Re: [Talk-GB] Tagging a named building now used for a different purpose

[Mark Goodge]

On 23/05/2019 22:09, Phillip Barnett wrote:
Not sure how to tag it now, but are you sure the name is correct? JW’s 
place of worship has always been known as a Kingdom Hall, not Wisdom.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Hall


No; this is definitely Wisdom Hall. It's an early name, probably from 
before the JWs standardised on Kingdom Hall. Which is also probably 
also why the name has stuck beyond their use of the building.


https://goo.gl/maps/drepqZxd7Dpy2fun9

https://www.samueljonespearls.co.uk/our-story/

Mark

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[Talk-GB] Tagging a named building now used for a different purpose

[Mark Goodge]

Looking for some advice...

There's a building in the town where I live that was originally 
constructed by the Jehovah's Witnesses and named, by them, "Wisdom 
Hall". It hasn't been used by the JWs now for several years, ever since 
they moved to a new location. The building is currently occupied by a 
jewellery company which uses it as their workshop.


However, the building is still known locally as "Wisdom hall", and that 
also still appears on the nameplate on the front of the building along 
with the current owner's trading name.


I've edited it to change it from a place of worship to a commercial 
building, as that's what it now is. (The previous tags were added in 
2015, well after it had ceased to be a place of worship, so I suspect 
the editor then was working from historic information).


However, I'm a bit unsure how best to tag it. Normally, commercial 
buildings have the owner's name as the value of the 'name' key. I could 
do that here, and then move the building name into the 'addr:housename' 
key, but that seems inappropriate. So I've left the building name as it 
was, which reflects current local usage.


But then, where does the current owner's name go? For now, I've put it 
into the 'operator' key. But I'm not really sure if that's the right 
place either.


This is the object in question:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/308217826

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Miniature railway or minimum gauge?

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/05/2019 22:13, jc...@mail.com wrote:

On 18/05/2019 18:03, Mark Goodge wrote:


The OSM wiki is correct to distinguish between miniature railways (ie,
ridable models) and small gauge "real" railways, as this reflects usage
among railway engineers and enthusiasts in the non-mapping community.


As I'm not a railway engineer or enthusiast I'm not sure what you mean,
so please can you give specific examples?


The most important difference, from an engineering/enthusiast 
perspective, is whether the line was originally built for a functional 
purpose (passenger/freight transport) rather than being just for the fun 
of the ride. Obviously, most narrow gauge railways these days exist 
solely for leisure purposes, but many of them were formerly functional 
railways. If it was built as a functional railway, then - even if it has 
been significantly rebuilt in order to cater for the leisure market and 
no longer has any functional aspect in current usage - it's a narrow 
gauge railway, not a miniature railway.


If it was built purely for leisure purposes, then what makes the 
difference is, generally, the appearance.


A miniature railway is, essentially, a large outdoor model railway 
that's big enough for people to ride on. A distinguishing feature is 
that it makes at least some attempt to be a visual replica of a 
full-size train, or, at least, a full size loco. These are a few good 
examples:


https://www.railadvent.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/NRM-Miniature-Railway.jpg

https://media.dayoutwiththekids.co.uk/media/15309/33373-kerrs-miniature-railway-arbroath-04.jpg?mode=crop=1680=940

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UWgUbSkmGJA/maxresdefault.jpg

https://www.railadvent.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/FR-Miniature-Railway-at-Tanybwlch.jpg

http://miniaturerailwayworld.co.uk/images/WeymouthBayMiniatureRailway.jpg

A narrow gauge railway, on the other hand, doesn't attempt to mimic 
anything bigger than itself - it's just a small (sometimes, very small) 
railway. Here are a few examples:


http://www.cheshirenow.co.uk/images_9/rdyd3.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_OKbvaNYSms/UFd4PYxK5QI/EkI/xSESbCLTM-Q/s1600/IMG_3625.JPG

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/ECFA5D/the-kirklees-light-railway-15-inch-gauge-railway-in-kirklees-west-ECFA5D.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vf0lBvPbyy8/maxresdefault.jpg

It's important to note here that track gauge alone is not the 
distinguishing factor. Although miniature railways are, typically, 
smaller than the smallest narrow gauge railways (you can get a ridable 
model on as little as 5" gauge, which otherwise really is into model 
railway territory), there is a lot of overlap. Although 15" gauge 
(otherwise known as "minimum gauge") is generally considered the lower 
limit of true railways (as opposed to models), there are a few examples 
with track gauges smaller than that. The Wells and Walsingham Light 
Railway, for example, has a track gauge of only 10.25", but is not in 
any sense a model railway and hence not normally considered a miniature 
railway:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_and_Walsingham_Light_Railway

Meanwhile, there are also plenty of miniature railways that use 15" (or 
even larger) gauge, simply because there are lots of commercially 
available products in that gauge. So gauge alone is not the deciding 
feature, even though it is an indicative one.


From a mapping perspective, therefore, there are two questions which 
need to be asked:


1. Was the railway originally constructed purely for leisure purposes?

2. Are the locomotives intended to be models or replicas of full-size 
locomotives (or are otherwise "faked", such as petrol-engined locos 
designed to look like steam locos)?


If the answer to both questions is "yes", it's definitely a miniature 
railway. If the answer to both are "no", then it definitely isn't.


Where it gets fuzzy is where the answers differ. The Romney, Hythe and 
Dymchurch Railway, for example, has locomotives that are models (or, at 
least, modelled on) full size steam locomotives. But it's considered a 
narrow gauge railway, not a miniature railway, because, despite the 
eccentricities of its creators, it was intended as a public service with 
paying passengers and freight transport rather than merely as a leisure 
operation.


From a mapping perspective, you can't always answer the first question 
from observation (although it can sometimes be inferred from the 
topography - "fun" lines are usually continuous loops or out-and-back 
layouts, while a point-to-point design - particularly a long one - 
often indicates a formerly functional railway). The second is amenable 
to observation, although you do need to know what you are looking for. 
But unless it is obvious either way from observation, then the best 
classification is whatever the operator calls it.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Miniature railway or minimum gauge?

[Mark Goodge]

On 18/05/2019 16:35, Martin Wynne wrote:

Wikipedia suggests that a "miniature railway" is one using rideable 
*models* of real railways, which is not the case for the RVLR:


  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum-gauge_railway

Should I change the tag to railway=minimum_gauge, bearing in mind this 
is not a common usage in the UK?


Other 15" railways in the UK (eg, the Evesham Vale Light Railway) are 
mostly tagged as railway=narrow_gauge. I think that's probably the best 
solution. Minimum gauge is really just a subset of narrow gauge (along 
with other common subsets, such as metre gauge and 3' gauge) rather than 
being a distinct category in itself. The Wikipedia page for Narrow Gauge 
lists it as a common subset:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow-gauge_railway#Gauges

The OSM wiki is correct to distinguish between miniature railways (ie, 
ridable models) and small gauge "real" railways, as this reflects usage 
among railway engineers and enthusiasts in the non-mapping community. 
But I think the wiki page on miniature railways is wrong to suggest that 
minimum gauge railways are a separate category in themselves.


The wiki page for the Key:railway doesn't mention 'minimum_gauge' as a 
possible value, and I think that's the correct position. The distinction 
between different subsets of narrow gauge is best left to the 'gauge' key.


I think the wiki age for Tag:railway=miniature needs updating to remove 
the spurious distinct between minimum and narrow gauge, and make it 
consistent with the usage defined on the main page for Key:railway itself.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] How would tag or name this wall crossing?

[Mark Goodge]

On 27/04/2019 18:02, I wrote:



On 27/04/2019 17:52, Andy Townsend wrote:


On 27/04/2019 17:50, Philip Barnes wrote:


https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier%3Dstile#Stile_details


4000 of those:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/stile#values

However also from that page I'm now wondering what "stile=hipster" (!) 
is?


You can only go through it if you have a beard!
Serious answer... generating a map of them via the Overpass Turbo link 
shows that all the instances of them are in an area around Keighley. 
And, looking at them on Google street view, they appear to be squeeze 
stiles. For example:


https://goo.gl/maps/v8P8SrBYHu8BWMzZA
https://goo.gl/maps/1h5zqHLpQDu4jUnb6

So I'd hazard a guess that it's a local name for them in that neck of 
the woods.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] How would tag or name this wall crossing?

[Mark Goodge]

On 27/04/2019 17:52, Andy Townsend wrote:


On 27/04/2019 17:50, Philip Barnes wrote:


https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier%3Dstile#Stile_details


4000 of those:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/stile#values

However also from that page I'm now wondering what "stile=hipster" (!) is?


You can only go through it if you have a beard!

Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] How would tag or name this wall crossing?

[Mark Goodge]

On 27/04/2019 17:46, Chris Hill wrote:

I've always known them as squeeze stiles.


Indeed. The term "stile" doesn't have to imply steps, although that is 
the most common form.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stile

Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Checking UK Towns

[Mark Goodge]

On 30/01/2019 16:00, Tom Hughes wrote:


The fundamental problem with this, as Jerry has just said, is that
many towns in the UK have no defined boundary.

Even where there is an administrative entity there is no guarantee
that it's boundary equates to what most people would view as the
boundary of the town - it may under or overstate things.


One useful thing here is the ONS concept of a "Built Up Area". That aims 
to give the normal human name of a defined place - for example, 
Mansfield and Maidenhead are both in the list, and mean what someone 
living there would expect them to mean. And it has subdivisions for 
major settlements - for example, the BUA of Greater London includes 
BUASDs of Bromley and Camden.


Shapefiles are available from the ONS Geography website, and are OGL, so 
they're compatible with OSM.


The downside of ONS BUA data is that it's only updated once per census, 
so the current dataset is now a bit out of date - it doesn't take 
account of new developments on the edge of existing settlements, for 
example. But, as a simple source of names, it's very valuable. And 
alterations to boundaries can be mapped on the ground, provided you've 
got an existing boundary to work with.



Equally there is no clear way of even determining what is, or is
not, a town. Just a variety of rules-of-thumb...


As far as local government is concerned, there is a defined meaning of a 
town. That is, any settlement which has a town council (eg, Evesham, 
Newmarket). And, for larger settlements, the word "town" is what most 
people would call what is, officially, a non-metropolitan borough (eg, 
Bromsgrove, Ipswich).


More generally, while there's no single definition of a town, it can be 
reasonably assumed to be the default terminology for any built-up area 
unless you know for certain that it isn't a town (eg, because it's a 
city, or it has a parish council, or is too small to have a council at 
all).


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Tagging post towns and other addressing issues in the UK

[Mark Goodge]

On 28/01/2019 18:50, Lester Caine wrote:

On 28/01/2019 18:24, Will Phillips wrote:


There are certainly occasions when the street name is needed. For 
example, I recently surveyed a single postcode (DE72 2HP) containing 
two houses with the same house name, but different street names.  
Postcodes do sometimes cover two streets in rural areas. In these 
cases one might technically be a subsidiary street, but it's often not 
obvious which one.


One could say that DE72 2HP is breaking Royal Mail's own rules, but it 
is a rare exception to the rule, and often you find the street is 
actually the secondary build reference rather than the street in the raw 
data.


It isn't breaking a rule. The rule is that unit + street + postcode is 
the minimum required for an unambiguous postal address, as far as 
standard postcodes are concerned (large user postcodes are different, of 
course, but they, too, are a minority).


