Re: [Talk-GB] Help with remapping
Andy Allan gravitystorm@... writes: 1.) Assume you need to replace a node which is in the intersection of several ways. Using Potlatch 2, select the junction node and press O. This deletes the node and attaches a new node to the cursor - you need to click to position it. If you reposition the new node in same place as the old one, this hasn't really achieved anything. At best, it has obscured the history a bit so it's no longer quite so clear that the node was originally added by a CT-decliner. Rather than going through this charade why not just add odbl=clean to the node? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Please do not use Code-Point Open, (postcode) data in OSM
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: OS data is currently not distributed under UK Open Government Licence but their own license which then incorporates UK Open Government Licence. Their own license includes a downstream attribution clause which OGL does not. Ah - I was going by http://data.gov.uk/dataset/os-code-point-open which seems to indicate the OGL is used. So that web page is not quite correct? CC-BY-SA technically forces map makers to attribute each and every contributor to OSM, ODbL does not. Is it at least possible to combine map data under ODbL with the Code-Point Open data to make a 'map plus postcodes' data set? I am guessing that the answer is no, at least not if you want to distribute that data. ODbL does not require attribution but it might be revised in ODbL 1.1 to allow an attribution requirement to be added by downstream users. Then it would be possible for users of ODbL-licenced maps to combine them with other open data that has an attribution requirement, although sadly such data could not be used to improve OSM itself. (As well as this postcode data set, another example of geodata with attribution requirement is the CommonMap project, a CC-BY licenced map of the world, which was partly intended as a common upstream which several map projects including OSM could take data from.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Please do not use Code-Point Open, (postcode) data in OSM
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: I regretfully have to relay that while the Ordnance Survey has no objections to geodata derived in part from OS OpenData being released under the Open Database License 1.0, this has to permanently exclude Code-Point Open, (postcode) data. That data is distributed under the UK Open Government Licence. If that licence does not allow use under ODbL, then the same surely applies to other data released with that licence. I am sure that the Royal Mail commercial licensing people would very much prefer that the open postcode data were more restricted, but that does not mean they can somehow make exceptions to the licence. Could you give more details about what particular permission is needed? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] GB License Change Readiness
Personally, I am still working to find a way forward so that OSM can remain compatible with Creative Commons. I joined OSM to help make a free Creative Commons (or compatible) map of the world and that remains my goal. There are a couple of avenues I am working on which I'd be happy to talk about by email or face to face. I had hoped that discussions with the LWG might result in a reasonable compromise such as continuing to offer CC-BY-SA in parallel with ODbL, and that I would be able to persuade other pro-CC mappers to support that too. But I can't speak for what others will do. I really don't want to just give up and go home unless every possibility has been exhausted. It is not too late. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS VectorMap water feature import
Perhaps you should cross-check the OS water features against Bing imagery. That would eliminate some of the errors from trusting any one source too much. Of course it still wouldn't be as good as walking around the outside of each water feature with a GPS to get the boundary, but I can say from experience that this takes a very long time! In some parts of the country there are waterways traced from out-of-copyright OS maps or from Street View tiles. Getting the shapes from OS VectorMap will certainly be an improvement on that. In my opinion it will also be an improvement compared to not having the water features at all. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Project Drake - mapping the University of Cambridge
David Earl david@... writes: I'm not overly wedded to name=Clare College (University of Cambridge) and the like. Indeed, for the University rendering I will be removing these suffixes automatically because the context and colours will make it completely obvious. Well, in that case, can I urge you to tag for the renderer and remove the suffix from the data! I think anyone looking at a map of Cambridge might have an idea that there is a university there and that any colleges or academic-sounding buildings are more likely than not to be part of it. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Locator 201111 released, musical chairs updated to use it
Robert Scott lists@... writes: Does the comparison look at not:name tags? It will (it will mark them in pink), but only when the osl entry has actually been matched to that not:name-tagged osm way. Makes sense. But do you know why it didn't match in the example I mentioned? The not:name is the same as the name in OSL and the geometry is similar, although split into two ways in OSM. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Locator 201111 released, musical chairs updated to use it
Robert Scott lists@... writes: The new OS Locator is out. I've just updated musical chairs. http://ris.dev.openstreetmap.org/oslmusicalchairs Great. Does the comparison look at not:name tags? For example object 4268860 is tagged to say that the OS Locator name is wrong, but is flagged in the check http://ris.dev.openstreetmap.org/oslmusicalchairs/map? zoom=18lat=51.52351lon=-0.1936layers=B0TTosl_id=491357view_mode=pseudorandom -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
I don't think the tagging of place=city has ever reflected official city status. You could change it, but that would be a departure from existing practice. I doubt most people would expect to see 'London' and 'Westminster' as equally-sized cities within a few miles of each other. The existing place node for London is at Charing Cross, I believe: not even within the City of London. I would suggest leaving place=city as the common everyday meaning of city, even though that is not strictly defined, and to introduce a new tag for the legal designation if that is felt to be useful. Alternatively, the renderings (and possibly other software such as Nominatim) could be changed to not depend on place=city, and then it would be possible to clean it up without disruption. Yes, this is tagging-for-the-rendererism, but having the capital city sometimes appear as 'Westminster' instead of 'London' (depending on random rules about overlapping text labels) would be so offputting I think it is worth paying some attention to what is currently rendered. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Another way of looking at this is that it comes from tagging a 'place node' rather than mapping cities as areas. Individual nodes for counties have been phased out in favour of exact boundaries and the same could happen for towns and cities. If you map an area, that forces the choice of whether your object is intended to represent the City of London, or Greater London, or whatever. Of course, once you have local authority boundaries you also have city boundaries, they just need to be tagged somehow as 'this local authority is for a city'. So in the long term the answer may be to stop rendering and address lookup and other applications from using the place=city nodes at all, but have them work based on areas. Then the ambiguous place nodes can eventually disappear. Since that isn't going to happen any time soon, I suggest leaving the current somewhat fuzzy definition of place=city as it is, and adding more tightly-defined tags such as 'designated city status' or population if they are wanted. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Ed Loach ed@... writes: Someone in this thread suggested using another tag. I forget the suggestion but along the lines of designation=city or official=city or something. I briefly thought that this was a good solution, but after further consideration realised we would probably need to always add it to place nodes in the UK just to confirm that we have tagged something as what it actually is, and not as something different based on area or population. Yeah, well that's useful as a way of tracking work in progress. You could also explicitly tag every large settlement that *doesn't* have city status. The note tag can cite the list of cities or date of Royal Charter or whatever. Since it's unlikely that every other country will change its tagging of cities to match ours, it doesn't hurt to tag things a bit more explicitly. Then someone using the map can know what the official cities are without having to remember the rules about what place=city signifies in each individual country. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Tom Hughes tom@... writes:
If you map an area, that
forces the choice of whether your object is intended to represent the
City of London, or Greater London, or whatever.
The problem with that approach is that concepts like town and city
do not have well defined boundaries in the UK.
Implicit in my argument for mapping areas was the assumption that
you'd want to map the official definition of city rather than the
informal one. AFAIK, every city has a defined boundary, even if
nowadays it is no longer marked by a city wall.
For 'town' this is not so, and you could not take a strict approach there.
If you decide to map the informal view of where a city lies, rather
than its legal boundary, then you have a choice of picking an
arbitrary boundary or picking an arbitrary centre point. Somehow in
OSM we are more comfortable with the latter, but it is hard to justify
from first principles. By giving less information, a single point has
less scope for edit wars and is not going to fool users of the map
into thinking a hard boundary exists where one doesn't. Nonetheless
applications might like to know about such informal boundaries ('you
are now entering Reading', announces the satnav).
