[Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
Recently, I wanted to fix a few local islands and public parks in coastal Maine, where I have local knowledge. But much to my dismay, the local area was pretty thoroughly broken: - The county lines along the coast are based on a really old (and incorrect) data set. - There's some confusion between towns (admin_level=8) and sub-town boundaries (admin_level=?). - Most towns are marked with nothing more than GNIS points. As a result, the local maps are incorrect, ugly (thanks to the bad county lines everywhere) and incompatible with Nominatim. I've prepared a more detailed explanation of what's wrong, with pictures, examples, and a couple of possible ways to improve things: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ekidd/Coastal_Maine_problems Personally, I'd be interested in tackling 4 small towns and maybe the Lincoln county boundary. But it looks like a large portion of the Maine coast suffers from similar problems. If anybody feels qualified to address the larger problems, I'd be grateful—and happy to help out. Thank you for your feedback and suggestions! -Eric ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
Hi Eric, Great to see some love for coastal Maine, where I have no local knowledge whatsoever. Do you think there may be a MapRoulette challenge in there perhaps? Or a tasking manager job so we can distribute work? I'd be in favor of replacing county boundaries with something more recent seeing how bad the quality is. Would require conflation and fixing relations at the edges of the work area, I guess, but may be worth it. Martijn On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 8:56 AM, Eric Kidd emk.li...@randomhacks.net wrote: Recently, I wanted to fix a few local islands and public parks in coastal Maine, where I have local knowledge. But much to my dismay, the local area was pretty thoroughly broken: - The county lines along the coast are based on a really old (and incorrect) data set. - There's some confusion between towns (admin_level=8) and sub-town boundaries (admin_level=?). - Most towns are marked with nothing more than GNIS points. As a result, the local maps are incorrect, ugly (thanks to the bad county lines everywhere) and incompatible with Nominatim. I've prepared a more detailed explanation of what's wrong, with pictures, examples, and a couple of possible ways to improve things: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ekidd/Coastal_Maine_problems Personally, I'd be interested in tackling 4 small towns and maybe the Lincoln county boundary. But it looks like a large portion of the Maine coast suffers from similar problems. If anybody feels qualified to address the larger problems, I'd be grateful—and happy to help out. Thank you for your feedback and suggestions! -Eric ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us -- Martijn van Exel skype: mvexel ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
Thank you for your response! I've made two test edits: - I imported TIGER County Subdivision files for four town boundaries. - I modified an existing TIGER Place outline to be admin_level=9, because it's a actually a subdivision of the real town. That's the brown blob on my example map. I've linked to the changesets here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ekidd/Coastal_Maine_problems#Experimental_edits Initial results are promising: Nominatim works! And the map looks better. So here's what it would take to make coastal Maine much better: 1. Use modern TIGER County data to replace the existing coastal counties. 2. Consider using TIGER County Subdivision data to give us actual town boundaries, and sort out the confusing mess of GNIS nodes that breaks Nominatim. 3. Decide whether we want to do anything with pre-existing TIGER Place outlines that are smaller than towns. I think (1) is safe, and not too much work at all. Maine only has 8 coastal counties, and they're really broken, so almost anything would be an improvement. (2) would help, but it's definitely more work. (3) is just a matter of deciding; the actual changes would take about 20 seconds for Lincoln county. Anyway, I'm happy to grab the necessary shape files, and use QGIS to simplify them, to convert them to WGS 84, and to break them into lines. But maybe we would want to do something more than that. I'm just a novice. :-) What do people think? Is it worth trying to do something about the Maine coast? 2014-10-15 11:31 GMT-04:00 Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org: Hi Eric, Great to see some love for coastal Maine, where I have no local knowledge whatsoever. Do you think there may be a MapRoulette challenge in there perhaps? Or a tasking manager job so we can distribute work? I'd be in favor of replacing county boundaries with something more recent seeing how bad the quality is. Would require conflation and fixing relations at the edges of the work area, I guess, but may be worth it. Martijn On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 8:56 AM, Eric Kidd emk.li...@randomhacks.net wrote: Recently, I wanted to fix a few local islands and public parks in coastal Maine, where I have local knowledge. But much to my dismay, the local area was pretty thoroughly broken: - The county lines along the coast are based on a really old (and incorrect) data set. - There's some confusion between towns (admin_level=8) and sub-town boundaries (admin_level=?). - Most towns are marked with nothing more than GNIS points. As a result, the local maps are incorrect, ugly (thanks to the bad county lines everywhere) and incompatible with Nominatim. I've prepared a more detailed explanation of what's wrong, with pictures, examples, and a couple of possible ways to improve things: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ekidd/Coastal_Maine_problems Personally, I'd be interested in tackling 4 small towns and maybe the Lincoln county boundary. But it looks like a large portion of the Maine coast suffers from similar problems. If anybody feels qualified to address the larger problems, I'd be grateful—and happy to help out. Thank you for your feedback and suggestions! -Eric ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us -- Martijn van Exel skype: mvexel ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Eric Kidd emk.li...