It is often the case that a postcode only covers a single street. But 
that's by no means universal, and it certainly isn't rare that it covers 
more than one.


Bear in mind that the whole point of the postcode system is to 
facilitate the delivery of post by Royal Mail. The final two characters 
of a postcode are the "walk" - literally, the smallest unit of the 
postman's round. And if there happens to be a pair of short streets, or 
a short street off a longer one, then they are often incorporated into 
the same walk. Topologically, this is the most common walk:


 -

but this is a common one, too:

 ---
  |

or this:

 |
 |--
 |

If the "vertical" section has a different name to the horizontal 
section, then it will typically also have duplicate numbering. Which 
means the street name is necessary to disambiguate.


I've just had a look at the Land Registry price paid data for my 
postcode area (WR), and there are 364 postcodes within it that are 
associated with more than one street name. That's a not a trivial or 
ignorable number, by any means, even if it is only a minority of 
postcodes. To guarantee a completely deliverable postal address, you 
need the street name.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Postcodes

[Mark Goodge]

On 25/01/2019 17:30, Jack FitzSimons via Talk-GB wrote:


I've noticed that many bank branches have a unique postcode while the 
shops either side of them all share a single postcode. When the bank 
branch closes (as so many do these days) the unique postcode finds its 
way on to Robert's old postal district list. A new occupant of the bank 
premises is likely to be given the same postcode as the other shops 
nearby. Do we need to retain the old postcode for any historical 
purpose? If so we probably also need to tag that this building was once 
a bank but if we do that for every previous occupant of every shop 
things would soon get out of hand!  While the bank is empty and, hence, 
no longer listed on the PAF, is it better to retain the old postcode or 
delete it and show no postcode for that building?


Those would be "large user" postcodes, assigned to recipients that get a 
lot of mail. A large user postcode is assigned to the organisation, not 
the premises, so if the organisation leaves the premises then the 
postcode either moves with them or becomes unassigned. So the correct 
thing to do, in your scenario, would be to either blank out the postcode 
or, by interpolation, change it to be the same as those either side.


I'm not sure if CodePoint Open includes a field showing whether a 
postcode is large user or not, but the ONS Postcode Database (which is 
also OGL, so compatible with OSM) does. So you can check against that if 
necessary. Another advantage of ONSPD over Codepoint Open is that it 
includes deleted postcodes (with a deletion date), which is handy for 
cross-referencing your other scenario of postcodes that have changed but 
where an old one is still displayed on company literature.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] OS Boundary-Line - Manchester political wards and related boundaries, dealing with inconsistent data

[Mark Goodge]

On 12/12/2018 23:11, ael wrote:


This is perhaps slightly off topic, but this habit of some of sharing
nodes causes me many problems. When I am updating roads and other
features from fairly accurate gps surveys, I often find the I have all
these tangled boundaries about which I know little. It is a huge pain
to duplicate nodes to separate ways before I can adjust just the feature
that I have surveyed. I confess that my patience often runs out, and I
just drag the other stuff along with my updates, thinking that the
mappers who shared the nodes in the first place get what they deserve
:-).


I agree. I tried to fix the outline of a park that's just down the road 
from me. It's clearly incorrect when viewed on the satellite view in the 
editor, and I thought it would be a relatively simple task of dragging 
the nodes to match reality. But it turns out that the nodes down one 
side are shared with a river that's adjacent to the park, and down 
another side with a road that is almost, but not quite, directly 
adjacent to the park. Sharing nodes with that road makes the park look 
bigger than it actually is, and, more importantly, makes a building 
that, in reality, is on the boundary of the park appear to be wholly 
within it. I thought I could simply drag the nodes to the correct 
position, but I can't without also moving the road, which would be 
equally incorrect.


It would make far more sense if the boundaries of the park were a single 
set of nodes and ways not shared with any other object. When I've got 
considerably more tuits to spare I may just do that - delete the park 
completely and then recreate it from scratch as a new object with its 
own nodes and ways. But, at the moment, I don't really have the time. So 
I've left it, and it continues to irritate me every time I look at it on 
the map :-)


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Govt should pressure Google to release data

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/11/2018 12:07, Gregory Marler wrote:


The ODI have called on the government to pressure Google, Uber, Apple 
into releaseing "mapping data"

https://theodi.org/article/we-call-on-the-government-to-work-with-google-apple-and-uber-to-publish-more-map-data-and-support-the-uks-emerging-technologies/

This got a fair amount of media attention last week in the Financial 
Times and other places.


My reaction was a bit confused...

Mapping data = location of things? Don't need it, as Sir Tim Bernes-Lee 
(ODI co-founder) already sings the praises of OpenStreetMap. Open data 
at Ordnance Survey is also getting better (I thought we/ODI we focusing 
on improving that, we all know govt could do better).


I think it's badly headlined, and badly reported. If you read the ODI's 
actual submission to the consultation, what they are actually calling 
for is for government  agencies and contractors to release more data 
under OGL or compatible licences. In particular, things like USRNs, 
UPRNs, TOIDs, INSPIRE IDs, etc.


The ODI's argument is that the lack of open data makes it difficult, if 
not impossible, for start-ups and other SMEs to compete with the giants 
(such as Google and Apple), as they do not have the resources to 
generate their own geospatial data and both the costs and conditions of 
licensing non-free data makes it impractical for them to use.


I entirely agree with that, and I would hope that the OSM community 
does, too.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Fwd: Open MasterMap progress since Policy Announcement

[Mark Goodge]

On 12/10/2018 21:32, Nick Whitelegg wrote:


Interesting. "Detailed path network" in particular looks interesting, is 
this rights of way or physical paths on the ground I wonder?


It would be physical paths on the ground.

Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Access restrictions for lorries above a certain GVM

[Mark Goodge]

On 27/09/2018 11:39, ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:


There's quite a lot of "maxweight:conditional" in OSM too, presumably 
for the same signs where people think they apply to buses too.  I'd 
agree with what's previously been said in that I don't think the "lorry" 
sign on it's own applies to buses (but would be happy to be proved wrong 
on that).


You're right, it doesn't apply to buses.

The HGV restriction sign isn't really a weight restriction at all. It's 
a vehicle category restriction. Obviously, HGVs, by definition, are 
heavy vehicles, but the reasons for imposing the restriction are 
generally unrelated to weight. It's more to do with size, congestion, 
pollution and impact on other road users. And they're usually 
conditional, because the aim is to minimise rather than eliminate HGVs 
on the affected roads. In particular, it's typically done to prevent the 
roads being used as a through route by HGVs, while still allowing 
deliveries to premises within the restriction.


Genuine maximum weight signs, applicable to all vehicles, are rarely 
conditional. Those are typically used where there is a safety-related 
need to restrict vehicle weight (eg, a weak bridge), so conditional 
exceptions would defeat the object.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] Access restrictions for lorries above a certain GVM

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/09/2018 17:33, Philip Barnes wrote:

On Wed, 2018-09-26 at 17:18 +0100, Tony Shield wrote:


From the examples given it seems that passing the facing sign is 
the limiting event, the end of the restriction may be posted with a

grey end of restriction sign; surveying them could be a nightmare
if the road/way is tagged - the restriction can be several miles
and in one direction.


I have never known such a restriction to be only in one direction.


The way it's actually done, from a legal perspective, is to put a 
Traffic Restriction order (TRO) on a very short length of road, and then 
only put the signposts at one end of the stretch.


Using ascii art, it looks a bit like this:

-<==---

where - is unrestricted road, = is restricted road, and < is a sign 
facing in that direction (ie, left in this case).


Because a TRO needs signs to be enforceable, that effectively makes it a 
one-way restriction as only traffic approaching from the left sees the 
sign. It's a bit of a hack, but quite a common one.


That's as opposed to a fully restricted road, which would be TRO'd and 
signed like this:


---<>---

I hope that makes sense. It's a bit difficult to explain!

Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Access restrictions for lorries above a certain GVM

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/09/2018 14:21, Paul Berry wrote:
On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 13:10, Mark Goodge <mailto:m...@good-stuff.co.uk>> wrote:


Another issue is how we tag "gateway" weight restrictions. These apply
only to traffic in one direction, and not to an entire length of road.
They're typically used in towns and villages that have been by-passed,
to ensure that HGV through traffic has to use the by-pass, but, having
accessed the town via a legitimate route, can then leave it via
whichever is most convenient.


Surely by updating every highway's tags within the are demarcated by the 
gateways? The same as is done for speed limits, etc... (That's how I'd 
do it.)


But that isn't how it is. Inside the gateways, there are no 
restrictions. It's just that you can't get there through the gateways.


And then we have interesting situations like this where, if anything, 
two hgv=no gateways back onto each other: https://goo.gl/maps/dRLTKeEH1RD2


Yes, the effect there is to effectively cut the road in half as far as 
HGVs are concerned. They can enter the road from either end, and no part 
of the road has a restriction. But, whichever end they enter from, they 
have to return the same way and can't pass the gateway in the middle.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Access restrictions for lorries above a certain GVM

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/09/2018 13:00, Colin Smale wrote:

On 2018-09-26 13:48, David Woolley wrote:

In that specific case (7.5T), which is the most common, it would be 
hgv=no, as that is the defining maximum authorised mass for an HGV. 
 I'd consider maxweight, for higher limits.


Is a bus/coach considered to be a goods vehicle for these purposes? 


No, they're not. If there is a restriction on buses, it will be signed 
separately. If it applies to all vehicles, irrespective of 
classification, it will look like this one:


https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4872708

They 
are usually heavier than 7.5t. In the case of hgv=no then they would 
still be allowed, but maxweight=18000 might erroneously imply a 
prohibition of other vehicles as well. Some larger coaches can far 
exceed 18 tons.
hgv=no would be correct for the sign that Tobias linked to. You'd use 
maxweight= for signs like the one in the Geograph photo, above.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Access restrictions for lorries above a certain GVM

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/09/2018 12:35, Tobias Zwick wrote:

Hey there

I can't believe this didn't come up before - or maybe it did but was not
documented in the wiki.

In United Kingdom, how do you tag roads signed with this sign?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_traffic_sign_622.1A.svg


That's a good question. I've had a look, and none of them seem to be 
tagged on the roads in my town.


Another issue is how we tag "gateway" weight restrictions. These apply 
only to traffic in one direction, and not to an entire length of road. 
They're typically used in towns and villages that have been by-passed, 
to ensure that HGV through traffic has to use the by-pass, but, having 
accessed the town via a legitimate route, can then leave it via 
whichever is most convenient. Here's an example of what I mean:


https://www.markgoodge.com/files/by-pass.png

The primary route (in green) which originally passed through the town 
has been diverted to by-pass it on a new construction. Junctions A and B 
will have weight restriction signs (as above) on the route into town, 
but junction C will not. So HGVs can enter the town via C, but then 
leave via either A, B or C. The intention, of course, is to ensure that 
only trucks which need to enter the town do so, as it can't be used as a 
short-cut (eg, if the by-pass is congested), but once in the town, 
there's no restriction on which parts of the town the trucks can service.


I really don't know how we'd tag that, because it would be a tag that 
only applies to one traffic direction of a way rather than the entire way.



Note that the GVM for which the sign applies is given explicitly on the
sign, which is apparently always the case for any HGV-access-restriction
sign in the UK.