--
Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Borbus borbus@... writes: I think a better solution would be to tag some place as being the city centre and then the renderer can be told: place the name somewhere within the area of the city, but try to place it close to the city centre. Yes, in general an area-with-centroid would be a useful type of object. It could apply to forests, seas, even some countries. I suppose it would be tagged as a relation with two members (a way for the area and a node for the centroid) and then tagging would be on the relation. Similar to what happens now for multipolygons. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] British Antarctic Territories
Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists ajrlists@... writes: Thanks to the National Library of Australia I have a number of mostly out of copyright (or nearly so) British Ordnance Survey Maps for the British Antarctic Territories . Yet again we see the lazy armchair mappers trying to 'map' areas they have never visited. Instead of wasting time with dubious-quality Ordnance Survey maps why don't we organize some mapping parties and community outreach to the penguins? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and ODbL OK
Steve Coast steve@... writes: I'm curious how the OSMF saying something magically makes it more valid than the LWG saying it, given the LWG is a body run by... the OSMF? Steve you recently mentioned that you couldn't speak for the OSMF without going to the OSMF board. Might the same apply to the LWG? If the answer is no, and the LWG is authorized to make statements such as an interpretation of the contributor terms without a separate say-so from the OSMF board, then it would be good to make that explicit. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and ODbL OK
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: Ordnance Survey has explicitly considered any licensing conflict between their license and ODbL and has no objections to geodata derived in part from OS OpenData being released under the Open Database License 1.0. As I understand it the objection was not so much whether the data can be distributed under the ODbL but whether the contributor terms (which under some reasonable interpretations allow OSMF to distribute under a different licence in future) are compatible. You have previously given your personal interpretation of the CTs, which is that a contributor need only assert that data is compatible with the *current* licence terms (and so might be incompatible with some putative future licence). Will there be official confirmation from OSMF backing up this interpretation? If not, is there a means for people to click 'I accept the CTs, subject to the interpretation posted on the talk-gb mailing list'? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Copyright issues of checking details on other websites
My rule of thumb is that getting facts from an individual website for a cafe or shop or church is fine, but do not copy from online directories or the databases maintained by search engines. If adding details from a website I will usually note it in the 'source' or 'uri' tags, or in the changeset comment, to provide some evidence that I found it independently and didn't just copy off Google. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK road name coverage now over 80%
Graham Stewart (GrahamS graham@... writes: I just noticed that todays http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/osm_analysis/main ITO Analysis Summary shows we are now over 80% for road name completion (i.e. OSM road names compared to the OS Locator data). Is it possible to analyse how much of that is independently surveyed and how much is just copied from OS? (I know that some mappers have not added source tags when copying from OS, and going through changeset comments is probably too hard, but it would give a rough idea.) Even if you're in favour of armchair mapping, I think most agree that copying the names from the OS map is just 'phase 1', with the next and much more time- consuming step being to go out and resurvey to make sure. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and accepting the new contributor terms
Steve Coast steve@... writes: I can't make a statement for the OSMF without going to the board, but that's my understanding, Mike is correct. Would this not resolve the Nearmap question? As I understand it they did not want to write a blank cheque allowing use under an unspecified licence. But if the only requirement is to be compatible with CC-BY-SA and ODbL/DbCL, they might be happy to reinstate permission to use their imagery. Potentially, there are other data sources in a similar situation. An official statement from the OSMF confirming this interpretation of the CTs (or, better still, a clarifying paragraph added to the CTs themselves) might clear up a lot of non-acceptances. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and accepting the new contributor terms
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: In other words, for the LWG, if data is compatible with *current* license terms, then there is no problem contributing it and accepting the contributor terms. This is a nice explanation. Could it be added as a clarifying paragraph to the contributor terms themselves? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Hosting OS OpenData files (was: OSM Analysis New Data and bot)
I don't have enough free time right now to set up a mirror but I am more than willing to chip in if it's merely a question of paying to upgrade bandwidth available on a hosting solution like S3. I know this isn't a big contribution but it might be something. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Video tutorials (was: OSM Analysis New Data and bot)
Note that David Ellams is one step ahead and has already created some video tutorials on how to use Potlatch 2. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Video_tutorials That's only one piece of the puzzle. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Housing Development Names
Kev js1982 osm@... writes: The current tagging is is_in:Gamston, West Bridgford place:suburb name:Knightshayes landuse:residential I would suggest removing place=suburb but leaving the name tag. Then it gets a reasonably tasteful and low-key rendering in the both the OSM Mapnik tiles and the cycle map. This is not merely tagging for the renderer, since the place is not really a 'suburb' if I understand you correctly. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: Worcester is nominally complete; yet despite the assurances of people in this thread that completeness will bring more mappers, Worcester has just one mapper, Steve, who was active anyway before OSSV came along. I would not claim that completing one particular town will have a significant effect on the number of OSM users and hence the number of contributors. It is positive, but what really matters is improving the 'worst-case performance' of OSM nationally. If you pick some metric such as ITO's OS Locator comparison (for want of a better metric), then I contend that what matters for OSM adoption is not the places at the top of the list but the one at the very bottom. If we can improve the worst place in the country from 35% completion to 90%, OSM use will greatly increase and so will the pool of contributors. I appreciate that this is not directly testable except by doing it. As SteveC noted, most claims about imports require a parallel universe to check. When the area near my house in East London became complete (from survey and Yahoo; this was before the days of OS) then the number of local mappers *decreased*. Of course, because the area was pretty much done, I concentrated my mapping trips on places further afield. If having an area complete means that a contributor can spend his or her time on other parts of the map which also need attention, that must be a good thing. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: This is no doubt true. But surely having an area that has been *surveyed* to 100% road name completion is just as likely to put off any new contributors as one that was *traced* to 100%? I don't think so. Again, the difference is that you're reaching 100% with the involvement of numerous people, rather than 100% with the involvement of one importer. And when you have that vibrant community, it's self-sustaining. I think we all agree that reaching 100% completeness with a collection of people doing diverse surveying methods (and even aerial tracing) is much better than reaching 90% completeness by importing. (The OS data is not 100% complete so it can never take us all the way to 100%, except by the limited metric of comparing ourselves to OS.) But you are leaving out the third possibility which is an area stuck at 40% completion, which doesn't have a vibrant community either. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Graham Stewart graham@... writes: That raises the question of why on earth we're still using cliquey semi-private email lists when we could be using nice open public forums with categories, threaded discussions, formatting and voting - but that is a discussion for another day. ;) I use Gmane: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.openstreetmap.region.gb -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: 1) A list of not:names that orginated from OS Locator but where OS Locator does not currently contain that error. The challenge is that not all not:name entries in OSM will have originated from error in OS Locator; they could contain details of errors from other sources, such as Navteq or TeleAtlas or elsewhere. Uhh... what? Is anybody updating the OSM map based on comparison with proprietary maps such as Navteq? I thought we didn't do that. Sometimes I find cases where the OSM name was wrong. When correcting it I add the old value as an incorrect_name tag. I suppose that some people might be using not:name for that purpose. 2) A list of street names which are in OSM but which are not in OS Locator could be a good publicity tool for OSM and a good new source of errors for elements of a way (for example where a short section of a street associated with a bridge but the other way had a typo in OSM). I guess that needs would ideally have its own rendering layer? Yes, it would be a separate report and layer from the usual comparison. Finally. Might it be useful for us to accommodate have multiple not:name entries associated with a single road? For example where a single street has multiple different duff names from one or more different sources, ie OS Locator and Navteq both have different wrong names. Again could you explain where you're coming from with Navteq, etc? