Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
IMO it's better to add something clear than to shoehorn something into a generic tag. Especially if you end up with compound values. OK so they could be parsed, but it's just making work (both processing and maintaining). Better to have something unambiguous like national_rail=yes and london_underground=yes. On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:35 AM, AJ Ashton aj.ash...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Richard everyone, This started off simply as an effort to improve our display London Underground stations using existing OSM data, but was scope-creeped into much more and apparently we messed up. We've found that the lack of familiar London Underground and National Rail icons is a particularly strong sticking point with people who would otherwise happily switch to OSM, which is partly why we chose to focus on it. The tagging for stations is not so consistent, and my blog post goes into details about how we attempt to account for this as much as possible at the import rendering stages. However certain inconsistencies seemed simple enough to just fix in OSM. We saw network=National Rail tags already in use at various stations and didn't think continuing to use them would be an issue. The imports/mechanical edits policies didn't come to my mind because we started with just a handful of edits. Even though this obviously ended up turning into many more, I thought that things were being done quite manually and carefully. There were no scripts or bots used, but the error the Craig points out looks like the result of a very bulk and incorrect copy/paste (or something) so clearly there were problems here. ... something that might seem simple from afar actually turns out to be a bit more nuanced, but by giving careful consideration to the nuances, we're making what is hands-down the best map of the world. I hope we can have a similarly useful conversation about the stations too. I guess our excitement to make awesome maps tripped us up here. Richard pointed out specifically that 'the network=National Rail tag is of debatable value and relevance'. I'm curious about the details of why. We just went with what seemed to be an established tagging system (but I guess is actually not). I am interested to hear tagging ideas that would be both correct and useful for rendering a map with appropriate icon styles. AJ @ MapBox ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
AJ Ashton wrote: We've found that the lack of familiar London Underground and National Rail icons is a particularly strong sticking point with people who would otherwise happily switch to OSM, which is partly why we chose to focus on it. Absolutely. It does look really good. :) I guess our excitement to make awesome maps tripped us up here. Richard pointed out specifically that 'the network=National Rail tag is of debatable value and relevance'. I'm curious about the details of why. Sadly anything to do with our godforsaken privatised railway system is always more complicated than it needs to be! For me I think the most problematic aspect is that there are actually several things that could be called networks, particularly in urban areas which have PTEs (Passenger Transport Executives) or similar. For example, there's Network West Midlands around Birmingham, Metro in West/South Yorkshire, Merseytravel/Merseyrail in Liverpool, and so on. (London has its own peculiarities.) So you end up with network=National Rail;Metro which is nasty, and breaks most toolchains which don't understand multiple values for one key. It may lend itself to an ncn/rcn/lcn or nwn/rwn/lwn solution, or Richard M's idea of using a distinct tag, or tagging station operators (e.g. operator=First Great Western) and rendering based on a set of those. I'm tempted to suggest a generic tag for any country's national railway system (mainline=yes|no or somesuch), and then you could render based on this tag and the UK polygon. Or indeed we could just go with network=National Rail as a good enough solution. I'd be interested to hear what others think. cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Bulk-railway-station-changes-tp5708989p5709044.html Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
Richard Fairhurst wrote: Or indeed we could just go with network=National Rail as a good enough solution. My issue with National Rail was that, to me, (as I explained to the Peruvian chap who's edited Mansfield Woodhouse station): National Rail means these people: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ , also http://www.atoc.org/ It's just an industry association of the various Train Operating Companies. They don't own, operate or have any direct involvement with the British rail _network_. The only place I've heard national rail* used is in London to refer to non-underground stations (and even there, you still here British Rail station). Everyone else says Railway. I don't think that network=network_rail works either, as there will inevitably by issues in London where NR works on infrastructure for TfL Overground services. So network=railway for me, since that's probably the best description of what it actually is. Cheers, Andy * in lower case, where national simply means non-underground, and is a description rather than a name. ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