That's not a major issue. Although the limit is always stated, it's also 
almost always 7.5t, as that's the boundary between different categories 
of goods vehicle. With very few exceptions, it's just the larger ones 
which are prohibited.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] What was the outcome of the discussion about C class roads with ref tags?

[Mark Goodge]

On 24/09/2018 09:34, Stuart Reynolds wrote:

[Side question, albeit not totally off-topic]

Out of curiosity, I understand what a C road is, conceptually, but what 
might an “MC” designation mean? E.g. 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/426675505


It's a local designation for what are more commonly known as C roads. 
See, for example:


https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=MC17_(Buckinghamshire)

https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Buckinghamshire_Council

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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/09/2018 18:16, Lester Caine wrote:

On 20/09/2018 17:50, Mark Goodge wrote:
In fact, putting them in OSM isn't just damaging to OSM, it's damaging 
to OHM. At the moment, OHM is a bit sparse, there are some well-mapped 
areas but there are some pretty big blank areas. What it really needs 
is a group of enthusiastic contributors, who are knowledgeable about 
history and want to see it mapped. Putting the historic counties into 
OHM would be a huge boost for it, it would make OHM much more useful 
for genealogists, fans of listed buildings, ancient monuments, old 
railways, etc. And there are plenty of those. That in turn would drive 
more users of OHM, and more contributors, thus helping to make it even 
more useful.


Until OHM has all of the current history available in parallel with 
'extra' data it's not worth spending any time on. I want to see where 
historic changes fit around the current state on the ground so I work 
off OSM ... and will until all that data is available in OHM ...


Then get involved and put it in OHM.

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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/09/2018 16:37, Dan S wrote:

Op do 20 sep. 2018 om 16:31 schreef Mark Goodge :





However, historic administrative boundaries, by definition, are not
current. They're not an edge case. They are completely outside the
realms of what is current.


Your "by definition" seems to be about "historical", not "historic" (a
distinction which already came up somewhere else in this thread).
Historical things are in the past; historic things were important in
the past, and might or might not still exist. I'm sure that seems
pedantic and I'm sorry, but it seems almost to be the crux of the
matter.


Administrative boundaries cease to be current when they are changed or 
deleted by whichever organisation has the authority to change them.


The debate around the historic counties is not about whether or not 
their boundaries are still current. They are not. That is indisputable. 
The debate is about whether they are still *important*, to the extent 
that justifies mapping them in OSM even though they have no current 
legal or administrative significance.


Now, I do agree that the mid Victorian county boundaries (which are the 
ones generally accepted as the boundaries of the historic counties, 
although there are other definitions) are important for a number of 
things. They matter for a lot of historical research, particularly 
genealogy and architecture. So having them readily available in data, 
and viewable on a map, is valuable.


However, that function is precisely what OHM is designed for. It isn't 
what OSM is designed for. So the historic county boundaries more 
correctly belong in OHM rather than OSM.


In fact, putting them in OSM isn't just damaging to OSM, it's damaging 
to OHM. At the moment, OHM is a bit sparse, there are some well-mapped 
areas but there are some pretty big blank areas. What it really needs is 
a group of enthusiastic contributors, who are knowledgeable about 
history and want to see it mapped. Putting the historic counties into 
OHM would be a huge boost for it, it would make OHM much more useful for 
genealogists, fans of listed buildings, ancient monuments, old railways, 
etc. And there are plenty of those. That in turn would drive more users 
of OHM, and more contributors, thus helping to make it even more useful.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/09/2018 13:46, Martin Wynne wrote:

On 20/09/2018 13:12, Dave F wrote:

See the OSM Welcome page.


Thanks. The wording there is:

"OpenStreetMap is a place for mapping things that are both real and 
current."


Unfortunately it doesn't define "real" or "current".


No, it leaves those to the ordinary, everyday meanings of the words.

What is a "real" bus stop? Does it need a physical marker post or 
shelter? Or is it a bus stop if it's just a place listed in the 
timetable? Or even just a place where buses often stop on request?


What is a "current" footpath? If I mapped it 5 years ago, how often do I 
have to go back and check that it is still there? If it's a public 
footpath crossing a field the farmer is allowed 14 days to re-instate it 
after ploughing the field. Is it still a "real" footpath for those 14 
days? What if I re-visit it on the wrong day?


There are, obviously, edge cases where a decision has to be made on the 
particular circumstances. Trying to define things too tightly creates 
unwanted inconsistencies.


However, historic administrative boundaries, by definition, are not 
current. They're not an edge case. They are completely outside the 
realms of what is current.


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 19/09/2018 16:57, Steve Doerr wrote:

On 19/09/2018 16:04, Andrew Black wrote:

I live in London. The place I live in has been inb the county of 
London since 1889. But the traditional county beast says I live in 
Surrey.


Then you will be familiar with the annual boat race between Oxford and 
Cambridge universities, at the start of which they toss a coin to decide 
who will row from the 'Surrey station' and who from the 'Middlesex 
station'. These counties still have cultural significance today.


Just because the sides are named after former counties doesn't mean 
those counties still exist. The Isle of Ely doesn't exist as a current 
administrative boundary any more either, but that doesn't stop several 
organisations based in the area it used to cover having that phrase in 
their name. Including, appropriately in this context, the Isle of Ely 
Rowing Club :-)


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 12:51, Chris Hill wrote:
One place to look is OS Open Names. That has place names listed with a 
category of populated place that seems to be hamlet, village, town or 
suburban area. That lists Wickham Market as a town.


That seems to be going solely by size, and is used to indicate how the 
name is displayed on OS maps. I'm not sure it's necessarily valuable in 
other contexts.



Wikipedia, on the other hand, says it is a large village.

The parish council website sits on the fence and calls it a 'thriving 
community'.


It has a dropdown link for "Our Village" at the top. But, interestingly, 
that gives some of the history which indicates that it was once 
considered a town - it had a charter market, and two charter fairs, but 
these have since lapsed. So that may be the root cause of the 
disagreement in this case - there may be people who think that the past 
is more important than the current situation (see also, historic counties!).


Legally, it's definitely not a town as it has a parish council, not a 
town council.



I'd plump for townage or maybe villown.


Or, maybe, just "place" :-)

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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 12:37, Martin Wynne wrote:


But it's not a useful indicator, because it's least reliable precisely 
in the cases where you are most uncertain.


Surely the more uncertain you are, the more useful an indicator becomes?


Only if the indicator is reliable though, And it's least likely to be 
reliable when other observational factors are inconclusive.


The presence or absence of a row of street lamps is not a wishy-washy 
legal opinion, or an argument in the local pub. It is an undisputed 
fact, to be called in evidence when someone demands an explanation for 
your mapping.


But that only applies to that particular street. What do you do when 
somewhere has some streets that are fully lit and some that aren't? Are 
you planning to go round every street in a settlement, check the street 
lights, total them all up and then use that to decide whether it's a 
town or a village? Especially when you can just look it up!


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 12:28, Stuart Reynolds wrote:


I would support a simple, objective definition, based on population size.


Population of what, though? The contiguous urban area? The local 
government entity? And by what measurement? Most recent census? 
Electoral roll? Current estimate?


Unless you can agree on all of those, it isn't completely objective. But 
if you do have one specific measurement, it's no longer simple.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 11:35, Martin Wynne wrote:
You were suggesting identifying them by observation, using street 
lights as a distinguishing factor.


Yes, in the event that you are uncertain. I said it was a useful indicator.


But it's not a useful indicator, because it's least reliable precisely 
in the cases where you are most uncertain.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 11:25, Martin Wynne wrote:
If it were true, then almost every village would need 30mph repeater 
signs throughout, as they wouldn't have enough lighting to count as a 
built up area. In practice, though, they don't.


Yes they do. At least all the villages I know have 30mph repeaters. 
Here's a couple at random:


  https://goo.gl/maps/zMfNHUFTSW92

  https://goo.gl/maps/N96GbyndYRB2


None of the villages round here do. Nor do any of those I've lived in 
previously.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 11:10, Martin Wynne wrote:


Here's a couple of locations near me. One is in a village, the other 
is in a town. Can you tell, just by looking at them, which is which?


If you already know one is a village and the other is a town, why do you 
need any other means of identifying them?


You were suggesting identifying them by observation, using street lights 
as a distinguishing factor.


However, this road in Badsey has no street lighting. If it was in a 
town, it would have:


  https://goo.gl/maps/LdvB1zisEiP2


This road in Evesham has no street lights. That doesn't make it a village:

https://goo.gl/maps/dvyf4foNydN2

It is true that the larger the urban area, the more likely it is to be 
consistently lit, and towns tend to be larger than villages. But that's 
just a variant of using population size to differentiate between a 
village and a town. It's only reliable at the ends of the spectrum, 
where there is already little dispute. It doesn't help with the edge 
cases or the atypical scenarios.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 10:47, Martin Wynne wrote:



There are, indeed, multiple definitions of the difference between a town
and a village


A useful indicator is the street lighting.

Generally a town has continuous evenly spaced street lamps along all or 
most roads within its boundary.


Villages often have no street lighting, or only a few strategic lamps 
scattered about.


That is really not true at all. It may be true for very small rural 
villages, but not for the vast majority of them. If it were true, then 
almost every village would need 30mph repeater signs throughout, as they 
wouldn't have enough lighting to count as a built up area. In practice, 
though, they don't.


Here's a couple of locations near me. One is in a village, the other is 
in a town. Can you tell, just by looking at them, which is which?


https://goo.gl/maps/LcBE9EmjcTR2

https://goo.gl/maps/j8SWzBjjkeQ2

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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/09/2018 09:06, Colin Smale wrote:

On 2018-09-07 09:37, Mark Goodge wrote:

Obviously it's been "town" more than village (and the person who 
added it as such was/is pretty local) - but is that still correct?
 I'll comment on the latest change about this thread so that 
everyone's aware of it.


It has a parish council that has not chosen to style itself as a 
town council. So, officially, it's a village.


How does that make it official? There are Town Councils whose name 
does not reference an existing place, so what the council calls 
itself doesn't make it official...


It does according to the Local Government Act 1972, which is what
defines a town for the purposes of local government.

Once upon a time a Town was a place that had been granted the right 
to hold its own market, wasn't it? By that yardstick WM would appear
 to be a town. Once again, there is no straight answer to the 
question "Is Whickam Market a town or a village?" The only single 
correct answer is "it depends" and there are a variety of correct 
answers according to the criterion you are using.


There are, indeed, multiple definitions of the difference between a town
and a village, although the idea that all towns have markets and 
villages don't isn't really one of them (that's just something of a folk

story). Lots of villages have markets, lots of towns don't. There is
such a thing as a "charter market", which was, originally, only granted
to towns, but if we use that as the basis then we're getting a bit into
historic county territory (as well as having to redefine several quite
large towns as villages!).

So now OSM (or the OSM community or the OSMUK local chapter) has to 
get off the fence and pick one. Or pick all of them by adding 
multiple tags, like market=yes, population=X etc. That provides the 
objective raw data so that data consumers (including renderers) can 
make their own decisions.


Multiple tags are certainly helpful, yes. But the particular tag under
discussion here is the 'place' tag.

I do think it's valuable to have a consistent approach to what goes in
the 'place' tag, which means having an agreed approach. Personally, I
think that the Local Government Act distinction between a village and a
town is the most useful, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's clear
and unambiguous, it's objective rather than subjective. Secondly, it's
easy to find out, it doesn't rely on local knowledge. Also, it tends to
be the distinction that's most relevant to most people's everyday lives.