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: I have not used commercial mapping while creating the map, but some errors in Navteq, TeleAtlas and AA naming locally have subsequently come to my attention subsequently and I see no reason why these should not be in also included in not:name. It certainly doesn't break any copyright to do so and provides strong evidence that we are doing proper surveying rather than copying. I'm no lawyer so I cannot tell you that what you are doing is infringing copyright. But I think it is better to take a strict clean-room approach. You may be disciplined when looking at the Navteq maps side-by-side with OSM; you may know exactly how far you can go in adding information based on them; but I think it would be better to stick to a simple and clear policy of never using other maps unless we know the copyright status is okay. To my mind, adding not:name from Navteq may provide evidence that we are surveying - but it also provides evidence that we are looking at Navteq's maps! That makes it harder to argue independent creation if for any reason our map starts to closely resemble Navteq's and they allege copying. For example: Navteq (and Bing) incorrectly name the section of Nacton Road in Ipswich from the junction with Felixstowe Road heading east as Clapgate Lane. It isn't. It might be appropriate therefore to add a not:name entry to OSM at that point with a not:name:note saying that Navteq has a wrong. I think I might tag this if I saw widespread usage in web pages or secondary sources using the wrong name. But I would prefer not to know which particular proprietary map the error originated from. I'd suggest we reserve not:name for the OS Locator check, since that's overwhelmingly what it is used for - even if the tag name doesn't make that clear - and if there is a need to tag 'commonly used but wrong name' for a street we use something else like incorrect_name. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: I have not used commercial mapping while creating the map, but some errors in Navteq, TeleAtlas and AA naming locally have subsequently come to my attention subsequently and I see no reason why these should not be in also included in not:name. That makes it harder to argue independent creation if for any reason our map starts to closely resemble Navteq's and they allege copying. I hear your concern. You will notice that I hadn't added that information and am not rushing to do us. OK. I may have made the common mistake of confusing the discussion of an action on the mailing list with the performance of that action. Can we agree, then, that it's a bad idea to tag anything in OSM that comes directly from proprietary maps such as Navteq - even if minor things like notes of errors in the other map - and so for any check of OS Locator versus OSM, we don't need to worry about not:name tags that might have been added for Navteq, because there won't be any. Thanks again (to you and your employees) for your work on these comparisons. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Jason Cunningham jamicuosm@... writes: I'd also like to give my support to using a bot to add names to existing roads. 1 - It would reduce foot surveys which would mean missing out on POI's (etc). Now feel this argument is short sighted and we would still have to deal with how we map POI when all streets are surveyed, so that should not stop us using the OS data. I would like to note that for me, using the OS data has been a great way to increase foot surveys. There are many areas which looked complete on the map, until OS showed that lots of roads (or public buildings) were missing. Adding those roads has spurred me to visit the areas on foot to mop up unnamed streets and to hunt down places of worship among other things. Different sources are complementary to each other and should not be viewed as alternatives. Even with 'classic OSM' we had Yahoo tracing combined with foot surveys. So this weekend I could go out and get names for remaining streets in my area, or we could use the bot... Please remember that you can do both - you can still visit to map by hand before or after adding information from OS or any other source. You might instead decide to concentrate your mapping time on those things that we can't get from OS as a first priority. But at least you are able to make an informed choice. However, to make sure that people have all the information when deciding what to go out and map, and to accommodate those who have quite reasonable concerns about ending up duplicating mistakes in the OS data, we need tools which show which parts of the map come from OS. ITO's map layer http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/ito_map/main?view=117 is an example. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Chris Hill osm@... writes: Since it looks likely that a bot is going to be run to add OS Locator names to unnamed British roads - something I strongly disagree with, but I can't stop - I demand that it is tagged with a common-sense, clear tag to show where this has happened. This should not be the bonkers cock-up that was described in the speed limit nonsense, and not a source tag, since many existing roads will have a source tag, e.g. source=survey. Would a tag source:name=OS be specific enough? Perhaps - and I'm just suggesting this as a possibility - the name could be added as unverified_name=X or name:OS=X or some other scheme. Then users of the OSM data could decide for themselves whether they strictly insist on ground survey (at the expense of coverage completeness) or whether they'd like to have the most complete set of names, even if some of them have only been surveyed by Ordnance Survey employees rather than OSM volunteers. I don't think that's a great idea, because the name is the name, and if we have good evidence that the name is X then we should just tag name=X. But it could be a way to keep everyone reasonably happy. When going on mapping trips I would then concentrate mostly on roads with no name at all, but also take a moment to verify the OS-sourced names as I passed those roads. I think this would be more efficient and produce a better map faster than if we ignore the OS names entirely. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Derick Rethans osm@... writes: When there are no names on a street, it gives a good incentive to go survey them, and it shows which things *need* to be surveyed. Quite right. How can we improve OSM coverage for end users (who would like to find their destination address when navigating, for example, and would not be impressed by their sat-nav device loading up Potlatch and telling them to edit) and yet keep the traditional setup for mappers where 'no name = go and visit'? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Derick Rethans osm@... writes: There is a substantial body of evidence that automated imports damage the ability to recruit and nuture new mappers. Could you cite the evidence? I can. I've a friend in the Netherlands that I'd say is the typical person that we want as mapper. He had mapped a lot of town Which then got wiped out by the AND import, and he didn't bother with OSM for a looong time. That's a good piece of evidence but if you look carefully I think what it says is that you should not wipe out existing mapping when doing an import. They must be knitted in with manual attention where necessary and not just dumped from a great height onto the map. In this context I don't believe anyone is advocating the replacement of any bits of the existing OSM map with OS data. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Andrew andrewhainosm@... writes: One other point: there may be parts of the UK where mapping is lost because someone doesn’t relicense and there are other contributors whose work has had the rug pulled under it but are willing to rebuild if there’s a way to make it as easy as possible. That assumes that the OS licence is compatible with the new contributor terms, which (as discussed at recent LWG meeting) is still not settled! -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: I wonder if the good folks at ITO could devise a way to analyse the not:name tags in the database and see whether any of them are now redundant? In other words, are the OS correcting any of the mistakes we appear to have identified? It would be cool to see a comparison the other way round: testing the OS data for accuracy using OSM as a reference. In inner London I think there are about 5% of names missing from OS - mostly semi-private drives or estates, but nonetheless signposted and addressable - so I think they would score no higher than 95%. (OS Street View is a bit better, I'd say that only about 2% of roads that exist are missing from it, and the 'false positive rate' of Street View showing a road where nothing is on the ground is almost nil. It's not as easy to do automated comparisons however. These numbers are totally off the top of my head and apply to London only.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Essex appearing in various London address nominatim results
Martin - CycleStreets list-osm-talk-gb@... writes: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/26450045 I think there will be a polygon for Essex, thus the above node can simply be deleted. This is the case in a lot of similar cases, as more exact data is now available. It has been discussed and agreed on this list before that these nodes can be junked now that we have county boundaries as polygons. So please go ahead. -- Ed Avis e...@waniassset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Kent Pharmacy, OSM Validation
TimSC mapping@... writes: I have done further investigations. As I said, the national dataset has about 90% of pharmacies exactly located. But in the Kent data set does not include this precise data and instead has the postcode centre as the pharmacy position. IMHO, if we can get permission for the national level data set, we should import/merge the good 90% (and manually survey the remainder). If pharmacies are just points with lat/lon, it is not always simple to import into the existing map, even if we knew the position were entirely accurate. The road network in OSM has some margin for error so a pharmacy might end up on the wrong side of the road. In areas with buildings, the pharmacy node might appear in the next-door building by mistake. That said, if you are looking for a pharmacy, it is certainly more useful to have one within a five metre accuracy rather than no data at all. So I would still be in favour of adding the data. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Kent Open Data, KCC
Clearly the local authority must have a list of all taxable addresses, with house number and postcode. If it can be safely released (just the address, with no other identifying information) then it would be a great completeness check for OSM, even better than OS Locator. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Opendata names copied in Harrow
Andrew andrewhainosm@... writes: An editor has cleared the OSL difference analysis in the London Borough of Harrow (http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/osm_analysis/area?name=Harrow) with the unusually low score of 5 not:names out of 1800. Do you mean that names have been entered where none existed before - or do you mean changing already-mapped names to agree with OS? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: e.g.http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.9256lon=-1.3605zoom=14layers=M It's not really 'the' C351, as there will be C351s all over the country. In that case local_ref would be a more appropriate tag than ref. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Opendata names copied in Harrow
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: It may be because I am a linguist, but I cannot bring myself to declare such forms as ST JOHN'S ROAD to be incorrect when they make much more sense grammatically. ...unless they are St Andrews Road or St Albans Road. Often if you look hard enough you can see an older street sign with an apostrophe, before the local authority became illiterate and stopped bothering with them. I take that as enough reason to tag the correct name. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