AJ Ashton wrote: .. and apparently we messed up. ... AJ @ MapBox Sorry, but who's we here? Is it a bunch of people at some other mailing list/forum, or who work for Mapbox, or something else? Last night I spotted changes from someone (I think*) from Peru, and (I think) from the US - were these co-ordinated, did (a) just follow (b) blindly**, or what? For the avoidance of doubt, I'm sure that everyone's trying to do the right thing here. Just a question of what and how. Cheers, Andy * now that everyone now uses gmail addresses it's difficult to tell which side of the planet anyone's on. ** I've seen naptan-coded bus stops in Germany ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
National Rail is what ATOC came up with to describe things that are represented by the double-arrow symbol, and which would formerly have been referred to as British Rail or informally as the rail network. (The staff refer to it as the railway, but that's another subject) National Rail isn't a great name, but it's the correct one. The symbol is owned by ATOC. On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:00 PM, SomeoneElse li...@mail.atownsend.org.ukwrote: Richard Fairhurst wrote: Or indeed we could just go with network=National Rail as a good enough solution. My issue with National Rail was that, to me, (as I explained to the Peruvian chap who's edited Mansfield Woodhouse station): National Rail means these people: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ , also http://www.atoc.org/ It's just an industry association of the various Train Operating Companies. They don't own, operate or have any direct involvement with the British rail _network_. The only place I've heard national rail* used is in London to refer to non-underground stations (and even there, you still here British Rail station). Everyone else says Railway. I don't think that network=network_rail works either, as there will inevitably by issues in London where NR works on infrastructure for TfL Overground services. So network=railway for me, since that's probably the best description of what it actually is. Cheers, Andy * in lower case, where national simply means non-underground, and is a description rather than a name. __**_ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk-gbhttp://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
On 16/05/12 04:35, AJ Ashton wrote: Hi Richard everyone, This started off simply as an effort to improve our display London Underground stations using existing OSM data, but was scope-creeped into much more and apparently we messed up. We've found that the lack of familiar London Underground and National Rail icons is a particularly strong sticking point with people who would otherwise happily switch to OSM, which is partly why we chose to focus on it. The tagging for stations is not so consistent, and my blog post goes into details about how we attempt to account for this as much as possible at the import rendering stages. However certain inconsistencies seemed simple enough to just fix in OSM. We saw network=National Rail tags already in use at various stations and didn't think continuing to use them would be an issue. The imports/mechanical edits policies didn't come to my mind because we started with just a handful of edits. Even though this obviously ended up turning into many more, I thought that things were being done quite manually and carefully. There were no scripts or bots used, but the error the Craig points out looks like the result of a very bulk and incorrect copy/paste (or something) so clearly there were problems here. ... something that might seem simple from afar actually turns out to be a bit more nuanced, but by giving careful consideration to the nuances, we're making what is hands-down the best map of the world. I hope we can have a similarly useful conversation about the stations too. I guess our excitement to make awesome maps tripped us up here. Richard pointed out specifically that 'the network=National Rail tag is of debatable value and relevance'. I'm curious about the details of why. We just went with what seemed to be an established tagging system (but I guess is actually not). I am interested to hear tagging ideas that would be both correct and useful for rendering a map with appropriate icon styles. I think talking to local mappers before making remote changes over a whole country is not just a good idea, but should be mandatory and failure to do so should routinely be met with a revert. I accept that your motives were good. The railways in the UK are a mix of nationalised and private companies who operate train services on tracks they don't own, using stations they might operate or might not, who sometimes get represented publicly by a company who doesn't run trains, operate stations or own any track. Some bigger stations are operated by the national track operator but most are operated by train operators, even though other train operators will often share the station too. In some cites there are added complications of underground, light rail and trams. In addition there are privately owned and run heritage lines, some of which provide local commuter services as well as tourist services. You could use the well-established operator tag to help to distinguish the stations. It would take research to find them all and there will be a longish list to wade through for rendering. Maybe some UK mappers could help you with their local stations. -- Cheers, Chris user: chillly ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