Other definitions are more problematic. There are two main historical
definitions, one based around town charters and the other around
ecclesiastical parishes, but you need to know the history of a 
particular place to be able to apply them. And, in any case, they go 
against the OSM principle that we map what is, not what was. Using them 
would also create some rather ridiculous situations; Milton Keynes, for 
example, is clearly a town by any sensible current definition but would 
still be a village by historic definitions.


Equally, using a simple numeric formula ("it's a village if it has fewer 
than X inhabitants") is harder than it looks. Quite apart from the 
difficulty of determining the actual number of residents, it creates 
edge cases where places that are legally and colloquially known as towns 
would have to be mapped as villages, and vice versa. Residents of 
Lancing, for example, are quite proud to live in the largest village in 
England! Who are we to tell them that they don't?


Apart from using the legal definition, therefore, it seems to me that 
the only other practical option is to leave it entirely subjective, and 
go by what people perceive their town or village to be - to use 
whichever of the historic, legal or numeric definitions is most 
appropriate for them. But then you have the problem that not everybody 
agrees (which I suspect is the issue with Wickham Market, which is why 
it's alternated between village and town). And how can the OSM community 
be sure that a particular designation really is what the majority of 
local residents think, rather than just being the bee in some 
individual's bonnet?


Obviously, all of the above is just my opinion, and others may well 
disagree. But I'd go by the official designation in any places that I 
mapped, unless there's an agreed OSM policy otherwise.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Wickham Market, Suffolk

[Mark Goodge]

On 06/09/2018 22:00, ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:
Is anyone familiar with this area?  Someone's mentioned on IRC that 
Wickham Market has been changed from town to village and back a couple 
of times:


http://osm.mapki.com/history/node.php?id=114148812

Obviously it's been "town" more than village (and the person who added 
it as such was/is pretty local) - but is that still correct?  I'll 
comment on the latest change about this thread so that everyone's aware 
of it.


It has a parish council that has not chosen to style itself as a town 
council. So, officially, it's a village.


http://wickhammarket.onesuffolk.net/

It's also a bit small for a town. According to Wikipedia (which also 
considers it a village) it has a population of just over 2,000. I 
wouldn't normally consider that a town.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickham_Market

However, local usage may be different. The real question is whether OSM 
has a policy of always following official usage or whether local usage 
can take precedence.


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Re: [Talk-GB] un-named roads in UK

[Mark Goodge]

On 31/08/2018 15:30, Steve Doerr wrote:

On 30/08/2018 22:26, Mark Goodge wrote:
It was incredibly confusing to visitors, as the hamlet was nowhere 
near the post town. So we inserted "near [parish name]" as the second 
line, when giving the address. 



Off-topic, but the Royal Mail have long discouraged the use of 'Near', 
but they do allow the use of 'Via'.


I know. But they're not equivalent. Just because a location is "near" a 
named place, that does not make it necessary or desirable to travel 
"via" that place to get there. And, since the problem is created by 
Royal Mail's suboptimal approach to postal addresses in rural areas, we 
didn't feel in any way obliged to follow their preferences in the 
matter. The post always got to us anyway; it was non-RM deliveries that 
were the issue.


These days, of course, it wouldn't really matter. Nobody uses the full 
postal address to locate a destination, they just plug the postcode into 
their satnav or other mapping application and then just use the street 
part of the address for the final leg if necessary.


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Re: [Talk-GB] un-named roads in UK

[Mark Goodge]

On 30/08/2018 17:40, Ed Loach wrote:
I missed the start of this thread as I was away, but there are some 
unnamed roads in England with houses on that just have a postal address 
in the format


house name, hamlet name, parish name, postal town


I grew up in one that was even more minimal, it was just

house number, hamlet, post town

It was incredibly confusing to visitors, as the hamlet was nowhere near 
the post town. So we inserted "near [parish name]" as the second line, 
when giving the address. But even then it didn't stop delivery drivers 
doing a tour of half the county before finding us :-)


This is actually a problem for OSM, as the address tags don't allow for 
a house number to be attached to anything other than a street name. But, 
in rural areas, it can often be a hamlet name.


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Re: [Talk-GB] When is a hedge a wood?

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 23:16, Martin Wynne wrote:
Both. It's administratively and legally part of the highway, but it's 
the part of the highway which consists of a grass verge.


Thanks Mark.

I think I should map that as

landuse=highway

landcover=grass

However for some inexplicable reason, landuse=highway isn't allowed. I 
was told the reason is in the name Open *STREET* Map, although I'm none 
the wiser.


This is a terminology thing again. OSM uses "highway" to refer to the 
route you travel along, with various tags to indicate the importance and 
permissions of the route, while UK legislation uses the word to refer to 
a legal function. Another instance where this can cause problems is 
something like a public square, in many cases these are legally highways 
even if they are, at least most of the time, pedestrianised. But you 
can't tag an area as a highway, only a way. So you can't tag a public 
open space as a highway even if, legally, it is.


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Re: [Talk-GB] boundary mania

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 21:36, Colin Smale wrote:

On 2018-08-26 21:17, David Woolley wrote:

It looks to me as though boundaries can be defined recursively, so 
Hampshire, rather than its bounding ways, ought to to be the object 
referenced in the bigger entities.
This wouldn't work in the case of civil parishes as components of 
districts and UA's though. You cannot define a district as the union of 
the parishes. There are unparished areas, detached parts and "lands 
common" which complicate the model. However I believe every point in the 
UK is within some district/UA, and every district is within a county, 
giving 100% coverage at that level.



Every point is within a district, but not every district is within a 
county - unless, that is, you consider a unitary authority to be 
effectively two different entities that happen to have identical boundaries.


From a legal perspective, districts (or boroughs, cities and unitary 
authorities) are the fundamental building blocks of British local 
government. Parishes or communities, where they exist, are subdivisions 
of districts. Counties or metropolitan authorities, where they exist, 
are unions of districts. The district is the "principal authority" 
defined in legislation, everything else is relative to it.


(As an aside, this is also one of the big drivers of nostalgia for the 
pre-1974 "historic" counties. The Victorian system had the county as the 
fundamental unit. So even where we still have counties, they are not the 
same as they used to be).


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 16:37, Andrew Black wrote:
Before we can decide whether to delete or document it we need to decide 
whether it is wanted.

Might a Loomio vote be a way forwards.


As a relatively recent newcomer to OSM as a contributor, I was wondering 
about that. Does OSM have the equivalent of Wikipedia's "Articles for 
Deletion" where issues like this can be discussed and, hopefully, a 
consensus reached?


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 20:54, Colin Smale wrote:


There is a wiki page for boundary=historic, which I think makes it
clear that these boundaries should not be in OSM.
I think it's slightly unfortunate that OSM uses the tag 'historic' for 
something that's different to what we are discussing here. As well as 
being potentially ambiguous, it may also encourage people to add 
boundaries that are "historic" in the sense used used by proponents of 
the traditional English counties.


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 21:05, Martin Wynne wrote:

I don't think it's for those who have mapped something in OSM to
demonstrate majority support for its retention. I think it is for those
seeking to have others' contributions removed to demonstrate a clear
consensus in favour of deletion.


Should this consensus be among OSM mappers or OSM users?


Most users will be blissfully unaware that they are there, since they 
won't be rendered in most cases.


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Re: [Talk-GB] When is a hedge a wood?

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 20:35, Martin Wynne wrote:
Rural boundaries can be extraordinarily difficult to map. For example, 
is this:


  https://goo.gl/maps/FtjMZiwNj542

a) a fence,

b) a hedge,

c) a very narrow wood,

d) all three at the same time?


I'd call it a hedgerow. I'm not sure if OSM has a tag for that, distinct 
to a hedge (which is a different thing, despite the similarity in name).



Is the area in front of it

a) grass,

b) highway,

c) both?


Both. It's administratively and legally part of the highway, but it's 
the part of the highway which consists of a grass verge.


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Re: [Talk-GB] boundary mania

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/08/2018 20:01, Frederik Ramm wrote:

Hi,

On 08/26/2018 12:46 PM, Colin Smale wrote:

It has gone all quiet here, and in the mean time smb001 has been making
steady progress across England.


I think he shouldn't have done this. He should have argued his case here
and the community should have come to an explicit resolution, rather
than one party creating a "status quo".


I agree.


Personally, I am very much against mapping historic boundaries in OSM,
mostly because the exemption from the "on the ground" rules that apply
to current administrative borders (they are so important that we make an
exception) don't hold for historic boundaries.


And also because there is no single entity otherwise known as the 
"historic" boundaries. Even before the major changes in the 1970s 
(objection to which is what a lot of the passion for the historic 
boundaries stems from), they were not perfectly stable. The Victorians 
were inveterate tinkerers, they adjusted boundaries continually even if 
only at a much more local level than the 1974 reforms.


Any mapped historic boundaries are, therefore, nothing more than a 
snapshot of what they were at a particular moment in time, not a record 
of how things have always been. Even the KML downloads provided by the 
Association of British Counties, the prime cheerleader for the historic 
counties, is offered in two different definitions which match different 
snapshots of the boundaries.


The historic boundaries are useful for a number of historic research and 
educational uses. But they are only properly meaningful when used in the 
form which matches the date being researched. Unless we are going to 
have every variant of the historic boundaries mapped on OSM (in which 
case, we should also map newer but now defunct administrative 
boundaries, such as the county of Avon), there's no real value in 
mapping them in OSM at all. Leave them to dedicated historic projects 
where the data is relevant.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 10/08/2018 13:14, Colin Smale wrote:

Who is the arbiter of relevance? I think for any given "mapper" or 
"consumer" 99% of the contents of OSM is not relevant. People are 
mapping the nuts and bolts of the insulators on electricity pylons.. I 
can't see that being relevant to most people.


Can you see the nuts and bolts?

I don't think there's any real argument about whether or not we map 
things we can see. There may be disagreements about *how* we map them, 
but the basic principle that we map what is visible is, I think, pretty 
firmly established.


The basic question here is how we go about mapping things which you 
can't see - intangibles, such as administrative boundaries, postcodes, 
road numbers, etc. And that's where questions of relevance come into it.


The basic principle of OSM is that it is free, in all possible senses. 


It's free, but it isn't unrestrained. You can't just make up entries. 
You can't put Ambridge and Hogwarts on the map (although you can, now, 
include Platform 9 3/4). You can't label a road as a river and a wood as 
a skyscraper. To be useful, we have to agree to a common set of 
principles and then stick to them.


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 10/08/2018 12:05, John Aldridge wrote:

I'd like to register a +1 in favour of accepting these historic counties.

I *generally* agree with your principle of 'only mapping what is on the 
ground', but if we followed that strictly we wouldn't map current 
administrative boundaries either. These historic counties do, rightly or 
wrongly, form part of some people's sense of identity *today*, and I 
think that crosses the bar for inclusion.


The current administrative boundaries are relevant to everyday life in a 
number of different ways. Even if you can't see them on the ground, the 
boundaries determine who collects your bins, who you can vote for, who 
fixes the potholes in the roads, who manages school admissions, etc.