In general it would be good to distinguish between what is signed and what is known to be true, though it may not be signed. Ultimately, road signs and street nameplates could be mapped as separate objects, though that might be going a bit far. In country areas there are many road names known to locals but not signed at all. A navigation app might not bother to say 'turn left down Lewsley Lane' if it knows that there is no marker on the ground to help a driver find it. But then, it would still be useful to show the name in local maps or tourist guides. In cities, if a street has no name sign anywhere I will tag unsigned=yes. In the countryside, having no sign is the common case so I don't usually add the tag. Similarly there are old hotels which still have the name carved in stone above the doorway but are nowadays used for something else. Nobody would put that into the name tag but it might possibly be useful for 'name_sign' or 'signed:name' or various increasingly complex tag schemes. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
Craig Wallace craigw84@... writes: There is a proposed unsigned=yes tag on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Noname But that is not very helpful, as it doesn't specify whether it is the ref or the name (or something else) that is unsigned. Something like unsigned:name=yes or unsigned:ref=yes would be better. I think this is a good idea, with plain unsigned=yes taken to mean that neither the name nor the ref or any other unique identification is signed. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: But sooner or later someone will tag something as unsigned=no. Double negatives seem faintly ridiculous to me. Why not replace unsigned=yes with signed=no? Seems more logical to me. Perhaps, but unsigned=yes already has some momentum and it's not worth changing. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Revolutionary open data from Camden council
Tom Chance tom@... writes: http://www.camdendata.info/AddDocuments1/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=171 It's not totally useless - you can cross-reference the school names here with those in the OS Street View maps (many of which have been traced into OSM) or the OS OpenData schools list. It's a bit perturbing that although they say Open Government Licence on the website, the PDF itself says 'internal use only' and 'all rights reserved'. Is it okay to use? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] On footpaths
Peter Oliver p.d.oliver@... writes: • Tagging a way highway=footway is equivalent to tagging it highway=path; foot=... (plus, in either case, additional tags to indicate the legal status of the route). However, both Mapnik and Osmarender display these two supposedly equivalent forms of footpath differently! That's right! And it suggests that the wiki page is wrong. If nothing else, the two kinds of tagging render differently, so they are not exactly equivalent. The general practice in this country is to use footway for paved paths in cities and path for muddier countryside ones (or, perhaps, through city parks). Likewise a narrow road can be tagged as highway=service or highway=track depending on how well it's surfaced. If you want to add additional surface tags, go ahead, but the footway/path distinction should be sufficient. Perhaps in other countries the convention more closely matches the wiki docs. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] On footpaths
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: The general practice in this country is to use footway for paved paths in cities and path for muddier countryside ones (or, perhaps, through city parks). Um, no it isn't. There is absolutely no consensus for using =path in the countryside rather than =footway. I strongly suspect that if you analysed the data in the UK countryside, you would find 80% footway, 20% path. Ah, sorry for making such a rash generalization. What I should have said is that to the extent path is used instead of footway, it has a sense of being an unsurfaced path. Footway is used too even in the countryside. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Sorting out layering in East Anglia, Essex, London and Kent
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: It it is in a cutting the the 'cutting' tag would be appropriate. because the layer tag saying nothing about relative height to a parallel way, only about the z ordering at crossing points. This is the problem - there are two different conventions for the layer tag which most of the time co-exist, but make it hard to interpret or clean up the data. It can be considered as applying only at crossing points - in which case it makes little difference whether you tag the roads as layers 0 and 1 or -1 and 0, and it makes little difference if the layer=1 extends further along the way than the crossing (in other words you need not carefully split a way into sections, you can just tag layer for a nice long stretch until you get near the next crossing). Or you can think of it as height relative to any *nearby* object, even if not touching. I think we have a mixture of both conventions. Above all, the wiki is not to be trusted - it's worth checking on this list. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Things that aren't stations tagged railway=station
Andy Allan gravitystorm@... writes: In making my recent transport map[1] I've found there's a (relatively) large number of nodes in the UK tagged railway=station, when they aren't stations I realise that there are additional tags to try to indicate that they don't exist (such as disused=yes) but I don't think this is a particularly useful approach, I thoroughly agree. It's not just stations: any kind of extra oh no it isn't tag makes life difficult for users of the data. I've even seen status=desire to indicate that a path doesn't exist, but it would be nice if it did... Any unambiguous tagging scheme you can think of would be fine. (railway=abandoned_station would also be possible) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Things that aren't stations tagged railway=station
80n 80n80n@... writes: I've even seen status=desire Here's a description, and a nice photo, of a desire path: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path Ah, you're right. I'm glad I didn't try to retag it. -- Ed Avis e...@waniassset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Contributor Terms vs OS OpenData Licence
Perhaps the best course of action would be for an additional checkbox on the contributor terms page to say 'I have used OS OpenData'. Then people would be able to sign up to support the licence change, if they wish, and it would be up to the legal people at OSMF to decide whether the data from these OS-using accounts is clean, or has to be deleted. But at least then it could be decided once rather than each mapper having to agonize about it. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Mapping buildings with gables
andrew andrewhainosm@... writes: Should we be mapping the outline of the gable because it is the greatest extent of the building, the bay because it is the important bit or a straight line because the bay and gable are too small to map sensibly? I think technically you should map what's at ground level. The building has an 'implicit' layer=0 which implies ground level. But this is a pretty weak argument; a stronger precedent would be to see what other mapping providers such as the Ordnance Survey do. I believe OS shows ground level but I'm not sure. In practice map whatever you can see clearly the aerial photo. Even with the Bing imagery we cannot clearly see the roof of the building distinct from its ground floor walls. Beggars can't be choosers. Sometimes I elaborately trace the building outline; sometimes I map a whole terrace of houses as mere rectangles. It depends on how good the Bing imagery is in that area and what else is nearby to be mapped. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Maxspeed tagging for the UK
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: Are people happy with: GB:motorway (which implies 70 mph at present and possibly 80 mph in the future) GB:dual_carriageway (which implies 70 mph at present) GB:single_carriageway (which implies 60 mph at present) I think this is a sensible scheme and can go either into 'maxspeed' (in which case client applications will need a lookup table of what GB:motorway means) or else into 'maxspeed:sign' (in which case the 'maxspeed' tag contains the literal mph value, and will need automated retagging in case the national limit changes). However, one flaw is that the speed limit sign is not for 'dual carriageway limit applies' but rather 'national speed limit applies'. So we still would not be tagging exactly what appears on the sign, but adding some additional interpretation. I think that is fair enough, but those who hold to a strict on-the-ground principle may disagree. (I don't currently map speed limits unless they are very low, like 5mph, so my view should not carry as much weight as that of mappers who actively maintain the highway network, or those who use the speed limit data.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis and ITO Map now updating daily. New stats for OSM Analysis. New overlay maps for ITO Map
Here are some examples of not:name and highway=no: http://oscompare.raggedred.net/?zoom=14lat=51.54846lon=-0.21501layers=B0TF From the comparison report you can see only two errors remaining. That is because the others have been checked, and where OS was wrong a not:name has been tagged. If you download the map for that area you'll see some ways tagged with highway=no. This is where I visited and found there was no road there any more. The highway=no way is just a placeholder to mark the not:name tag for the check. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Maxspeed tagging for the UK
Chris Hill osm@... writes: I'd use maxspeed:national . All of the roads being discussed are in the UK, so they do not need UK: or GB: namespaces. True enough in principle but it can be difficult for client applications to work out that fact. I expect they would prefer to just get the tags for a way and not have to compare its bounding box against country outlines. It is not a big deal to add the extra three characters to tag 'GB:national' instead of 'national', so I suggest this is one of the cases where the most sensible thing is to tag data that's technically redundant, but makes querying easier. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Maxspeed tagging for the UK
Richard Mann richard.mann.westoxford@... writes: So maxspeed=30mph+source:maxspeed=national means: there's some street lights and no signs. If there's some street lights and no signs comes to mean something else, then a bot can change the maxspeed=30mph (adding a note that it's done so). In other words, you suggest that maxspeed should hold the speed limit that applies, rather than 'what is on the ground'. If such an approach is followed, could I suggest tagging 'maxspeed_sign=...' as well as or instead of a source tag? For example maxspeed=30mph maxspeed_sign=no maxspeed=30mph maxspeed_sign=30mph Then both the 'tag what's on the ground' and 'tag what's most useful' camps could have a way to record the information they want. For more complex cases, such as the presence or absence of street lights, a source:maxspeed tag might still be needed. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Rebooting the NAPTAN import?
