created routing code, loc8,
 openpostcode or whatever else you like.

I don't see any usecase for storing a PostCodeSystemA -
PostCodeSystemB map. If somebody gives you his address including a
postcode, you store that postcode and maybe the corresponding lat/lon
coordinates. If you wish (for display purposes ?) you can turn those
coordinates back into OpenPostcode or generic Loc8 (but not back to
Eircode unless the coordinates are spot on).

Also, if you're deciding on a primary key for your database, you
should make sure that the key has a value for all the objects you
might want to put in your database. Eircode is the wrong choice for a
primary key: by design it only points at certain type of objects, and
even in its chosen field it might not be up to date and not have a
value yet.


  It's quite easy to
 rationalise the data into something routable, usable or relevant to
 ones needs.  The needs can vary per organisation.  I personally don't
 need a sequencing system to find a house whereas the companies that do
 can invent their own to suit their needs or translate to a sequencing
 system that has already been designed to suite their needs.

Sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at here.


 * It's brand-new, and we don't know how much real-world usage it'll get
 * Mirroring it in OSM is a huge amount of work and a lot of data
 (which will qualify as bloat if it isn't useful)

 Putting house names and numbers into OSM is also a huge

Re: [OSM-talk-ie] eircode question

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 17/07/2015, Killyfole and District Development Association
webmas...@killyfole.org.uk wrote:
 Maybe set-up a website like Free the Postcode in the UK ?
 http://www.freethepostcode.org/

 Once the database gets to critical mass they will hopefully just open the
 data
 themselves, like the Post Office/Royal Mail were forced to do in the UK.

 Unfortunately, ignoring it and hoping it will go away rarely works.

True.

 The benefits of reliable delivery of goods and services tends to outweigh the
 disadvantages with most people.  These people just want something that
 works!

That's the crux of the issue. The freight transport association (which
ought to be the biggest Eircode user) has stated long ago that Eircode
did not fit their needs
(http://mapscribbles.blogspot.ie/2014/08/freight-transport-association-ireland.html).
Ambulances and Firefighters and many others can't use Eircode because
it only contains postal addresses. An Post originally wasn't
interested about having a postcode because the current system was good
enough for them (anyone has an update on that ?). The technical issues
that lead would-be Eircode users to these conclusions are well
documented.

To sum it up: Eircode *does not work* for its stated purpose.


 For OSM to be useful for the masses, it needs to work with this model too.
 You type in your eircode and it finds your property, simple, no messing
 about  trying to find where you want to go.

My guess is that even if the Eircode data was free (aka imported into
OSM hand supported by Nominatim), it would get very little use.

The pragmatic decision is to support Eircode anyway: there *are* cases
where it is usefull after all. But if supporting Eircode today means
we won't get a proper postcode tomorrow, that pragmatic decision is
also short-sighted.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] eircode question

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 17/07/2015, Richard Cantwell manaboutco...@gmail.com wrote:
 My current view is that the codes themselves are not copyrighted, but the
 ECAF (flat file with postal address and Eircode) and ECAD (database with
 aliases, co-ords and other things) are copyrighted.

That was my understanding as well. Because the actual eircodes belong
to the PMLH company, but corresponding textual addresses and
coordinates belong to the GeoDirectory db, which is itself copyrighted
and has TOS attached.

 I'll let you know if the MD agrees with me.

Thanks. Of course we'd need a formal statement, not just an oral one ;)

 Automagically scraping the finder.eircode.ie site is a
 grey area, I would caution against doing that for the moment.

I don't think that anybody is planning that yet, this is mainly food
for thought.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] eircode question

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 17/07/2015, Simon Poole si...@poole.ch wrote:
 Congrats or not on the introduction of eircode system :-), there is
 naturally some insecurity as to if we can legally include the data in
 OSM from user contributions.

 It would be helpful if somebody could provide the text of the letter you
 received with your eircode to the LWG, and naturally if anybody can
 provide pointers to relevant specific legislation or any other relevant
 material that would be welcome too.