The "historic" boundaries, though, whatever particular snapshot of them 
you choose as the most important one, don't have any relevance to 
everyday life. They do matter to a small number of people with 
specialist uses, but - like now-obliterated routes of former railways - 
they are better suited to a spin-off project rather than being in the 
core OSM.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 08/08/2018 17:05, Stephen Doerr wrote:

On 8 August 2018, at 15:50, Sean Blanchflower  wrote:

 >I begin to fear I've caused offence in my recent editing, so apologies 
if so. I'm just a keen OSM editor trying to add what I see as a valuable 
omission in its database.


I for one am glad to have the boundaries of the 'real' counties in OSM, 
so thank you for doing this.


I'm sorry, but this is complete and utter bullshit. The "historic" 
county boundaries are no more "real" than the current ones. They were, 
at the time, the administrative boundaries. They are no longer the 
administrative boundaries.


I do appreciate that there are matters where the historic boundaries are 
relevant (primarily genealogical research). But that's not really a 
mapping issue., And the emotional attachment to the pre-1974 boundaries 
is just that - emotion, not based on any objective assessment. And the 
fact that, in retrospect, the 1970s changes were over-reaching and did a 
lot of harm does not change that.


Describing the historic boundaries as "real" is like insisting that we 
map, say, the old Euston station the way it was before it was rebuilt, 
because it was a lot nicer then. It may well be the case that it was. 
But we map what exists now, not what existed in the past and in 
rose-tinted memory. The same with county (and other administrative) 
boundaries. We map what is, not what was.


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'historic' county boundaries added to the database

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/08/2018 20:48, Dave F wrote:

Hi

User smb1001 is currently adding county boundary relations with 
boundary=historic through out the UK:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ASf (May take a while to run)

Changeset discussion:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61410203

 From the historic wiki page
"historic objects should not be mapped as it is outside of scope of OSM"

Frankly I don't buy his comments. The problem is where to stop? Do we 
have ever iteration of every boundary change since time immemorial? Then 
what about buildings, roads, or coastline changes etc? The database 
would become unmanageable for editors (it already is if zoomed out too 
far).


I agree that "historic" boundaries don't belong in OSM. They have value 
for historic researchers, but, as you say, that's not what OSM is about.


It's also flat out incorrect to say that historic boundaries are 
"immutable". Although it is true that there were massive changes in the 
1970s and a lot more since then, the idea that the historic (or 
"traditional") counties were stable throughout history is just 
myth-making. A lot of what people think of as the historic county 
boundaries are, in fact, a Victorian creation. And even they didn't 
leave them alone!


I do think, though, that there's a case for including the current 
ceremonial and preserved county boundaries. These have a defined and 
relevant meaning here and now, even if it's a less common one than 
administrative boundaries such as counties, districts and parishes. 
Maybe the people adding historic boundaries to OSM could be nudged in 
that direction instead.


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Re: [Talk-GB] 'D' class roads references.

[Mark Goodge]

On 05/08/2018 22:55, Martin Wynne wrote:
But C and D numbers are not (normally) public, they are internal 
identifiers not intended for public use.


They often appear in planning applications, and public notices about 
road works and diversions.


So do extracts of detailed OS maps. That doesn't make them open data.


All of which are intended for public use.

I can't see why Worcestershire County Council would go to the trouble to 
put information on its web site, if it's not intended for public use.


"Public use" is not the same as available for re-use.

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Re: [Talk-GB] 'D' class roads references.

[Mark Goodge]

On 05/08/2018 14:44, Richard Fairhurst wrote:

Rob Nickerson wrote:

Dave can you do the D class roads too. Someone has added these -
e.g: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/52.21554/-1.87663


That reminds me - there's some weird ones in Hillingdon too:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.5603/-0.3943

Can anyone think of a location in mainland GB where
tertiary/unclassified/residential roads _should_ have a (non-A/B[1]) ref?
Milton Keynes has its (signposted) H and V numbers for Horizontal/Vertical,
but other than that I can't remember any.


The H and V numbers in Milton Keynes aren't actually numbers, in the 
road numbering sense. They're names, or parts of names, in the same way 
that "Fifth Avenue" and "32nd Street" are names of roads in New York.


The use of H and V numbers in Milton Keynes to mimic US-style numbered 
street/avenue names was deliberate, along with the grid layout of the 
street pattern. The aim was to give Milton Keynes a very distinctive 
structural style, all part of the vision of a "new city".


In practice, both the naming and layout have softened somewhat since 
first being built, with most streets now having "normal" names as well 
as H and V numbers, and newer residential streets not necessarily 
following the grid pattern. But most major longitudinal and latitudinal 
roads retain their original H and V numbers as part of the current name 
(for example, "V7 Saxon Street" and "H6 Childs Way").


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] 'D' class roads references.

[Mark Goodge]

On 05/08/2018 21:10, Martin Wynne wrote:

Copyright doesn't work like that.


But you can't copyright names, addresses and similar material.

Road names and numbers would surely fall within that.


Public road names and numbers (eg, names on name plates and numbers on 
road signs) fall within that. But C and D numbers are not (normally) 
public, they are internal identifiers not intended for public use. The 
fact that a published document may include them doesn't necessarily mean 
that they can be re-used.


In practice, I doubt that there would be any objection to them being 
incorporated in other documents such as OSM. But OSM doesn't work on the 
basis that something is probably OK, however high the probability. It 
needs to be definitely and incontrovertibly OK, either via a licence 
which permits re-use or an explicit grant of permission from the 
rightsholder.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Bartholomews, Brighton

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/07/2018 16:39, Martin Wynne wrote:

  > And, since that also matches what's on the ground,

What's on the ground is that a property in Avenue has a postal address 
in East Street, so maybe Avenue is simply a part of East Street and 
should be mapped as "East Street"?


It is in the normal run of East Street numbers - 60 not 60A:

  http://www.cutemedia.com/contact/


It's on the corner of Avenue and East Street. So it's not surprising 
that it has an address in East Street. There are no properties which 
face solely onto Avenue. They all face onto East Street or Old Steine.


Google Streetview clearly shows a name plate for "Avenue":

https://goo.gl/maps/97fkMqoXCg72

and at the other end:

https://goo.gl/maps/siHbb4nKEFN2

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Re: [Talk-GB] Bartholomews, Brighton

[Mark Goodge]

On 26/07/2018 13:32, Paul Berry wrote:
I can't help but think this changeset is misguided for a number of 
reasons. However I'm nowhere near Brighton so not really in a position 
to verify other than from memory and some armchair detective work.


To wit: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/59687846

So, two ways: "Bartholomews" and "Avenue" or just one: "Bartholomews 
Avenue"?


FWIW, they are separate streets, "Bartholomews" and "Avenue", on the 
NSG, with different USRNs. "Bartholomews" also appears on OS Open Names, 
although "Avenue" doesn't (probably because it's solely a pedestrianised 
route now and not a vehicle route, so it isn't categorised as a road).


I know we can't use NSG data directly as it isn't (yet!) open, but Open 
Names is.


FWIW, I think it's likely that the changeset author's comments are 
right, and it is originally from an error by the highway authority. But, 
if so, it was an error made long enough ago to have become the current, 
canonical name. And, since that also matches what's on the ground, I see 
no reason to try to "correct" it on OSM. I'd revert the change.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Closed software supplier ESRI creates OSM vector tile basemap

[Mark Goodge]

On 10/07/2018 23:10, Paul Norman wrote:

On 2018-07-10 2:00 PM, Mark Goodge wrote:
ESRI's free maps can be accessed as server-side tiles. See 
Leaflet-providers for some examples:


https://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/

I'm not sure of the licence restrictions which apply to them, or any 
rate limits. But, from a technical point of view, it's just as easy to 
use as OSM Carto tiles. 


The ESRI layers listed on leaflet-providers are from a different host, 
and looking at URLs, I wasn't able to get raster tiles from the new 
vector basemap.


The ESRI layers are served from arcgisonline.com, which is one of ESRI's 
domains.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Closed software supplier ESRI creates OSM vector tile basemap

[Mark Goodge]

On 10/07/2018 21:10, Paul Norman wrote:

On 2018-07-10 12:30 PM, Mark Goodge wrote:


I think it's a positive. One of the biggest issues with large-scale 
use of OSM is that OSM's own tile server isn't suited for high-volume 
use, but most of the alternative tile servers are rate-limited and 
require payment for larger volumes. If ESRI's tile server will, as the 
blog post suggests, be free to access, then it will be a more useful 
alternative for users who don't have the resources to host their own 
tile server.


It's not the same as OpenStreetMap Carto. OpenStreetMap Carto is written 
in CartoCSS and rendered server-side, what they have uses client-side 
rendering and lots of ESRI technology.


ESRI's free maps can be accessed as server-side tiles. See 
Leaflet-providers for some examples:


https://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/

I'm not sure of the licence restrictions which apply to them, or any 
rate limits. But, from a technical point of view, it's just as easy to 
use as OSM Carto tiles.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Closed software supplier ESRI creates OSM vector tile basemap

[Mark Goodge]

On 10/07/2018 20:16, Jez Nicholson wrote:

https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=fae788aa91e54244b161b59725dcbb2a

"...updated every few weeks..." is not so great

"...freely available for any user or developer..." sounds good

discuss


I think it's a positive. One of the biggest issues with large-scale use 
of OSM is that OSM's own tile server isn't suited for high-volume use, 
but most of the alternative tile servers are rate-limited and require 
payment for larger volumes. If ESRI's tile server will, as the blog post 
suggests, be free to access, then it will be a more useful alternative 
for users who don't have the resources to host their own tile server.


I think a more granular update schedule is unlikely to be an issue for 
most users. Even "every few weeks" is going to be a lot better than Bing 
and Google.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Has someone just given us (the start of) access to the crown jewels?

[Mark Goodge]

On 13/06/2018 17:08, Simon Poole wrote:
Most of the time such much applauded changes in policy work mainly for 
the big guys (aka the goog, here and tomtom), by lowering the costs to 
have similar level of non-automotive related detail as the national 
mapping agencies and OSM. I don't quite see and haven't seen in other 
countries, even in theory, how "small businesses" profit from this at all.


Releasing property extents under OGL is likely to be useful in the 
realms of planning and development. And UPRNs will benefit a lot of 
property-related businesses or those for which property forms an 
important part of their dataset.


The really big win, of course, would come from OGLing AddressBase. But, 
in the short term, UPRNs + OSM would make for a workable open source 
alternative.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Railway Platforms - Covered=yes are not shown in latest rendering

[Mark Goodge]

On 29/05/2018 14:53, Tony Shield wrote:

Guys

Recently changed Chorley station adding more details. Added covered=yes 
cos there is a canopy for us to huddle under but not the whole length of 
the platform, there are also bus shelter type of shelters so shelter=yes 
was also added.


I think 'covered' is the wrong tag, in this context. According to the 
wiki, it doesn't simply mean something that has a roof (or canopy), it 
means something that is underneath something else.


From my understanding of it, a more correct use of this in a railway 
context would be at somewhere like, say, St Pancras, where you would map 
the building as a whole and then map the platforms underneath the train 
shed as "covered". But I think it's complicated anyway, as even where 
there is a separate train shed, it doesn't usually cover the entire 
length of all of the platforms. (And I note that St Pancras doesn't 
actually have the platforms tagged as "covered", anyway).


At the end of this week (2nd June) I intend to change the platforms I 
know to remove covered=yes, if you disagree please challenge.


I think removing it would be correct, too.