Derick Rethans osm@... writes: What uses the bus route data anyway? I do And Harry: http://www.harrywood.co.uk /blog/2011/03/28/bus-route-rendering-at-rewiredstate/ My question was really a way to ask 'what format should bus routes be tagged in so that software can use them?'. I _think_ that the above example is using the relations and not the route_ref on individual stops. The trouble is, route_ref is directly marked on the ground. The path followed by a bus in the correct order, although it is more useful information, is also harder to discover. In the time it took to ride on a bus from Croydon to Crystal Palace, or wherever, I could map a hundred streets and other POIs. It's a pity that Transport for London's data feeds are under unsuitable terms. Perhaps at least we can make sure that OSM contains all the bus stops with the necessary tags to cross-reference them against the TfL data set. I don't know what the situation is in other areas. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Rebooting the NAPTAN import?
What we seem to be edging towards is a mixed tagging of route_ref and relations, being respectively the 'rough' and 'proper' way to tag bus routes, and the need for some lint-like tool to reconcile the two - at least as far as migrating data from route_ref to the ideal tagging. If you just wish to verify the position of the bus stop and not any of the other information like name, local_ref or route_ref, then you can often find the position using Bing imagery. I've adjusted a handful of stops this way and marked naptan:verified=yes but tagged a note to say that only the position was checked. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Hack weekend
I'd like to attend the hack weekend tomorrow (though not sure yet I'll be able to make it). I have added my name to the wiki page - hopefully the building reception will have the new page and not a printout from Friday? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder updates - postal addresses, house maps and error maps
Steve Doerr steve.doerr@... writes: 'Postcode W9 is badly formed' - many streets are tagged with just the first part of the postcode (the outbound code). I do however want to flag these as, while they are certainly useful, they are not 'true postcodes'. I agree with the last point: 'postcode' is a misnomer in these cases. This form of addressing existed for decades before 'postcodes' were invented. 'W9' (or 'W.9') would have been referred to as a 'postal district', The question is whether we want to invent a new postal_district tag for these and retag them all, or continue tagging them as postal_code. I don't see the harm in overloading the postal_code tag to contain both full postcodes and these short codes. If we accept that as established practice, then they don't need a warning. (The warning doesn't say anything useful because it is not possible to just go in and fix it, as for example when a postcode is in lower case, nor does it indicate wrong data - just incomplete data, which we are used to having in OSM.) On the other hand, if we agree that postal_code (or addr:postcode) should be for the full postcode only, then these should be pushed off to another tag and it makes sense to warn about any remaining cases. Of course, there is also a middle way where they don't get retagged, but not accepted as correct either, and the warning keeps firing and people get used to ignoring it, but I think that is less good than the other two choices. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder updates - postal addresses, house maps and error maps
Matt Williams lists@... writes: Possible bug: I just tried searching for my own address (42c Mulberry Road) and it returned no results, What I _plan_ to add it that if you search for '42c Mulberry Road' then it will indeed return a result as you'd expect but there's no way to do anything useful if you search for just 'Mulberry Road'. This is because since the house is not in a relation there's no way to group together disparate houses with addr:street=Mulberry Road into separate streets. If I understand you rightly, you're saying that you could return all such houses across the whole country but you wouldn't be able to group them by street. Some fishing around in the map for a nearby street with that name would be needed. This is certainly an advantage of mapping it as a relation. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder updates - postal addresses, house maps and error maps
The new error map is great, I'll add it to the set of 'lint' tools I keep an eye on. There is one false positive however: 'Postcode W9 is badly formed' - many streets are tagged with just the first part of the postcode (the outbound code). This is signed on the ground, and is useful to disambiguate street names, so it ought not to be an error. I think you are already allowing it on ways, but there are a few odd nodes that have it, usually road junctions. I wouldn't tag it on the junction node myself, but if it's there then it is not wrong. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] new ITO Map service in beta
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: ITO are pleased to announce a set of new 'overlay maps' for OpenStreetMap which can highlights some of the data layers, Looks useful for enabling a whole new class of 'noname hunts' now that the unnamed streets are almost all gone in inner London. Thanks. Here is an example of a school which is named in OSM, but highlighted in red: http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/ito_map/main?view=6 bbox=-12417.127097309,6714804.31181825,-11084.256416825001,6715625.24072455 layers=base_style=clear_map_history=true -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] new ITO Map service in beta
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: Does the highlighting still work when POIs are mapped as a point instead of an area? No - unfortunately we can't do anything with nodes yet. Understood. Nowadays the Bing imagery is good enough that schools and churches (though perhaps not all shops or restaurants) can be traced as buildings or areas, even though in the early days of OSM it was normal to make a node for them. One of the useful armchair tasks that can be done with the Bing imagery is to hunt for such POIs mapped as a node and where the building shape is obvious, trace it and move the tags to the building. I don't believe there is currently a 'lint' map that suggests such candidates. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data
This is great stuff - could I make a few suggestions? - When displaying the textual address put a comma between name and street. For example http://milliams.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodefinder/house/way/42732730/ should show 'Mole Avon, Station Yard'. The comma is not necessary for house *numbers* but it is for names. - If a street does have house numbers but not the particular number entered, there might be the option to log this in a bug database. The following two suggestions would make the tool more useful, but they might be out of scope if your intention is strictly to show fully-tagged Karlsruhe schema data and nothing else. - Have you considered using the Code Point Open data as a fallback in case the postcode is not in OSM? It would not allow an exact address to be pinpointed but it could give a link to the right area of the map with a hint to get to work populating it fully. - Similarly if a street is found but has no house numbers, zoom to that street. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data
Tom Chance tom@... writes: I've been switching any feature I find over to addr:postcode. If this is the consensus view then perhaps they should be changed en masse? At least just for the United Kingdom. What do others think? (I've always used postal_code until now, perhaps because when I started mapping the Karlsruhe 'addr' schema was not finalized.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS VectorMap District with LandForm Panorama contours overlay
Luke Smith luke.smith@... writes: The beta version of VMD is now available. Details on the OS website at http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2011/03/ os-vectormap-district-graduates-to-beta-release/ Some things have been generalised, others improved. Notably the building shapes are more detailed than before, but sadly still worse than those on OS Street View (which are themselves simplified). Compare the example they give of the 'beta' release: http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/christchurch_beta.jpg with the same area in Street View http://os.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.73493lon=-1.79026zoom=16 -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data
Derick Rethans osm@... writes: For a common address, such as 2 High Street, you return multiple results, with no obvious distinguishing feature. Please include the addr:city value in the results (if present); Actually, city wouldn't always work. There are f.e. 3 Victoria Roads in London. Yes, I found this to my cost when trying to view a house in 'Victoria Road, West Hampstead' as the estate agent put it. There is no such street - but there is one near your house in nearby Kilburn. By matching up OSM data with average house prices, it might be possible to make a filter translating estate-agent-speak to normal addresses. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Postcode finder based on OSM data