I haven't received that letter yet, but I doubt that any permission
given therein to each homeowner for individual Eircodes can be legally
transfered to an aggregated database. I suppose the same legalese that
applies to Eircodes received by the post also applies to Eircodes
looked up on (or scraped from) their website.

Regardless of what they managed to legally forbid, the rate limiting
on the website is a clear statement of intent. So if we find a legal
loophole, they'll work to cover it. Of course they probably wouldn't
bothers OSM until it holds a sizable portion of Eircodes.

But I actually don't want to play that game. I'd rather do my best to
let Eircode flop as hard as possible (amongst others by ignoring it in
OSM) so that in a few years time the government and/or a coalition of
geocoding users decide to switch to an alternative postcode system. No
need to go back to the drawing board, the superior alternatives
already exist.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Talk-ie Digest, Vol 74, Issue 2

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/07/2015, Colm Moore colmmoor...@hotmail.com wrote:
 Legally, the name is Iarnród Éireann—Irish Rail
 http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1986/en/act/pub/0031/sec0007.html#sec7

 They use both names, but never the dual name. The day-to-day use tends to be
 Irish Rail.

 At the start, Irish Rail was dominant. However, they had a problem with
 people defacing their then IR logo to IRA:
 http://farm1.staticflickr.com/2/3797462_95ac494eb8.jpg

 So they changed to having Iarnród Éireann dominant with the IE logo.
 http://c2.thejournal.ie/media/2013/02/irishrail-old-2.jpg

 However, in promoting websales, they found that few people could spell
 www.iarnrodeireann.ie (possibly as few could pronounce it properly) so the
 website is now www.irishrail.ie

 Comparing Google results Irish Rail (with quotes) has 390,000 results,
 while Iarnród Éireann  (with quotes) has 150,000.

Interesting :) Thanks for this background info.


 Now, I'm not sure if we want to get into operator=Iarnród Éireann—Irish Rail
 or operator:en=Irish Rail and operator:ga=Iarnród Éireann  - it would lead
 to too much confusion and would be maintenance intensive.

 On balance, I think Irish Rail is the better one to use.

Clearly operator:ga and operator:en is overkill. Iarnród
Éireann—Irish Rail is a bit of a mouthfull, but is the most correct
value from what you are saying. For that matter, AIB Group (UK)
p.l.c. is as much of a mouthfull, it's the same official name vs
usual name issue.

I lean in favor of using the official name on operator=*, but Irish
Rail could be ok as well. The most important thing is to use the same
value everywhere. If other people think we should chaneg to Iarnród
Éireann—Irish Rail, I think it's ok to do it with an overpass+josm
semi-automated edit.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Operator=*

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/07/2015, Colm Moore colmmoor...@hotmail.com wrote:
 There are a handful of entries for IE (Iarnród Éireann) that need to be
 changed  to Irish Rail (several thousand).

I actually thought that the main name (which goes in operator as
opposed to operator:LC) was the irish one in this case ? The on-board
annoucements say Thank you for travelling on Iarnroód Éireann, and
the irish name is displayed more prominently on the website. The
domain name is in English, but that may be due to wanting to avoid
diacritics. I can see that OSM has currently settled on the english
name for operator=*, but I wonder wether that's strictly correct ?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/06/2015, Andrew Wiseman awise...@gmail.com wrote:
 Something else semi-related that might be a terrible idea: I wonder if
 there ought to be some way to show which edits are by remote mappers and by
 locals? Could you do this automatically via IP address or something by
 seeing who was nearby and who was not?


That's an interesting approach. I don't think IP-based identification
would work because of all the false-positives : I spend my time
between France and Ireland, and I'm a local in both places even if I
edit while in the other country.

What I've been mulling over is the home location data on the
profile. Right now it's close to useless. I'd like to be able to set
multiple areas (not points) and rate them can survey / good local
knowledge / particularly interested. The tricky part is creating a UI
that isn't overwhelming. Appart from categorising if an edit is
local or not, it'd be very helpfull to contact relevant contributors
for an area. Pascal Neis's tools are usefull (and have the advantage
of not requiring opt-in), but not as good as explicit information
would be.