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Re: [Talk-GB] Railway level crossings

[Mark Goodge]

On 24/05/2018 16:36, David Woolley wrote:

Please read the terms of use on that web site, in particular:

"You may only print off copies, and may only download page(s) from our 
site for your personal and non-commercial use."


Anything included in OSM needs to have licence that permits commercial 
use, so you cannot use the data from that web page as a source for OSM.


And, from a practical perspective, even if it was available under a 
suitable licence it wouldn't be suitable for bulk import as quite a lot 
of the coordinates are too imprecise.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] UK Quarterly Project: Post Offices

[Mark Goodge]

On 03/05/2018 11:25, SK53 wrote:
Can we please avoid changing the meaning of post office by extending it 
to courier offices, and restrict it to those places which offer not only 
a full service mail offering (aka Universal Postal Service), but the 
traditional other services available at post offices (some banking, 
government forms, etc). Extending the meaning of the tag would make OSM 
data immediately intrinsically less useful in cities where courier 
offices exist. Such a change would a) require every post office to be 
suitably tagged with an indication of which service it belongs to; and 
b) require every data consumer to change.


I agree. "Post Office" has a specific legal meaning in the UK, and 
applying the tag to things that are not actually Post Offices would be 
confusing at the very least.


I think it would be helpful to have a suitable tag for things like 
Amazon lockers and Hermes drop-off points. But they're not Post Offices. 
They're not even close to being Post Offices. They fulfil a different 
role, and need to be identified as such.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Bottle Kilns

[Mark Goodge]

On 06/04/2018 18:58, Brian Prangle wrote:

Hi Russ

If any are listed buildings it would be good to tag them

heritage=2
heritage_operator=Historic England
listed_status =  Grade I  Grade II* or Grade II as appropriate


All surviving bottle kilns in Stoke-on-Trent are listed. But sometimes 
they are listed as part of the factory to which they are attached, 
rather than individually. If you're trying to search for them, on the 
British Listed Buildings site or elsewhere, it's worth noting that, in 
the Potteries, they're generally referred to as bottle ovens in the 
listings rather than kilns.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] recent School ref:edubase update

[Mark Goodge]

On 13/03/2018 12:58, Dave F wrote:

Hi

Robert Whittaker has recently performed an edit across England & Wales 
to update Schools ref:edubase code.


https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/57034975

As well as the reference, he's amended some of the names in OSM as 
listed in the database. I think this is wrong. Similar to shops & street 
names etc I believe we should should be using the names displayed on the 
ground.


I think you'll find that the displayed names are the official ones, and 
hence the same as in Edubase. I've just checked all the schools that I'm 
personally familiar with in my area, and the name shown on OSM is the 
name that the school has on its name board. I appreciate that's a small 
sample, but it's 100% right on that sample. If you can find cases where 
the school's displayed name differs from the OSM name, then by all means 
edit it to reflect the displayed name. But I don't think that's a good 
enough reason to revert this bulk edit.


Part of the issue is that schools do change their names quite often, 
particularly when converting to academies, but the old name tends to 
persist in popular usage for some time. Popular usage, though is not 
what's "displayed on the ground" - for that, we have to go by what the 
school has put on its own name board. And they are, generally, very good 
at changing the name boards to reflect any changes in their official name.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] New Post Office Data and Comparison Tool

[Mark Goodge]

On 19/02/2018 14:37, David Woolley wrote:

On 19/02/18 13:29, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:

The raw branch list data can be found at
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postoffice/data/  and it licensed under
the Open Government Licence v3. It includes ID numbers, branch names,
addresses, locations, and opening hours.


What does type=Crown mean, as one of those near me is marked as this, 
but is actually a concession in a W H Smith's?


A Crown Post Office is one that is either managed directly by Post 
Office Ltd, or is provided as part of a national franchise agreement 
with a major retailer.


AIUI, WH Smith is, so far, the only retailer that has currently entered 
into such an arrangement, but I may be wrong.


The difference between a franchised Crown Post Office and a normal sub 
Post Office is that in the latter, the management of the Post Office and 
the non-PO retail are the same (typically, of course, a village shop 
that combines the role of Post Office and general store), whereas in a 
Crown franchise, the Post Office section is managed separately to the 
normal retail operation even if they share non-managerial staff.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Errors in Street Names in Addresses

[Mark Goodge]

On 27/01/2018 20:09, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:


Secondly, some addresses contain two street names, a main
street and a so-called "dependent street". Apart from the historic
anomalies, a single postcode should only cover one main street, but
can include more than one dependent street.


These are actually quite common, and having had a look at the error list 
for my local area nearly all of them are due to this - the address is on 
 secondary street accessed from the main street with which it shares a 
postcode. Here's one, for example:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/304095650


(The tool will not see the
dependent streets as different if both streets are tagged, either as
addr:substreet and addr:street or as addr:street and
addr:parentstreet.) 


Which is the more correct usage here? Do we

a) tag the dependent street as the addr:street, and the main street as 
addr:parentstreet, or should we


b) (following Royal Mail practice as found in the PAF), tag the 
dependent street as a addr:substreet and the main street as addr:street?


My personal preference would be the latter, it's not only consistent 
with official addressing practice but it's also how most people perceive 
these kind of addresses as well. But, on the other hand, most map 
editors are likely to use addr:street for the dependent street, simply 
because the editor UI doesn't make it obvious that addr:substreet is a 
possibility. So it might be simpler to fix these by adding 
addr:parentstreet as necessary rather than trying to get everything 
pedantically correct.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Errors in Street Names in Addresses

[Mark Goodge]

On 29/01/2018 12:38, Lester Caine wrote:


UK post codes are based on the postmans walk, so follow the footpaths 
that a postman can follow to deliver mail. Yes a street may have a 
different postcode on each side, and long roads are broken down into 
smaller blocks each with it's own postcode. One rule for postcodes is 
that each will only cover one primary street name and so ignoring the 
'postal address file', postcodes ARE essentially a list of streets.


For residential streets, that's generally true (although there are 
exceptions). It's not at all a reliable guide in commercial areas, 
though, where a significant number of properties will have large user 
postcodes of their own.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wildly inaccurate postcode

[Mark Goodge]

On 25/01/2018 14:05, Stuart Reynolds wrote:
…and who does that? I didn’t ask for a search on NPEMap/FreeThePostcode, 
and it isn’t something that is stored as a physical node on the map that 
I can edit out. It is simply a service that sits behind the search box 
on openstreetmap.org , so far as I can tell.


I don't know why OSM still uses NPEmap as a search resource, and I don't 
know who to approach to get that removed. Maybe somebody else on this 
list may be able to answer that. My response was simply to point out 
that it isn't an issue with NPEmap that can be, or will be, fixed.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] Wildly inaccurate postcode

[Mark Goodge]

On 25/01/2018 11:48, Stuart Reynolds wrote:

Who do we need to speak to at FreeThePostcode to get it fixed? Does 
anyone have any contacts?


FreeThePostcode is obsolete, and has been ever since postcode data was 
released under the OGL by OS and ONS. It will, therefore, never be 
updated or fixed.


The correct solution is to remove any data derived from FreeThePostcode 
from OSM and Nominatim, and replace it with data from OS Codepoint 
and/or the ONSPD. Additionally, NPEMap should no longer be used as a 
search resource on OSM.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] FHRS info when pub has been taken over.

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/01/2018 22:39, Andrew Black wrote:
If a pub has been taken over by a chain (and changed name), should one 
delete FHRS info.

My gut feeling is yes but. ...


If there has been a change of ownership, then yes, the old FHRS rating 
doesn't carry over to the new one. So it would need to be deleted from 
OSM as well. If it's merely a change of trading name, though, then it 
does remain applicable, and can be left on the data too. You'd need 
local knowledge to tell the difference, in most cases.


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[Talk-GB] Nominatim and postcodes

[Mark Goodge]

I tried searching on OSM for a postcode, which I know exists, but it 
returned zero entries from Nominatim. Other postcode searches work fine.


Can anyone tell me where Nominatim gets its data from for a postcode 
search, and how often it's updated?


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

[Mark Goodge]

On 29/12/2017 23:23, Mick Orridge wrote:

The ONS postcode file (Open Government Licence other than BT postcodes 
for NI) for August 2017 (download here:- 
https://ons.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=1e4a246b91c34178a55aab047413f29b) 
holds terminated postcodes. It's entry for BD5 8JR shows a terminated 
date of 2009 06. I guess the replacement postcode could be narrowed down 
using the date introduced field along with perhaps the OA01 field (2001 
census output area) plus easting and northing.


That's a nice idea, but unfortunately it doesn't quite work :-)

The correct postcode according to PAF, BD6 1DA, was introduced in 1980 
(the same year as BD5 8JR, as it happens), so there isn't a one to one 
mapping of old to new - instead, properties formerly in BD5 8JR seem to 
have been reassigned to other existing postcodes rather than to a new one.


Also, BD6 1DA isn't the nearest current postcode to BD5 8JR - there are 
a couple of other BD5 xxx postcodes that are closer.


It's speculation, but my guess is that BD5 8JR was simply abolished and 
all the properties in it reassigned to the BD6 postal area. Bear in mind 
that it's not just a different postcode, but also a different district 
(and therefore a different outbound code). Looking at the boundary maps 
of the postcode districts, it looks as if Rooley Avenue and all the 
roads immediately off it were moved from BD5 to BD6. So the change was 
probably for operational reasons, quite possibly in response to new 
development in the area that affected the pattern of mail delivery.


Going back to the previous point about using neighbouring properties as 
a guide, the Shell filling station only has one neighbour (on the other 
side it's right up against the junction). That neighbour is Pearls 
Tearoom & Patisserie, which publishes its own postcode as BD6 1DA:


https://www.facebook.com/pearlstearoom/

Also, looking at the map, the tearoom shares an entrance and car park 
with the filling station (it's a typical "cafe at a petrol station" 
layout). Given that BD6 1DA isn't a single-user postcode, I think that's 
sufficient observational evidence to assign it to the filling station as 
well - unless the filling station itself had a single-user postcode 
(which is unlikely), there's no other postcode it could plausibly be.


Personally, I'd be happy with that. Even though we know, from the PAF, 
that BD6 1DA is correct, there's enough non-PAF evidence to support it. 
If anyone feels like editing it, it would probably be worth adding a 
note to say that the source of the postcode is extrapolated from a known 
neighbour, just to be on the safe side. But that ought to be enough to 
cover it.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

[Mark Goodge]

On 29/12/2017 11:41, Ian Caldwell wrote:




On 29 December 2017 at 10:47, Mark Goodge <m...@good-stuff.co.uk 
<mailto:m...@good-stuff.co.uk>> wrote:


since a filling station isn't going to be large enough to have a
single-user postcode


Not necessarily I used to own a three bedroom house that had its own 
postcode.


That sounds a little implausible. Are you sure it wasn't just the only 
*house* within that postcode? Or was it, possibly, the only remaining 
property with that postcode after others have been reassigned (or 
demolished)?


(It's relatively easy to check, if you give us the postcode, even if 
it's now a defunct one).


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Non-free sources [was: Re: Importing Shell fuel stations]

[Mark Goodge]

On 29/12/2017 11:14, Andy Mabbett wrote:

On 29 December 2017 at 08:30, Adam Snape  wrote:


Speaking generally, I don't think it's good practice to be using
non-free resources like this to research information which is
not clear from open data, even if we don't use the information
directly.