Matt Williams lists@... writes: I'm not sure that adding the postcoded street itself to my database would work since the base unit I work with is the 'house' or 'delivery point' whereas the street is simply part of the address. That's absolutely right but it might still be useful to provide a postcode-to- street lookup if only this lower-resolution data is there. Adding postcodes at the street level might be a useful halfway step between no postcode data and the exhaustive tagging of every building. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS and OSM
Tom Chance tom@... writes: Steve, In Southwark I experimented with bulk importing buildings auto-traced from OS StreetView, but gave up in favour of manually tracing from Bing imagery. In fairness you should mention that the Bing imagery was not available at the time of the original OpenData release. It's clear that the simplified Street View building shapes are inferior to high-res aerial photos that Bing has let us use. But back when we only had the low-res Yahoo photos, the Street View building shapes were very useful and typically superior to the early OSM building tracing efforts. You mentioned errors in OS Locator, and it does indeed have some, but typically fewer errors than a single-pass ground survey (this based on my experience rechecking mismatches across London). It is great to do a ground survey and then use OS Locator to check for mistakes, but it would be equally possible to populate names from OS Locator and then do a ground survey to check for mistakes. The total amount of work involved is the same, but by kick-starting from the OS data you get to the 90% mark faster, even though the final 10% takes time. Again, I would re-iterate that the OS Locator names usually have a lower error rate than OSM ground surveys, so I would have more confidence in a street name populated from OS only than in one that had been found on the ground but not checked against OS. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS and OSM
Chris Hill osm@... writes: Much of North and North East Lincolnshire is only in OSM because it has been traced from OS OpenData. Opinions differ about whether this makes OS OpenData a good thing or a bad thing. Personally I am delighted that people have been able to quickly boost OSM's coverage from 'nothing' to 'basic' in these areas, and provided a base for further mapping. But then, I am an incrementalist kind of mapper and I almost always work by refining and adding detail to areas already partly complete. Opinions also differ about whether having basic coverage in an area, rather than a blank sheet, attracts OSM users and contributors or drives them away. This too usually depends on the way an individual contributor prefers to work. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS and OSM
Andy Allan gravitystorm@... writes: It is great to do a ground survey and then use OS Locator to check for mistakes, but it would be equally possible to populate names from OS Locator and then do a ground survey to check for mistakes. Rhhhttt - that's not exactly an interesting day out for most people. Walking round collecting street names. That is how I started in OSM and it is still today the core of my mapping activity. (Although these days, a typical 'noname hunt' ends up with mostly building names and POIs mapped, most of the unnamed streets having turned out to be service roads or footways. But I do try to walk along them all on foot.) Great. An OSM database filled with only OS data is a) at very best, only as accurate as OS data and b) a massive disincentive to people to go out mapping. As I've mentioned this 'complete disincentive' is opinion, not fact, and for me personally it's an opinion I do not agree with. I have found the OS data invaluable for provoking further mapping expeditions and refinement of areas which, until the OpenData release, had appeared to be complete. (They weren't.) For example, at http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.548234lon=-0.157174zoom=18layers=M OS Street View showed some extra roads which weren't mapped. I traced in the roads and then walked along each one finding building names and other features. In the end, they turned out to be un-named service roads, but it was useful to revisit the area to check it in more detail. I really don't understand why you keep arguing against the sequence of a) send some mappers out then b) use OS as a check for the minority of mistakes. I don't argue against that at all, I think it's great. But in fact that is not the classical OSM way, which has been (a) armchair trace from Yahoo imagery then (b) send out the mappers to find street names and other stuff. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Loch Lomond National Park sorry for 'Giro Bay' map
These maps will probably become collector's items: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12684156 -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Pub meetup in Fulham tomorrow evening, reminder
Andrew andrewhainosm@... writes: The meetup tomorrow evening (8th March) You mean tomorrow, Thursday 10th March? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Ordnance Survey Public Sector Mapping Agreement
For those that haven't seen, the Ordnance Survey is going to provide local authorities with access to its maps free of charge from April 1st. http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk /oswebsite/business/sectors/government/publicpsmafaqs.html This doesn't directly affect OSM but it will provide tougher competition when we try to persuade local councils to use OSM. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Welsh Street Map
Andy Berry andynberry@... writes: I have a spreadsheet containing a list of 1800 streets and the official Welsh names agreed by Wrexham Council a number of years ago. Ultimately I would like to produce a Welsh version of the OSM streets in the area. Is there a way of adding the name:cy without manually searching for each English name. I would not want to overwrite any existing Welsh names. You could use a script to do this. Please post a link to the file you have and I or somebody else (I'll have time this weekend) will hack up something to download the existing OSM data, check the names, and (if you choose to do so) upload the name:cy tags. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Southwark update
Jerry Clough : SK53 on OSM SK53_osm@...; writes: Incidentally, 0% discrepancy between OSM and OS Locator is inadequate as an indication of streetname completion My measure of completeness is that all the noname streets are gone. (That does depend on someone having traced everything from aerial imagery or OS Street View so that they can then be visited on the ground.) On that measure there are still a few council estates and odd spots in Southwark that need visiting, but I am working through them. There are quite a few names on the ground and in OSM that don't appear in OS Locator. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Southwark update
Tom Chance tom@... writes: [Southwark council using OSM] Alas, they were considering this for some time but really wanted a dataset with building outlines and I've been too slow in my mass-tracing efforts. In the end they went for a third party product based on OS Mastermap. Out of interest do you know how precise they wanted building outlines? In other words might they have been satisified with the blocky rectangles of OS Street View, or would manual tracing from Bing be needed, or would even that be too poor-quality? I wonder if it would be possible to simply purchase the building outlines from OS for the borough of Southwark and import them into OSM. I suppose they would want a ton of money for that. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Southwark update
Tom Chance tom@... writes: Tom, I've noticed you've added a large number of trees with species details supplied by Southwark Council. I've also tried to crowdsource the common names for all of the species in the data set and add those in, along with any fruit/nuts they produce for people like me who are interested in foraging. I think to get the common name you could grind your list against Wikipedia. Ideally, only the scientific name would need to be tagged in OSM, with natural language versions added automatically when rendering. Is that the plan? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Southwark update
Southwark's map is here http://maps.southwark.gov.uk/connect/index.jsp?tooltip=yes It is humbling to look at the Master Map-derived tiles and realize just how far we have to go. Tracing just a square kilometre from Bing is an hour or two's work, and then adding building names and house numbers requires a visit. But I don't need to tell you this :-(. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Southwark update