@randomhacks.net wrote: Thank you for your response! I've made two test edits: - I imported TIGER County Subdivision files for four town boundaries. - I modified an existing TIGER Place outline to be admin_level=9, because it's a actually a subdivision of the real town. That's the brown blob on my example map. I think you are on the right track with the TIGER County Subdivision files. I did a lot of work on the town boundaries in New Hampshire and it probably had the same sort of mess you are seeing in Maine. Boundaries for towns were imported multiple times by different users and the county boundaries were imported using a much lower precision source. At least in New Hampshire, the county boundaries are most often coincident with town boundaries, so it makes sense to have these in OSM as Relations (not as closed Way polygons) and sharing the Way objects among multiple boundaries. Also, the TIGER CDP shapes were erroneously used in place of the actual town boundaries. The CDP for a town is often generally where the most of the people live, but the actual boundary for the town is a much larger area and this can be verified against town-line signs on the ground. The TIGER boundary data seems to want to share nodes with TIGER road data even though it doesn't actually make sense. For example, town boundaries are often straight lines, but in TIGER these lines are slightly jagged so that they can share points with roads that are close to the town line. If you look at resources like property tax maps that some towns make available, you can see that in many cases the TIGER boundary data should just be made into straight lines. And straight lines in OSM should just be represented by a Way connecting 2 Nodes (your simplify step in QGIS will get you most of the way there). Tagging on the Ways is completely optional as that information should all be in the admin Relations. However, the consensus is that the Ways should have the admin_level be the lowest number (for example admin_level=6 for Ways that make up both a town and a county boundary) rather than trying to have multiple values separated by semicolons. Generally, I have used admin_level=9 for areas inside of towns that appear to be separately administered. In some larger towns, I used admin_level=9 for the wards or districts which correspond to seats on the local government. Towns have also been imported as single nodes, which could be influencing your Nominatim results. These place Nodes should be added to you admin Relations with role admin_centre or label. You should also add wikipedia tags to the boundary relations as this will help Nominatim determine the place hierarchy. --Peter ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
On 10/15/14 10:56 AM, Eric Kidd wrote: Recently, I wanted to fix a few local islands and public parks in coastal Maine, where I have local knowledge. But much to my dismay, the local area was pretty thoroughly broken: * The county lines along the coast are based on a really old (and incorrect) data set. * There's some confusion between towns (admin_level=8) and sub-town boundaries (admin_level=?). * Most towns are marked with nothing more than GNIS points. As a result, the local maps are incorrect, ugly (thanks to the bad county lines everywhere) and incompatible with Nominatim. I've prepared a more detailed explanation of what's wrong, with pictures, examples, and a couple of possible ways to improve things: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ekidd/Coastal_Maine_problems Personally, I'd be interested in tackling 4 small towns and maybe the Lincoln county boundary. But it looks like a large portion of the Maine coast suffers from similar problems. If anybody feels qualified to address the larger problems, I'd be grateful—and happy to help out. Thank you for your feedback and suggestions! you can get 2014 boundary data for Maine from TIGER and it should be pretty good. i have some extracts from it in GeoJSON in github if you want to look it over. Maine GIS has data online but their current licensing is extremely incompatible with the ODbL richard -- rwe...@averillpark.net Averill Park Networking - GIS IT Consulting OpenStreetMap - PostgreSQL - Linux Java - Web Applications - Search ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
Thank you, everybody, for your advice. Special thanks to Peter for his experience with similar issues in New Hampshire. Earlier today, I added 4 towns on the Boothbay peninsula, which was a nice, low-risk change. Just a moment ago, I updated the southern half of Lincoln county with the TIGER 2014 county data, splicing it into Sagadahoc and Knox counties on either side. This is a pretty big change, and I was as careful as I could be, but I'd appreciate another set of eyes. Wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ekidd/Coastal_Maine_problems County: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/26104709#map=8/44.090/-68.730 Everything was done with boundary lines and relations, and I cleared up all JOSM validation errors on the parts I touched. Overall, this sort of cleanup seems like it would help coastal Maine a lot. The maps are a lot nicer looking, and Nominatim is working now. That only needs 7 counties that are in need of love. :-) (And one which is in need of review.) -Eric 2014-10-15 14:25 GMT-04:00 Peter Dobratz pe...@dobratz.us: On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Eric Kidd emk.li...