Are you happy for people to enter into OSM the name of a store, read
from the store's shop-front signage?

What if that signage is an artistic design, meriting copyright?

What if it is written in a proprietary, copyrighted font?


Names aren't subject to copyright. They may be protected by trademarks, 
but mapping them is not an infringement of a trademark.  So, provided we 
didn't discover the name from a source which is itself protected by 
database right (eg, a proprietary directory such as Yellow Pages), then 
there's nothing stopping us from using a name. Reading it directly from 
the shopfront would always be OK. And we're not reproducing the font or 
the logo, so that's immaterial.



What about from a non-free photograph, found online? Or in a book,
magazine or newspaper?


Those are fine. We are not reproducing any of the content, we are merely 
ascertaining facts.



Were exactly do we draw the line? Why there?


We draw the line at using a source which is subject to database right, 
and where using the content would be an infringement of that right. 
Because facts are not subject to copyright, but a collection of facts 
can be subject to database right. And it's the database right which, in 
the context of OSM, is the key issue.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

[Mark Goodge]

On 28/12/2017 22:33, Warin wrote:


Could the post code be derived from surrounding features?
I don't know how detailed the post codes there are .. but if features in 
OSM surrounding it were of the same post code (and correct) then they 
could be used to derive the post code?


It will almost certainly share a postcode with at least one neighbouring 
property, yes. A filling station is not going to receive enough post to 
justify a "large user" postcode. So if it's surrounded by properties 
that all have the same postcode, then that's definite enough. But if one 
neighbour has one postcode, and a different neighbour has a different 
one, then we can't be certain which is correct for this property... :-)


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

[Mark Goodge]

On 29/12/2017 08:30, Adam Snape wrote:

Hi,

I don't think we would delete a postcode found in other Open Data just 
on the basis of it not being in Codepoint Open; the error could lie in 
Codepoint Open itself. I suggest that a FIXME would be appropriate where 
two sources appear to contradict each other.


There are two open data sources of postcodes: Codepoint Open and the ONS 
Postcode Database. Ultimately, both of those are populated from Royal 
Mail data, since it's RM that assigns postcodes. So if CPO and ONSPD 
agree that a postcode is deleted (and I'm not aware of any instance in 
which they've disagreed), that's canonical.


I think a FIXME is probably a good solution here; hopefully there will 
be somebody on the ground who can verify the correct postcode simply by 
comparison with known postcodes for neighbouring properties (since a 
filling station isn't going to be large enough to have a single-user 
postcode).


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

[Mark Goodge]

On 28/12/2017 19:31, Lester Caine wrote:

Get the return address right ...

On 28/12/17 16:12, Colin Spiller wrote:

I've been adding postcodes in the Bradford BD area using Robert & gregrs
useful tools. I've just noticed that the Shell station at the Rooley
Lane / Rooley Avenue junction BD5 8JR is now reported as having an
incorrect postal unit (the final two letters of the postcode). This
postcode appears widely on the internet for this site, but the RM
postcode finder thinks it should be Rooley Avenue, BD6 1DA.


PAF file has ...
Shell Filling Station
Rooley Avenue
BRADFORD
BD6 1DA

and BD5 8JR is not listed having been deleted in 2009
http://checkmypostcode.uk/bd58jr so the real problem is does one leave
the faulty postcode in place because we can't use the PAF data or do we
validate postcodes against the codepoint database and remove those that
are not listed


It's an interesting conundrum, on several levels. We can certainly 
validate against Codepoint Open or the ONSPD, as these are open data. So 
if they say the postcode is impossible (because it's defunct), then we 
can definitely delete it if we want to.


Replacing it with the correct postcode, though, is harder. We'd need a 
source that isn't derived from PAF. But Googling for this particular 
station, all the sources have the old, incorrect postcode - even Google 
itself! (I would expect they're all using the Shell data, of course).


So that leaves us with three options, at least initially:

1. Leave it as is. We know it's wrong, but it's consistent with every 
other source, and it's from the only canonical source.


2. Replace it with the right one. More useful, but potentially risky 
from a licensing perspective.


3. Delete it and leave the entry with no postcode. Probably the best we 
can do as far as accuracy is concerned (in line with the general 
principle that data is better missing than wrong, if it can't be right), 
and avoids any licence conflict. But this is the least useful for users 
of the data (since, in this case, even the wrong postcode will identify 
the location in practice - for obvious reasons, Royal Mail will deliver 
to defunct postcodes long after they have been deleted, and many 
sat-navs will work with defunct postcodes too).


Maybe the best solution is to leave it alone for now, and see if we can 
persuade Shell to fix it. Deleting the postcode risks it being re-added 
by someone else who spots its absence and decides to be helpful, without 
realising that if they use the RM postcode finder to validate it that 
isn't compatible with OSM's licence.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Importing Website Data

[Mark Goodge]

On 21/12/2017 15:49, Frederik Ramm wrote:

Hi,

On 21.12.2017 16:13, Mark Goodge wrote:

My vision of OSM is a movement which places its users first, by
providing the maximum utility possible for those who look at the maps.
That means maximising the quantity, accuracy, relevance and timeliness
of the data.


That is certainly a valid approach that many will subscribe to. The
goals you mention will sometimes have to be weighed against each other
("is a large amount of inaccurate data better than a small amount of
accurate data", "is it good to add this bulk data which is unlikely to
be cared for by mappers and hence will soon lack in timeliness" etc) but
on the whole they're a good selection.


Data has to be accurate. Inaccurate data is worse than missing data 
(although, it must be noted that imprecise is not the same as 
inaccurate, and we can tolerate a reasonable amount of imprecision 
provided it is not misleadingly imprecise).



I think that relevance plays a big role, and commercial players tend to
claim that concept for themselves ("tell us something about you so we
can display ads that are relevant to you") - in my view, a pub in your
town is not "relevant" because the chain operating it thinks that it
should be, but because the locals find it relevant.


As far as a map is concerned, something is relevant if it is there. Even 
if only one person a year actually wants to know it's there :-)


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Reversing the flow of a one-way street

[Mark Goodge]

On 13/01/2017 22:44, Lester Caine wrote:

On 13/01/17 22:36, Mark Goodge wrote:

There is a one-way street (to be more precise, a service road) in my
town centre which has the wrong direction of flow on OSM. I can't see
any obvious way of changing that - the "oneway" tag merely has a value
of "yes", and there's no direction attribute anywhere that I can see.

Is it simply a case of deleting the way and re-adding it in the right
direction, or is there a better solution?


You simply reverse the direction the way is drawn. What editor are you
using as it's fairly obvious on all of them which direction a way has
been input.


Ah, OK. That's a link that I simply hadn't spotted I could click. I'm 
using the default iD editor.


Mark


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[Talk-GB] Reversing the flow of a one-way street

[Mark Goodge]

There is a one-way street (to be more precise, a service road) in my 
town centre which has the wrong direction of flow on OSM. I can't see 
any obvious way of changing that - the "oneway" tag merely has a value 
of "yes", and there's no direction attribute anywhere that I can see.


Is it simply a case of deleting the way and re-adding it in the right 
direction, or is there a better solution?


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Tagging a multilvel building

[Mark Goodge]

On 12/01/2017 10:58, Will Phillips wrote:

Great to see some new mapping taking place in Evesham. I do visit
occasionally and last year did some updates around the centre.
Unfortunately I haven't had much time during recent visits.

Tagging multi-level buildings can be difficult and there isn't one
agreed way to go about it. Generally I would try to keep it as simple as
possible while adding the information you consider important.

The easiest option in this case would be to place a node inside the
existing Town Hall building outline. Tag the node as a cafe, add the
name and other details as you wish. Also add level=0 to show it is on
the ground floor.


OK, I've done that for now. We'll see how it looks when it updates.

On a related note, should a cafe-bar be tagged as a cafe, or a bar? 
There doesn't seem to be an option for cafe-bar, despite this being an 
increasingly popular form of catering outlet!


Mark

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[Talk-GB] Tagging a multilvel building

[Mark Goodge]

I'm currently trying to tidy up some of the tagging and locations of the 
town centre where I live. I've already moved a pub to be in the right 
place, and updated some labels for shops that have changed hands since 
the previous edit. However, one that also needs updating is a multi-use 
building with different uses on different floors, and I have to confess 
that I can't really work out how to tag it from the information on the wiki.


Specifically, the building is Evesham Town Hall. Like a lot of English 
market town Town Halls, it was originally built on arches at first floor 
level, the ground floor open space being used as a market space. But 
then the ground floor was later enclosed, and used separately - it was, 
for a long time, the town police station and jail, and now has a 
commercial tenant as a cafe-bar.


What I'm trying, and failing, to work out how to tag is some way of 
representing the following:


1. The entire building is "Evesham Town Hall".
2. The top floor comprises two parts: the Council Chamber and the Town Hall.
3. The ground floor (excluding the access to the first floor) is the 
Valkyrie Cafe-bar.


I don't think it's necessary to map all the distinct parts, including 
the staircase that gives access to the top floor. And tagging the 
Council Chamber may be unnecessary, too. But I do think it needs to be 
tagged as both the Town Hall and the cafe-bar, with the latter being 
represented as being contained within the former at ground level.


Does that make sense? If so, how do I do it?

Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] beetroot or beet

[Mark Goodge]

On 10/01/2017 01:44, Andy Townsend wrote:

On 10/01/17 01:20, David Groom wrote:

...
Tag info shows 579 ways tagged with crop = beet, of these 572 are in
northern Italy added by 3 users, so its probably quite easy to ask
what exactly they meant by "beet" , and retag these existing ways if
they actually should be beetroot.


In the UK I could hazard a guess as to whether sugarbeet or something
else based on the proximity to one of British Sugar's plants such as
Newark or Peterborough, but in Northern Italy asking the mapper
definitely seems like a good idea.


In British (or, at least, English; I'm not familiar with Scottish or 
Welsh) agricultural practice, "beet" alone is generally short for sugar 
beet. Beetroot isn't normally abbreviated, not least because doing so 
would risk confusion with sugar beet. Fodder beet (aka field beet) is 
typically called mangelwurzel in England.



Another caveat in the UK - crops are often rotated (and planted based on
price expectation) so what is beet one year is barley the next, and
perhaps oil-seed rape after that.  Essentially, where this variation
happens it'd be difficult to trust any "crop" tag over a year old.


I agree; I think labelling annual crops is probably rather pointless in 
the UK. It's probably worth labelling perennials, such as orchard crops, 
vineyards, grassland etc, as these typically remain the same over a 
period of many years (centuries, even, in some cases). But there are 
very few circumstances where the same annual crop will be grown 
repeatedly in the same field. And keeping up to date with the changes is 
too big an ask, really.


Mark


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Re: [Talk-GB] Quarterly Project (Health): Pharmacies and Defibrillators

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/05/2016 16:42, Andy Townsend wrote:

On 20/05/2016 16:29, SK53 wrote:

In my experience there are certain prescription which I can only get
fulfilled by a hospital pharmacy (those written by a consultant).


Agreed - and in the case of the one I'm familiar with it's not a stock
issue but a bureacracy one - anything written "upstairs" by a doctor
apparently has to be fulfilled by the (outsourced) hospital pharmacy.
I've never tried to redeem a "regular" prescription there, but they do
sell the normal high-street pharmacist add-ons, so they don't just rely
on the closed shop of hospital-written prescriptions.