Tom Chance tom@... writes: Tom, I've noticed you've added a large number of trees with species details supplied by Southwark Council. Ideally, only the scientific name would need to be tagged in OSM, with natural language versions added automatically when rendering. No, I want to put the species, genus, common name and produce into OSM wherever possible. It's good for OSM users to have this information but if it's derived from a simple lookup of species name then it's not ideal to duplicate it on every object. For example suppose there was a mistake in your list mapping species to common name. If the common name was tagged on every tree, then correcting the mistake would involve retagging every tree object. On the other hand, if the tree is tagged with just the key needed for lookup (the species) then the information about common name can be corrected in a single place. Purely from a data modelling point of view I don't think it right to populate data into OSM when that data is not new information, but can be automatically derived from existing OSM data. Better to keep the lookup table of species information in a central place and give OSM the necessary data to point to it. On the other hand, if there is some new fact about the world, such as a particular tree which is known to give particularly tasty figs, then this can certainly be tagged. The key point is that it's information which could not be deduced from what's already there. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Populating redundant data (was: Southwark update)
The question of adding redundant data to OSM is something that needs to be addressed more generally. You are right that putting information in a denormalized form can make life easier for a user of the data. I'd like to see a way that the user could download OSM-style data with objects and tags but without all of that data needing to be stored in OSM itself. An additional layer would enhance the download with 'virtual tags' which are derived automatically from OSM and external data sources. This might also take care of some other controversies such as whether a speed limit should be tagged on every way (easy for users, but crufts up the database) or implied by the type of the way and which country it's in (such rules would best be documented in code rather than informally). But that's blue-sky dreaming. In the meantime if you feel that adding the extra tags to every tree is the simplest way, it's your call. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Southwark update
Jerry Clough : SK53 on OSM SK53_osm@...; writes: There are three (perhaps more) schemes : name:botanical=*, species=* and taxon=* You are right that name:botanical is a bit odd. It might be better as species:name:botanical or perhaps taxon:name:botanical That also allows for species:name:en and so on to store the common name in various languages (subject to earlier grumbles about tagging such redundant data in OSM itself). -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Wiki - United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines
Nick Whitelegg Nick.Whitelegg@... writes: The main problem with the wiki page is that it didn't distinguish between an official public footpath and a way which is there on the ground, but has no known designation or right of way status. my usual approach to the above is to tag with foot=permissive if that is explicitly or implicitly (evidence of frequent usage, stiles and gates, signs that imply walkers are OK such as No cycling or Dogs must be kept on leads) indicated. That is good for rural areas but I was thinking of cities. There are all sorts of paths between buildings, pedestrian shortcuts, even walkways inside shopping centres and so on. I believe these should be tagged as highway=footway and should not have any designation=x or foot=designated or other cruft added, unless there is definite knowledge of the right of way status. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Wiki - United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines
Richard Mann richard.mann.westoxford@... writes: There are all sorts of paths between buildings, pedestrian shortcuts, even walkways inside shopping centres and so on. As per my original post, I think the wiki ought to record the dominant usage. I think plain highway=footway is dominant for such situations. Then I think we are in agreement. Please check the wiki page after my recent edits to it. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Wiki - United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines
The main problem with the wiki page is that it didn't distinguish between an official public footpath and a way which is there on the ground, but has no known designation or right of way status. (Or else the page just didn't cover that case, even though it is by far the most common.) I've edited the page to add a new section about plain old footways which are tagged with highway=footway; please have a look. This is the common practice in London at least. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] B72 is a wrap
Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists ajrlists@... writes: http://blog.mappa-mercia.org/2011/02/whats-in-postcode.html Great work! How can you tell when you have every postcode and is there some way of checking them against the OS OpenData postcode centroids? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Armchair-mapping postcodes (was: B72 is a wrap)
Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists ajrlists@... writes: Great work! How can you tell when you have every postcode and is there some way of checking them against the OS OpenData postcode centroids? Just by being systematic. If you have Chillly's codepoint postcode layer sitting over BING its easy in the editor to assign the postcodes as you see them when adding buildings. http://www.raggedred.net/codepoint/ I see - so you can use your judgement to work out the area of a postcode based on its centroid and the streets and buildings nearby. Since this isn't using any kind of ground survey to check the data, I wonder if it would be a suitable task for a bot? A program making guesses about postcode areas might not be any more fallible than a human doing the same task. Of course it could only be done in areas that had already reached a high standard of completeness, ideally with buildings traced as well as streets. Or, perhaps, the robot could make suggestions which a human would then accept or reject, so that 95% of the area could be covered, with human assistance for the last few tricky bits. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Armchair-mapping postcodes (was: B72 is a wrap)
Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists ajrlists@... writes: http://www.raggedred.net/codepoint/ I see - so you can use your judgement to work out the area of a postcode based on its centroid and the streets and buildings nearby. It's not that simple. You need to do the ground survey first to get the house numbers and work out which property belongs to which street. Ah, right. I thought it sounded too good to be true! Jerry C. also pointed out that house numbers have to be present. So the ground survey is to add the house numbers - or I suppose just addr:street would be sufficient in most cases? - and then the armchair part is putting those together with the code point data to find buildings in a particular postcode. OSM's coverage of streets is much better than its coverage of buildings. Might it make sense to tag postcodes on ways? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Armchair-mapping postcodes (was: B72 is a wrap)
Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists ajrlists@... writes: OSM's coverage of streets is much better than its coverage of buildings. Might it make sense to tag postcodes on ways? Nope, streets often have more than one postcode for the properties on that street. It's not the street that has a postcode anyway, it's the delivery points for the mail, i.e. the letterbox in your front door. That is true. But given that in many areas we have good streets but not good buildings, there may be value in adding a simplified version of the postcode data in which a way is tagged with the postcode(s) that apply along it. The use case I am thinking of is the common 'enter your postcode' on business websites or over the telephone. Given a postcode you can find the street (or streets) which it corresponds to. This means that a house number plus postcode is sufficient to make the whole address. A simplified tagging of postcode=x;y on a way would let OSM be used to map postcode to street name. It would not be quite as precise as the PAF, giving two possible streets in some cases where there is only one in reality. But it might be useful for small organizations who want to give people an easy way to enter their address, without paying for the PAF data. (Potentially, a web service could offer this lookup and feed back statistics on which streets were chosen, to be used to fix up the OSM data.) By no means should tagging postcode on ways replace the more thorough building- by-building survey with street numbers, but it might be a first step, just as we usually tend to put the street network in first with no buildings and come back for the extra detail later. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM analysis - two wrong names?