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM in India

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/06/2015, Arun Ganesh arun.plane...@gmail.com wrote:
 Businesses throughout the country want to list themselves on GM to get more
 customers. I have been to remote parts of the country where hoteliers or
 shop owners ask me how they can be listed. This POI database is massive and
 along with it comes address information which is data gold in India for
 geocoding. There is low business incentive for anyone to list themselves on
 OSM, moreover the computer skills to do that is lacking by most people.

That argument isn't specific to India, and hasn't stoped OSM growth
elsewhere. Note that it takes a long long time between OSM data is
much better than GM and OSM is well known and used by the general
public.

 If there were more users of openstreetmap, this can change quickly.

Yes, it's logarythmic, beginings are slow.


 Its a given that most users of new technology in the country are familiar
 with English, or atleast the Latin alphabet. One may not be able to speak
 the language but can easily read street signs and it is more familiar than
 localized signage.

Same in Ireland, even the most hard-core Gaeltach advocates speak good
English. But that doesn't mean that nobody wants a map in Gaelic. For
most it's a cultural identity thing. They've been colonised by the
English in the past and want to assert their roots. In India this
ought to be even stronger, for all the people to whom English is a
foreign language.

 We have had trials with localized maps
 http://yogiks.github.io/osm-kn/map/ but apart from being good PR they have
 limited practical use in daily life.

That looks good :) Add a proper domain name and a bit more dressing up
work, and it could become more than just a PR stunt.

 We would need to support 22 languages and in offline mediums to make the
 maps truly accessible to most of the people.

Once you've got things working in one language, adding the other 21 is
little extra work and some extra hardware ressources (surely not 20x
more ressources).

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM in India

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 16/06/2015, moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com wrote:
 We have had trials with localized maps
 http://yogiks.github.io/osm-kn/map/ but apart from being good PR they
 have
 limited practical use in daily life.

 That looks good :) Add a proper domain name and a bit more dressing up
 work, and it could become more than just a PR stunt.

Also, even if Hindi maps have no practical use and are just good PR,
it is worth it. Publicity is a Good Thing when you're trying to grow a
community. Find ways to bootstrap the virtuous circle.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 15/06/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 Am 15.06.2015 um 01:24 schrieb Warin 61sundow...@gmail.com:

 There was a humours suggestion to map animal paths, rejected as not
 something wanted in OSM.

For the record: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Pascal%20Cuoq/diary/1

 who in osm would be able to reject what can be mapped?

It's not rejected, it's discussed and argued about. In the link above,
the mapper was asking for community opinion to begin with.

 To some native farmers those paths may be very significant. The rejection
 reflects a 'western culture'.

I plead guilty of westerner bias in my answer in that blog, but the OP
was mapping in France, so a westerner POV was needed in this case. And
I maintain that animal trails probably should not be mapped in France.

 farmers or hunters? If something is sufficiently significant  to someone
 (and persistent) to map it and potentially maintain the mapping, he will
 just do it, not?

I agree with that, in France or elsewhere. *IF* the trails are
significant, persistent, and OSM-maintainable, they should be mapped.
But I think that the conditions are rarely met. Surely there are
regions of the world where they are more easily met, and asking the
local community will yield a different answer. Hopefully there's a
local OSM community there :)

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 15/06/2015, Arun Ganesh arun.plane...@gmail.com wrote:
 Maps are a relatively new concept in Indian society and is still used only
 by a small minority in urban areas in daily life. Naturally one cannot
 expect strong OSM communities at this stage till maps gain wider
 reach. Remote mapping in cases like this can serve to catalyze the process
 by making the maps more attractive to use. I happened to talk about a few
 of these points in my lightning talk at SOTMUS last week which might give
 more context on mapping in India:

 https://youtu.be/4fK_cWhCQbE?t=22m1s

 Devoting more resources to make these maps and tools accessible to the
 common person would be more fruitful than worrying about colonizing
 countries by remote mapping.

Do you have any specific ideas on what would make OSM more compeling
in India ? I'm thinking along the lines of working better with cheap
phones and bad/expensive network coverage.Maybe smarter
surveying/editing tools. Maybe a combined Mapillary photo + OSM note
app.Maybe offline maps that are cut into smaller pieces.Maybe a smart
social media campaing.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 15/06/2015, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote:
 You think it's only India that has problems with bad/expensive network
 coverage?