All pharmacists offering the standard FP10 ("green form") prescription 
service have to be able to dispense all drugs that can be prescribed via 
it. That is a licence requirement. That doesn't mean holding a stock of 
every drug - for the more esoteric ones, obtaining them to order is 
acceptable - but it is good practice to hold stocks of all those that 
are likely to be requested regularly. It's unlikely that a hospital FP10 
pharmacy would have a stock policy that's significantly more limited 
than a high street pharmacy.


However, not all hospital pharmacies are FP10. This, for example, is not:

http://www.yorkhospitals.nhs.uk/our_hospitals/_the_york_hospital/facilities/

As a rule of thumb, if the pharmacy provision is outsourced to one of 
the regular High Street names (Stewart Pharmacy and Lloyds seem to be 
the most common), then it's likely that it will offer an FP10 service. 
If it's in-house, however, or run by a hospital pharmacy specialist, 
then it probably won't.


If you were going to map them, then you would need to now the 
difference. But, personally, I don't think it is worth it. All hospitals 
have a pharmacy of some sort, so mapping them separately is pointless.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] place=village/town/city

[Mark Goodge]

On 15/02/2016 12:35, Gregory wrote:

What did people think of my place:designation=* suggestion?


That would make sense, yes.

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Re: [Talk-GB] place=village/town/city

[Mark Goodge]

On 12/02/2016 17:18, Colin Smale wrote:

Several attempts have been made to "correct" the tagging from city to
village/town... each time it was changed back to city...


This, I think, illustrates why we really could do with a "legal_status" 
tag or similar for populated places. People, particularly those living 
in small (by population size) cities (in the legal sense) tend to be 
very protective of their city status, and dislike any attempt to 
override it. And saying that it's a global OSM policy isn't going to 
persuade them. Their argument (and to be fair, it's a very good 
argument) is that for a UK location, UK law takes precedence over the 
policy of a self-appointed voluntary group (which, ultimately, is all 
that OSM is). It's an argument that you won't win, short of banning 
people who disagree.


The only way to reconcile this, in the long run, is to have two separate 
tags for populated places, one describing the size according to global 
OSM guidelines, and one describing the legal status according to local law.


Mark
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Re: [Talk-GB] Secondary, tertiary and unclassified

[Mark Goodge]

On 04/11/2015 18:05, Lester Caine wrote:


The point I was trying to make was that Secondary, tertiary and
unclassified are essentially the same level of importance for road
navigation and so treating them differently in rendering ( or routing
rules ) adds an incorrect importance to one over the other.


They're not at all the same level of importance. Making that assertion 
betrays a fundamental ignorance of the UK's road network.



In the
absence of any other evidence I'm planning to simply re-tag the problem
unclassified routes as tertiary for now, but I can make a case for all
being secondary so they get rendered with the same separation from the
sections of the road system that should not be used for through routing.


If a road can be used for through routing then it probably is tertiary 
rather than unclassified[1]. That's a reasonable rule of thumb for 
making the decision, in the absence of more reliable information. But 
secondary is very well defined, and is part of published open data. 
There's never going to be a reason to tag a road as secondary that isn't 
already known to be.


[1] This is one of the reasons I don't like the new style, with white 
for all smaller roads. The difference between tertiary and 
residential/unclassfied is quite significant in UK road topology, and 
needs a clearer distinction than just the width of a digital brush 
stroke. But that's a different issue.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Secondary, tertiary and unclassified

[Mark Goodge]

On 04/11/2015 08:40, Lester Caine wrote:

OK finally spotted what is going thanks to the new style sheet ;)

The question is where do we get the 'tertiary' designation from since in
many cases there is little to distinguish those roads from
'unclassified'.


As far as the UK is concerned, this is part of the official 
categorisation. Although we're only used to 'M', 'A' and 'B' appearing 
on signs, the actual classification goes a stage further to include both 
'C' and 'U'. This data is part of the National Street Gazetteer (NSG). 
The NSG is used by commercial cartographers, and is how Google, Bing, 
OS, et al tell the difference between tertiary and residential routes.


If you go to http://roadworks.org and enable the base data layer, the 
underlying classification is exposed and you can click through from any 
road to get its full official classification data. Here, for example, is 
a C road (tertiary) near where I live:


http://portal.roadworks.org/data/dsp_usrnDetail.cfm?r=AAAmziAACAADtFTAAA=rstat 



and here's an unclassified (residential) road:

http://portal.roadworks.org/data/dsp_usrnDetail.cfm?r=AAAmziAACAADs0iAAC=rstat

Unfortunately, the NSG is not Open Data, so it isn't available to OSM by 
default. The nearest we can do is attempt to visually classify by 
observation. That's one of the weaknesses of a crowd-sourced approach., 
If that matters to you, you might want to get involved in the campaign 
to get the NSG released as Open Data.


Mark
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Re: [Talk-GB] New map style

[Mark Goodge]

On 01/11/2015 07:22, Ed Loach wrote:


On 31 Oct 2015 21:59, "jonathan" > wrote:
 >
 > I don't like it.
 >
 > It very simple, the colours should match the road sign colours: Blue,
Green, Red!

Red?


Traditional UK mapping colours for roads are a bit more complex than 
that. When the OS first started using colour, back in the early 20th 
century, it chose red for A roads and orange for B and larger 
unclassified roads, with white for residential streets and rural tracks. 
The use of green for primary routes and blue for motorways (and yellow 
for tertiary routes) came quite a bit later. The earliest OS maps to 
feature motorways have them in red, and practically indistinguishable 
from A roads - just about the only clue is the presence of slip roads at 
junctions. Here's a very early stretch of the M1 and M10:


http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=14=51.7518=-0.4195=11

The first UK maps to use blue for motorways were wide-scale route 
planner maps published in the late 60s. Most UK mapping companies 
quickly followed suit and it became the generic default. But it wasn't 
until the 90s that green for primary routes became anything like a standard.


Green and blue do, of course, match the relevant signage. But the other 
standard colours don't, and never have (other than in the trivial sense 
that minor road signs are white, and so are the lowest category of roads 
on pretty much every mapping system).


The use of blue for motorways by the OS was actually quite controversial 
at the time! Many people felt that blue should be reserved for water 
features, and that applying it to roads would be too confusing.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] New map style

[Mark Goodge]

On 31/10/2015 22:27, Chris Hill wrote:


We should all keep in mind that the standard map on the OSM website is
not OSM. It is just a single render as an example of what is possible.
There are thousands of renders out there (I must have made more than a
dozen). Making your own map tiles in your own style is not that hard and
not very hard or expensive to host if you have a real need to do it.


Easy for you and me, maybe. But not easy for the average user of online 
maps.


I don't disagree with the basic argument that OSM is fundamentally about 
the data, not the visual appearance of the website at 
http://openstreetmap.org. But, to the vast majority of users of OSM 
(that is, the type of user who is not represented on these mailing 
lists), the website *is* OpenStreetMap. If we are serious about making 
OSM a resource for the ordinary web user, as an alternative to Google 
and Bing, then we need to take those users into account. So the UX of 
the default presentation of OSM does matter, and matters a lot.


Mark

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Re: [Talk-GB] Village, Hamlet and populations ...

[Mark Goodge]

On 14/09/2015 00:41, Tom Hughes wrote:

On 14/09/15 00:16, Lester Caine wrote:


The OSM wiki defines 'hamlet' as less than 100-200 people, but village
supposedly starts at 1000 up to 1 with the proviso that it depends
on the country. Ideally the two would perhaps meet :) We are perhaps
looking at a population of around 8000 for a town designation in the UK,
but anything down to 100 is still classified as a village by the ONS.
What are actually missing from the OSN data are ANY hamlets despite
their claiming to include them.


Please don't try and draw bright lines based on population, and
certainly don't try and mass edit things based on that. It's much more
subjective than that.

Nobody would ever have described the place where I grew up as anything
other than a town, but we always used to reckon on a population of
around 3000 people (wikipedia says 5627 as of the 2011 census) and
certainly 8000 sounds very high to me.


Historically, the distinction between a hamlet, a village and a town was 
based on ecclesiastical parishes. A village was a populated area 
comprising a parish of its own, with one parish church. A town was a 
contiguous populated area comprising multiple ecclesiastical parishes, 
while a hamlet was a populated area too small to have its own parish 
(and thus being contained within another one, either a village parish or 
an outlying area of a town parish).


This official distinction has been lost over the years with multiple 
phases of local government reorganisation, but it still provides a good 
rule of thumb.


In England and Wales, a civil parish council can choose to style itself 
a town council if it wishes. The majority of those which have done so 
are those which, prior to the Local Government Act 1972, would have been 
a Municipal Borough (eg, Evesham or Lewes) and which meet the historical 
definition of a town, but by no means all of them fall into this category.


What that means is that population alone is a no more than a rough guide 
to the likely status of a town or village, at least in England and 
Wales. There's a significant overlap between the largest villages and 
the smallest towns.


Mark
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Re: [Talk-GB] UK/GB OpenStreetMap survey results

[Mark Goodge]

On 07/08/2015 10:02, Paul Norman wrote:

On 8/6/2015 2:07 PM, Antje wrote:

Forking the map style with stronger British road colours and then
getting that forked road style onto the main site once the default
style goes “international”.

After all, we didn’t call it “open” for nothing!

I'd approach this with caution, for two reasons

The first is that developing a new render style is one of the items more
disagreed with. Providing server space would be necessary for others to
host the tile layer so others can view it without installing it
themselves, and this was also a disagreed item. On the other hand, this
is a fairly well defined technical task, while items like raise
awareness and encourage more mappers are fairly fuzzy and harder to
define clear actions for.


Just an (anec)data point here. One of OSM's strongest selling points 
among the ordinary (non-map-geek) web community in the UK at the 
moment is the fact that, unlike Google, it uses the correct colours 
for roads. Google's own change to the orange-and-grey colour scheme 
generated huge opposition from many UK-based users. So the current OSM 
colour scheme is itself doing a very good job of raising awareness of OSM.


If there are plans to move OSM to an international colour scheme 
globally as well, then that advantage will be lost unless there is an 
easy option to use a UK-style overlay. So yes, I do think that a UK 
colour scheme should be a very high priority.


Mark
--
http://www.markgoodge.uk


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Re: [Talk-GB] Thrapston viaduct

[Mark Goodge]

On 13/07/2015 18:14, Andy Allan wrote:

On 13 July 2015 at 14:34, Mike Evans mi...@saxicola.co.uk wrote:


It seems to me that the viaduct and the railway are two separate
entities and should mapped as such. Just because an abandoned
railway happens to run on the top of the viaduct is irrelevant in
my opinion.


Exactly. If there was a massive viaduct that used to carry power
cables, it should be shown since it's a massive sodding viaduct, not
because there used to be some cables on it.

The same goes for massive trenches in the ground (i.e. cuttings) and
enormous embankments.


This.

From a general purpose mapping perspective, if you can see it (and
it's big enough to be noteworthy) then it should be mapped, irrespective
of its current or former purpose.

Usage is a separate and orthogonal consideration. Whether a bridge, for 
example, is used for a road, a railway, a footbridge or even has no 
current use will affect the iconography and colours applied to it. But 
it doesn't affect the fact that it's there, and therefore should not 
affect the question of whether it appears on the map in the first place.


Mark
--
http://www.markgoodge.uk

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