Thanks for the explanations of the complicated 'network' situation. Richard Fairhurst wrote: It may lend itself to an ncn/rcn/lcn or nwn/rwn/lwn solution, ... I'm tempted to suggest a generic tag for any country's national railway system (mainline=yes|no or somesuch), and then you could render based on this tag and the UK polygon. ... Either of these seem like good generic approaches. I'm sure there are numerous complications and caveats to discuss, but a relatively simple, global system is likely to have advantages for many applications of the data. ... or tagging station operators (e.g. operator=First Great Western) and rendering based on a set of those. Based on everyone's comments I'm leaning toward this as an alternative approach to start with. It sounds like data/tags are less ambiguous and already well-used (though not without oddities to be careful of). On the icon rendering side it's slightly more complicated, but totally manageable within our current rendering setup. The token-replacement feature for image paths in in Mapnik 2 is really fantastic. SomeoneElse wrote: Sorry, but who's we here? ... We is MapBox, or at least the few MapBox employees who made these edits. We're primarily based in the US, but also have some folks in South America and Europe. -- AJ Ashton ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
SomeoneElse on IRC noticed a big heap of debatable bulk changes to station nodes in the UK, seemingly made by people outside the UK and using Wikipedia as a source. I've reverted these (well, actually, at the time of writing the revert is running!). If the users would like to discuss the changes here first, then maybe we can arrive at some agreement. I'm not sure whether they're reading this so will write to them via the OSM messaging system too. cheers Richard ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
I wrote: SomeoneElse on IRC noticed a big heap of debatable bulk changes to station nodes in the UK Someone else (not SomeoneElse... hell this is confusing) has pointed me, off-list, to this: http://mapbox.com/blog/improved-british-rail-icons/ which obviously looks cool. I guess this is probably the source of the bulk edits. Without wanting to copy out the Mechanical Edits Policy word-for-word, I'd strongly reiterate the need (and, besides that, desirability) of consultation before making big changes like this. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. Most importantly, local insight gives better answers - that is, after all, the USP of OSM. The RoW tagging thread running at the moment on talk-gb is an excellent example of how it should work: something that might seem simple from afar actually turns out to be a bit more nuanced, but by giving careful consideration to the nuances, we're making what is hands-down the best map of the world. I hope we can have a similarly useful conversation about the stations too. cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Bulk-railway-station-changes-tp5708989p5708995.html Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
On 15/05/2012 20:16, Richard Fairhurst wrote: SomeoneElse on IRC noticed a big heap of debatable bulk changes to station nodes in the UK, seemingly made by people outside the UK and using Wikipedia as a source. I've reverted these (well, actually, at the time of writing the revert is running!). If the users would like to discuss the changes here first, then maybe we can arrive at some agreement. I'm not sure whether they're reading this so will write to them via the OSM messaging system too. I notice that some of these bulk edits tagged all of the stations on the Glasgow Subway as disused=yes. Which is clearly incorrect, the stations are definitely still open and in use. Craig ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Bulk railway station changes
Hi Richard everyone, This started off simply as an effort to improve our display London Underground stations using existing OSM data, but was scope-creeped into much more and apparently we messed up. We've found that the lack of familiar London Underground and National Rail icons is a particularly strong sticking point with people who would otherwise happily switch to OSM, which is partly why we chose to focus on it. The tagging for stations is not so consistent, and my blog post goes into details about how we attempt to account for this as much as possible at the import rendering stages. However certain inconsistencies seemed simple enough to just fix in OSM. We saw network=National Rail tags already in use at various stations and didn't think continuing to use them would be an issue. The imports/mechanical edits policies didn't come to my mind because we started with just a handful of edits. Even though this obviously ended up turning into many more, I thought that things were being done quite manually and carefully. There were no scripts or bots used, but the error the Craig points out looks like the result of a very bulk and incorrect copy/paste (or something) so clearly there were problems here. ... something that might seem simple from afar actually turns out to be a bit more nuanced, but by giving careful consideration to the nuances, we're making what is hands-down the best map of the world. I hope we can have a similarly useful conversation about the stations too. I guess our excitement to make awesome maps tripped us up here. Richard pointed out specifically that 'the network=National Rail tag is of debatable value and relevance'. I'm curious about the details of why. We just went with what seemed to be an established tagging system (but I guess is actually not). I am interested to hear tagging ideas that would be both correct and useful for rendering a map with appropriate icon styles. AJ @ MapBox ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