Not at all. I'm asking a contributor who feels that his local
community is not very strong if there's anything specific he thinks
could improve things. Since this thread mentions the westerner bias
a lot, I prefer to ask to get educated about a particular local
community.

 I can't drive down the M5 without loosing a data connection,

Me too, losing network on the go, I hate it. But let's be honest :
this pales in comparison to the coverage issues in many countries
(presumably like India, but my experience in the matter is getting
old).

 so OSMAND is the only way to work and that works on cheap android
 devices. I've actually got it running on a £40 tablet for a bigger sat
 nav display ...

 All that is lacking is that other apps go to OSMAND rather than trying
 to get google maps running ... which only works with a network link?

I've got a pretty good todo-list of what would improve my European OSM
contributor's life, but I was curious about India. It has a huge
population, good level of IT skills, offline functionality needs,
good-but-not-great Google maps... It ought to be a prime location for
OSM to shine, but it isn't (yet). I wonder why.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 15/06/2015, Arun Ganesh arun.plane...@gmail.com wrote:
 Not at all. I'm asking a contributor who feels that his local
 community is not very strong if there's anything specific he thinks
 could improve things.

 The very simple answer is that most people who know English and can afford
 a smartphone already use Google maps which work reasonably well in India.
 OSM is atleast 10 years behind in coverage and there is just a handful like
 me who have the luxury of free time who can see the long term benefits of
 contributing to open source. To the rest, they already have working maps,
 so why bother.

Fair enough. Although a quick mapcompare session shows that GM has
nowhere near the quality that it has in Europe/America, so it should
be less work for OSM to overtake GM in India than it took in Europe (I
know, if the community is tiny, less overall work is still way more
work for each individual).

You point out an interesting bit of information though: GM is for
English speakers. Do you render a Hindi (and other languages)
slippymap ? Provide Hindi OSMand and Garmin maps ? That might catch
the attention of many users. In Ireland we have an all-Gaelic map
(http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/?zoom=9layers=00BFFlat=52.92847lon=-7.65252)
that attracts people from outside OSM.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 13 June 2015 15:37:22 GMT+01:00, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:
http://groundtruth.in/2015/06/05/osm-mapping-power-to-the-people/

I really liked that article, but to me it doesn't argues *against
remote mapping* as much as it argues *for local mapping*.

I think everybody already agreed that local trumps remote, and the
article is enlightening about how important that is and even how to
define local. But that doesn't mean that remote mapping is a bad
thing. To me, remote and local are two necessary tools in the box. OSM
wouldn't be hafl as good as it is today without that combinaison of
multiple mapper profiles who contribute to a given area.

If remote mapping slows local community growth (I have my doubts), or
if a New Yorker newbie makes a mess of african highway classification,
the way to treat this is to get more contributors, locals spread
everywhere, real strong diversity, better tools and documentation.
etc. The solution of holding off remote editing, letting the map
linger in a not-very-usable state for a potentially very long time,
does not sound very sensible to me.



 frede...@remote.org

Starting a thread arguing against remote mapping from an @remote.org
email address ? Love it :p

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 14/06/2015, Kate Chapman k...@maploser.com wrote:
 On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Simon Poole si...@poole.ch wrote:
 Further we have additional material in the early simulations that Matt
 Amos did that indicate that this is not unexpected given some
 assumptions about editor motivation.

 This sort of work has not really been updated recently however. The
 community has grown and changed over the years. I think if we were to look
 at motivations today vs. years ago they would likely be different. As OSM
 is used on larger and larger platforms it is possible that people have
 begun mapping to see their edits on Foursquare or Craigslist rather than
 previously where people might be mapping to make their own map.

Another aspect I see is that in the western world, proprietary maps
were already pretty decent when OSM started. In that context, the fun
of mapping a whole town is a important factor of community building.
Because otherwise, pragmatism entice people to contribute to the
proprietary map that they already use instead.