Tom Chance tom@... writes: There is a road in Southwark with two incorrect names listed against it: Correct: Gibbons Rents Major error: Gibbons Rent Minor error: Gibbon's Rent (By the way, the history of this street suggests the 'correct' name would be Gibbon's Rents, after a man named Gibbon, but let's not go into that now. The street sign, at least at the junction with Magdalen Street, has no apostrophe.) This is related to the discussion of what to do if there is a former street that no longer exists on the ground. You could add an entirely bogus way in parallel with the existing one, tag it not:name=whatever and highway=no. The ITO check will soon be modified to pick this up. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: What do you do when a road has completely gone? Actually we are going to accept an value for the highway tag, so it could be highway=banana or highway=not or whatever. Cool, so we can add spurious ways tagged with not:name=xxx and highway=no to suppress the check. There are a couple of cases like this in central London which I will retag soon. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: I am aware that we still have many place names missing (available as open data in the NatGaz file released by Traveline/DfT). Place name nodes are a useful thing to have for address searches and should not raise any objections about messing up existing data, provided they're added only if there isn't an existing place node within 10km. So I would suggest importing this data if it is of reasonably high quality. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: If we import OS OpenData into OSM, then OSM becomes national *but* is no longer rich. I can't agree with that at all. A blank area is not any more 'rich' than one with basic details complete. We do not improve the map by leaving blank bits. There are parts of OSM today which have only very basic street layout, worse than the OS data. Do you suggest deleting them to make the map 'richer'? Because no-one is out there trudging the streets, because no-one cares for the data, it becomes sterile. I note, once again, that the Worcester estates that someone helpfully traced from StreetView last year are still bereft of most of the footpaths and half of the road names. And estates that nobody traced from StreetView, and were left blank... are mostly still blank. Perhaps we do need some better motivating tool to encourage people to visit areas which have been only traced from OS. When things are traced from Yahoo the old 'nonames' tiles straightforwardly directs mappers to go and visit them on foot. An equivalent for OS might be useful. I have been thinking, too, about a 'noname buildings' layer for large buildings with no name or address. Can't we actually have a go at doing it ourselves and finishing the UK this year? Say right, let's look at a bot in spring 2012, but we have a year to get this right? I think that would be a fair compromise - I think we have already waited long enough, but I'm willing to go with your suggestion. It does not imply at all that in 2012 we should just give up on mapping parties and community outreach and all the other good things you have talked about. Only that we should consider using all the other resources we have too, to make the best map possible. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: What do you do when a road has completely gone? Mascall Avenue in Oxford has completely gone. There's a new housing estate, with a road network that doesn't match what was there before, so there's no way to mark with old_name or not:name or anything. I suggest that the main upload process should spot an attempt to add back a feature which has been removed with the message ' Mascall Avenue was removed by -this- edit on xx-xx- with the comment 'blar blar' Are you sure you want to add it back'. A bot would also ideally do this prior to it getting to the upload stage. Wikipedia has a similar warning for people attempting to re-create a previously deleted article. Hmm, just possibly, but I think relying on user intelligence and good judgement is better. (The mapper needs to have those anyway.) Nobody would blindly trace a street from OS through the middle of some existing features - at least I hope not! And any putative bot should definitely behave better than that too. I would suggest that whoever removed Mascall Avenue from the map should have mapped what replaced it - a brownfield site or whatever - to avoid future confusion. It's most unlikely for features to be removed from OSM and replaced with an entirely blank canvas. The Wikipedia parallel is not exact: an article is deleted from Wikipedia usually not because the thing it refers to doesn't exist in the real world, but because it is not 'notable' or 'verifiable' or has been merged into another article. OSM has a much simpler criterion of whether the thing exists. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Girl of four died in turn-restriction error
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12360687 The lack of good turn-restriction information can be lethal. (Of course, this news story proves that people should keep looking at the road signs even when using sat-nav. It also proves that sometimes they do not.) Perhaps we need an explicit tagging for 'no turn restriction' at junctions. Data checking can then produce a warning for major road intersections where the turn-restriction info is missing. To keep the report manageable, it would have to be restricted to junctions where one of the roads is highway=primary or secondary. That's still a lot of checking to do. I have sometimes wondered whether harvesting GPS traces would help with this task. If every trace shows turning left at the junction, flag a warning for somebody to check whether a turn restriction needs to be added. But to do that we would need a bigger collection of traces, appropriately tagged to show which are from motor vehicles. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: If the OS name is different from the streetsign and general usage I put it in not:name If it is apparently a valid alternative I put it on alt_name I hadn't realized that your OS Locator data check looks at alt_name too, thanks. Sometimes it is necessary to add both alt_name and not_name. For example OS Locator contains the name 'Edgware Road The Hyde'. In OSM we don't tag with both names concatenated like that, so I added name=The Hyde, alt_name=Edgware Road (chosen since 'The Hyde' is more common in addressing), and then not:name to quieten the check. It isn't appropriate these days to have the A14 labeled as 'Huntingdon Road' however Huntingdon Road is not 'wrong' either. In these cases I put the name Hungingdon Road into alt_name and leave name empty. In this way it is cleared from the OS Locator comparison test but isn't rendered on the main map. That's one way to do it. I think I would prefer to put the name in the name tag but then perhaps have some kind of hint to say that it should not be rendered. (Or a general rule that 'A' roads be shown with their number not a name.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Andy Allan gravitystorm@... writes: This started over Xmas I decided to experimented using Potlatch 2, OS Open Data and Bing aerial to map a completely unmapped town (Lakenheath) to OSM as far as I could without visting the place. I've just checked a few well-mapped areas - Tendring, Hull and Edinburgh - and the not:name is running at 2%, 3.1% and 1.9% of all the roads. So for every 100 roads you've added, you could be adding 1 to 3 bogus names Just a quick data point - from my experience in London visiting streets to check the name mismatches between OSM and OS Locator, the ratio of mistakes is about ten to one in favour of OS Locator. In other words when the two disagree, it is almost always OSM which has been wrong on the ground. (Today, after cleanup work, the OSM names are more correct.) This is without counting obvious misspellings such as 'Stret' instead of 'Street', which don't need a resurvey to correct them. (They are plentiful in OSM but somewhat rare in OS Locator.) Come back when the problem is I've spent a day out mapping and X could make me work faster. I think this is exactly the situation. In my experience, using the OS data is both faster and more accurate than manual surveying, and I have done a great deal of both. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Dair Grant dair@... writes: Lastly, I don't believe that adding data from external sources discourages contributors. Quite the opposite. It is a blank canvas that puts people off. The way to bring in contributors is to show a map with a few missing details that are so tempting to fix 'just one thing'... Is there an example of a road import that has led to an increase in contributors? I thought that in most cases it had the exact opposite effect. I was thinking in particular of the Yahoo tracing. In the beginning OSM was largely blank and the only way to add new ways was to go out and make GPS tracks. I suggest, but cannot prove, that seeing an entirely blank canvas doesn't entice you to start adding to the map, which must necessarily involve adding small bits at a time. Once the Yahoo aerial photos became available and many OSM contributors traced large areas from them (yes, even though they had not visited those areas on the ground!) then anyone could contribute small bits and pieces such as the name of their local street or the pub on the corner. This is how I got started. Now importing ways from OS data is not quite the same as tracing from an aerial photo but I suggest a similar principle applies. IMO the blank canvas is what pulls people in: an area that's 90% already there finds it harder to attract new mappers as it already looks done (filling in all the footpaths, post boxes, pubs, etc, is something you tend to do once you're already hooked). On the other hand what you say here sounds plausible too. However, we do have some real-world evidence. There are towns which have been blank for a long time on OSM. If a blank canvas were a good way to encourage contributors, they would have been filled in by now. The fact that they are still missing suggests that the strategy of deliberately leaving an area blank and hoping for somebody to go out and survey it from scratch is not always effective. The way the OSM project has grown is by the principle of 'do what you can'. Map something roughly using the best of your knowledge, which is still better than leaving it entirely unmapped. Then somebody can come along and improve it later. If you want a 1:1 copy of the OS data, why not just use the OS data? What I want (and I think what others want) is a map in machine-readable form which corresponds to the real world. The source it originally came from does not matter. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Adding a further 250, 000 UK roads quickly using a Bot?
Dair Grant dair@... writes: There is suggestion raised by a number of people, but refuted by others that imports reduce the number of contributors. It has been denied, not refuted. I think the closest there is to real data on the effect is: http://www.asklater.com/matt/wordpress/2009/09/imports-and-the-community-ii We do also have real data on the effect of not doing imports - the towns which are almost completely unmapped. While importing data from OS may not be ideal, doing nothing and waiting for somebody to go and map it doesn't seem like a successful strategy either, if the past five years are a guide. For prosperous city areas there is no difficulty finding a local mapper who will take on a new hobby to get away from the computer screen for a few hours. But OSM has a real coverage gap in socially disadvantaged areas (Fake SteveC has a pithier name for them). But we want a complete map and not just a map of where the typical OSM contributor lives. If using some of the work already done by the Ordnance Survey helps us get there, that has to be a good thing. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