But if you're in an area of the world where government and commercial
maps are bad, and a HOT task suddenly propels OSM to being very
obviously the best map available for the region, then pragmatism
brings contributors to OSM instead. Compounding this effect, if you
live in these areas, chances are that life is hard and the you don't
have much time for editing or much mood for fun town drawing. In that
context, you're more likely to contribute if you can add a street name
here and a POI there than if you need to trace the basic road network
first.

You can take these musings with a grain of salt since I bring no study
to show how important these effects are, but I'd be really surprised
if the criterias that drive community-building of Nepal or Liberia
were the same criterias as for the USA or Netherlands.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Where's the coastline?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 06/06/2015, Killian Driscoll killiandrisc...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi, maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick, but why try and reinvent
 the wheel when you can just compare how the land or water is already
 interpreted

It's more important to be self-consistent than to follow another
project's lead, even a well-respected one. Or to phrase it
differently, sticking with your decision is more important than what
your actual decision is.

That said, I think that the coastline is at mean high-water spring
tide principle is the most common (sometimes using high-water mark
instead, which is close enough).

 look at the EPA map http://gis.epa.ie/Envision /
 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Corine_Land_Cover and see what is land,
 transitional waterbody, coastline.

AFAIU Corine doesn't have a notion of coastline the way OS does. It
just deals with landcover, and categorizes those as salt marsh, which
is an easy decision in OSM too. The OSi map on that website shows the
north part of the wetland as land and the south part as water, which
is really bogus and a nice example of the official government-funded
maps not always being the best :p

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] bridges

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 07/06/2015, Caroline Lewis carolinele...@eircom.net wrote:
 not sure how to add bridges
 correctly - i split at the two nodes that define the bridge , add bridge tag
 and then should i also tag as layer = 1?

Yes that's basicly it. The layer tag says which way is above the
other. You can add layer=* to either way (or both) but a rule of thumb
is to add it to the shortest way (usually the bridge).
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bridge has some more info.

The bridge and the underlying waterway/rail/etc shouldn't share a
node, which can be annoying when maping townlands that follow both the
bridge and the waterway. In those case, you should use an extra way
just for the townland boundary. For example
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/273846258 or
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/344169613

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Where's the coastline?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 05/06/2015, Rory McCann r...@technomancy.org wrote:
 Hi,

 I just wanna check something, to make sure I'm mapping coastlines
 properly.

 I'm working around the Clare coast, mapping townlands, and I'm unsure
 where the coastline is when there is a lot of tides or estuary.

 In this area: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/52.7762/-8.9752
 There's lots of mud flats(?) that I'm not marking as coastline, but
 the GSGS maps show that they are land. You can see that I've chopped
  Islanddavanna Upper in half.

 Am I mapping coastlines correctly here?

It's always going to be a subjective call. In this particular case, I
think that these mud flats are making a fine case for land status,
quoting Mackerski in http://pastebin.com/rbniH18e. If you look
closely, you can see man-made paths  There's a clear one at the south
end of the west mud flat, and there are a few bridges connecting
your coastline to the mud flats. On the other hand, most of the
surface does get covered by high tides, so according to that IRC
discussion and the wiki, it should be on the sea side of the
coastline.

So I mostly agree with your tweaks on the west side, but I'd map the
path at the south end with a sliver of land around it. And in any
case, map the natural=wetland .wetlang=saltmarsh/tidal_flat area.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Things you can do with the GSGS Maps - Lake Names!

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 03/06/2015, Killyfole and District Development Association
webmas...@killyfole.org.uk wrote:
 Is this something could be made into a Map Roulette task
 (http://maproulette.org/)?

There are a lot of unfixables (no GSGS map for the area yet, or no
name for that particular lake), and I'm not sure how easy it is to
display GSGS on maproulette. I fear setting up maproulette would be
more bother than it's worth.

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Re: [OSM-talk-ie] Things you can do with the GSGS Maps - Lake Names!

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 03/06/2015, Rory McCann r...@technomancy.org wrote:
 I hope ye are all having fun mapping all those townlands! We've just
 crossed the 50% barrier, and are almost at 30,000.

Impressive progress, keep it up :)

 A new thing you can do with the old maps is map lake names! Overpass
 Turbo can help with this.

 If you go to this Overpass page http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/9Jw and
 zoom to an area and press run, it will show you all unnamed lakes.
 Then Export, then JOSM. It'll have opened up those unnamed lakes
 in your JOSM. Use the GSGS maps to add the name (and water=lake as
 appropriate). You don't need to download any extra data. Upload when done!

I've played this game in Mayo tonight, although I altered the query to
select even named lakes so that I could add the water=* tag. While at
it, there's a lot of lakes created with scanaerial that can do with
manual fixing.

 I use JOSM's filter feature (
 https://www.mapbox.com/blog/2012-08-15-using-filters-josm/ ), with the
 query name=* and water=* to hide lakes that I've already named.

I prefer to use the josm todo plugin, because it pans, zooms, and
selects for you with just one click :
1) Use JOSM search (I just searched for type:relation because that's
what I limited my overpass query to)
2) Click add in the todo side-panel to populate the todo list
3) Click zoom for the first item
4) Edit the object
5) Click mark
6) Repeat.steps 4-5 until done or bored.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 01/06/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 Am 31.05.2015 um 23:19 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com:
 In both cases, it doesn't look like a take that routers and renderers
 would want to take into account.

s/take/tag/

 why not? both seem to cover exactly the topic of on the ground signage that
 we discuss in this deviation of the thread

Both unsigned_ref and visible_name have obviously been chosen
specifically to not be picked up by the usual renderers and routers,
so these consumers should probably respect the maper's intent. In
contrast to the various signed=* tags which say this is an actual
name/ref, but you shouldn't display it to the end user that are
intended to be used by consumers.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 30/05/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdre...@gmail.com wrote:
 there are ~600 visible_name

On Overpass there's actually only two places where visible_name has been used:
* In Venice, associated with a corresponding name=*, looks completely
superfluous.
* Somewhere else in Italy, associated with noname=yes and a note on
why the signposted name isn't a proper one.

In both cases, it doesn't look like a take that routers and renderers
would want to take into account.

 37000 unsigned_ref

And 3 of those are associated with a ref=*. Not sure how this is
supposed to be used, it seems like a poorly-designed tag to me. Is
that inherited from TIGER ?

 518 unsigned
 400 signed
 161 name:signed
 124 name:sign
 86 ref:signed
 48 unsigned_name
 47 ref:unsigned
 16 name:signposted

Yup, founds those too after Simon explained things a bit.


 It seems that for names nobody cares to say whether they are signposted or
 not (or maybe only when the sign is different from the actual name), while
 for ref it seems common practice(?) to use unsigned_ref

I wouldn't trust or interpret unsigned_ref until I understand a bit
more about it.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 29/05/2015, Maarten Deen md...@xs4all.nl wrote:
 It depends on what you want. When someone asks me to navigate to
 Natanzon, Haifa how can I enter it when the only name in the map is
 נתנזון, חיפה?

Your software should know about both names (so that you can search for
either) and show you the local name (so that you can compare to
streetsigns) in addition to the name in a language of your choosing
(so that you know what you're doing).

And yes, I see the combination of name and a long list of name:CC
as a good backend for that requirement.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 29/05/2015, SomeoneElse li...@atownsend.org.uk wrote:
 I'd say that whether or not a name is actually usable to help navigate
 to a place is a pretty important piece of information.

True. And that what name should give you. The name:CC tags should
not be a hindrance, at most they should be given alongside name by
your satnav.

 For example,
 when processing OSM data for my own use I'll try and drop unsigned names
 and refs from roads (there's no point in saying turn left on Foo
 Street if Foo Street does not appear on the sign).

That's really neat. How do you know wether a street is signposted or
not ? I don't know of any tag that gives that info. I can't imagine a
good heuristic using name:CC.  I've added quite a few unsignposted
street names by asking locals.

 It's the same
 principle here - if there are 300 names for a place, are you really
 suggesting that I have to do an external check to some other database to
 find that as it's in South Wales, signs are likely to be in Welsh and
 English, so it's those language names that I need to look out for?

What's wrong with name ? What's the UK policy on the content of
name for places with Welsh and English names ? If you want to see
Welsh names as often as possible but still make the local name more
prominent, use local name (welsh name if different) in your map
generating script.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 29/05/2015, p...@trigpoint.me.uk p...@trigpoint.me.uk wrote:
 On Fri May 29 11:27:41 2015 GMT+0100, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
 Even if it was justified, the reversals were either sloppy or biased : see
 http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/10021976/history which got
 name:ru Лестер deleted but was allowed to keep name:ukЛестер.

 The Ukrainian names were added after the mapper engaged the UK community.

If that's the case, it means the reversal was biased rather than
sloppy, which is arguably worse. name:ru was first added 4 years ago,
name:uk 1 year ago. The more recent changesets that re-added name:ru
got a changeset discussion where the contributor explained his
verification process, which isn't much but is probably as good as can
be in this case. Лестер is the same message from Ukraine and from
Russia, but in the second case the messenger was shot.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 29/05/2015, SomeoneElse li...@atownsend.org.uk wrote:
 On 29/05/2015 07:07, Andrew Hain wrote:
 Thank you Dave. As a British mapper I am ashamed that some people want
 to make the map of my country less useful, and not only to Russian
 speakers a long way away.

 Hang on, where is _anybody_ saying that?  The whole point of the thread
 is about whether it would be possible to use wikidata to make the map
 _more_ useful to people who don't speak a particular language, not
 less.

The thread opening was indeed about using wikidata translations (which
would make the map more usefull for all) and perhaps deprecating
name:CC in OSM as a result (which is much more debatable).

But then the question came up (By Richard I think ?) of which name:CC
should be kept for a particular object, and the large number of
name:ru in the UK (reverted by you and others) was given as an example
of an unaccepable name:CC. And then some agreed that name:en in
non-English-speaking coutries should get the same treatment.

This second paragraph can be seen as making the map less useful (I
share that POV). It has been argued that the reverts were justified
because the names were just transliterations and not real names, but I
think that this was overzealous (it wasn't blind tranliteration, there
was human skill involved). Even if it was justified, the reversals
were either sloppy or biased : see
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/10021976/history which got
name:ruЛестер deleted but was allowed to keep name:ukЛестер.

And just to be clear: pushing the decision of whether Лестер is the
correct russian name of Leicester to wikidata just so that OSM looks
cleaner is not a solution.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 29/05/2015, SomeoneElse li...@atownsend.org.uk wrote:
 how do we distinguish in the Abergavenny case between the two
 established names and the up to 7,000 (but realistically in the short
 term a few hundred) translations?  That's unfortunately something that
 name:xx in OSM doesn't give us currently

You don't distinguish them, and that's fine. There may be many many
more pleople using Abergavenny than Абергавенни, but that doesn't
mean that the name isn't established, at its more limited scale.

Speaking of plain dumb transliterations that got established, have a
read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_names_in_Ireland . Despite
sharing the latin alphabet, all Irish placenames have been
systematically translated when Ireland was under British rule. The
transliteration job has been ridiculed by the locals and is no better
than what a modern algorythm would do, but for better or worse today I
live in Kilkenny more than I live in Cill Cainnigh.

 A question to those suggesting Абергавенни as a name:ru for
 Abergavenny / Y Fenni - how to distinguish the latter (both are names
 that you can to compare with signposts to see that you're going in the
 right direction) with the former (which you can't, but a speaker of that
 language might use to refer to that place in their own language)?

Where the signpost toward Pékin (the french name for Beijing) ?
Where on UK soil can I find the city sign for Londres ? Foreign
names for local places *are* harder to verify, and we rightfully cast
a more critical eye on them. But we've got plenty of hard-to-verify
data in OSM, and we rarely take a deletionist approach to it. And for
better or worse, Russia-based contributors are better suited to know
what should go into name:ru than UK-based contributors. And as it
happens, Абергавенни comes from Abergavenny rather than Y Fenni,
showing that some discernment was applied.

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