@randomhacks.net wrote: Thank you for your response! I've made two test edits: - I imported TIGER County Subdivision files for four town boundaries. - I modified an existing TIGER Place outline to be admin_level=9, because it's a actually a subdivision of the real town. That's the brown blob on my example map. I think you are on the right track with the TIGER County Subdivision files. I did a lot of work on the town boundaries in New Hampshire and it probably had the same sort of mess you are seeing in Maine. Boundaries for towns were imported multiple times by different users and the county boundaries were imported using a much lower precision source. At least in New Hampshire, the county boundaries are most often coincident with town boundaries, so it makes sense to have these in OSM as Relations (not as closed Way polygons) and sharing the Way objects among multiple boundaries. Also, the TIGER CDP shapes were erroneously used in place of the actual town boundaries. The CDP for a town is often generally where the most of the people live, but the actual boundary for the town is a much larger area and this can be verified against town-line signs on the ground. The TIGER boundary data seems to want to share nodes with TIGER road data even though it doesn't actually make sense. For example, town boundaries are often straight lines, but in TIGER these lines are slightly jagged so that they can share points with roads that are close to the town line. If you look at resources like property tax maps that some towns make available, you can see that in many cases the TIGER boundary data should just be made into straight lines. And straight lines in OSM should just be represented by a Way connecting 2 Nodes (your simplify step in QGIS will get you most of the way there). Tagging on the Ways is completely optional as that information should all be in the admin Relations. However, the consensus is that the Ways should have the admin_level be the lowest number (for example admin_level=6 for Ways that make up both a town and a county boundary) rather than trying to have multiple values separated by semicolons. Generally, I have used admin_level=9 for areas inside of towns that appear to be separately administered. In some larger towns, I used admin_level=9 for the wards or districts which correspond to seats on the local government. Towns have also been imported as single nodes, which could be influencing your Nominatim results. These place Nodes should be added to you admin Relations with role admin_centre or label. You should also add wikipedia tags to the boundary relations as this will help Nominatim determine the place hierarchy. --Peter ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board
Voting closed on the OSM-US board election last night. Michael Collinson and I acted as election observers and we are both satisfied that the election was carried out properly. So today I am happy to announce our new board members: Alyssa Wright Martijn van Exel Alex Barth Ian Dees Eleanor Tutt More information and some notes from Michael about the election are up on the openstreetmap.us blog: http://openstreetmap.us/2014/10/election-results/ Please join me in thanking the outgoing board members for their service to the OSM community in the US over the past year and welcome the new members to the challenges ahead for next year. Toby ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board
Thank you, Toby! I am excited and honored to serve on the board for another year with this great team. Let me also take this opportunity to thank you and Michael Collinson, the other independent elections observer, for the important role you played in ensuring these elections were conducted in a proper and fair manner. We could not have done this without you. Let me also join you in thanking the outgoing board members, Mele and Kathleen, for their invaluable service on the board! I have enjoyed working with both of you immensely. And, I want to thank all the candidates for running! We had the strongest ballot I can remember and whatever the outcome would have been, it would have resulted in a great 2014-2015 board of directors. Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank all of you who took the time to vote and be a part of these elections by engaging in the discussions on this mailing list and elsewhere. The coming weeks we will be busy with a few things. Firstly, the transition phase getting the new members up to speed. Secondly, finalizing the State Of The Map US 2015 bid selection process. And finally, working our way through the final administrativia involved with becoming a 501(c)(3) registered charity. Best, Martijn On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 4:43 PM, Toby Murray toby.mur...@gmail.com wrote: Voting closed on the OSM-US board election last night. Michael Collinson and I acted as election observers and we are both satisfied that the election was carried out properly. So today I am happy to announce our new board members: Alyssa Wright Martijn van Exel Alex Barth Ian Dees Eleanor Tutt More information and some notes from Michael about the election are up on the openstreetmap.us blog: http://openstreetmap.us/2014/10/election-results/ Please join me in thanking the outgoing board members for their service to the OSM community in the US over the past year and welcome the new members to the challenges ahead for next year. Toby ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us -- Martijn van Exel President, US Chapter OpenStreetMap http://openstreetmap.us/ http://osm.org/ skype: mvexel ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board
Congratulation to everyone who ran which shows we have a strong community. Best of luck to the our new and returning Board Members. And like Toby said, that you to the outgoing Board Members. You rock! Clifford On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Toby Murray toby.mur...@gmail.com wrote: Voting closed on the OSM-US board election last night. Michael Collinson and I acted as election observers and we are both satisfied that the election was carried out properly. So today I am happy to announce our new board members: Alyssa Wright Martijn van Exel Alex Barth Ian Dees Eleanor Tutt More information and some notes from Michael about the election are up on the openstreetmap.us blog: http://openstreetmap.us/2014/10/election-results/ Please join me in thanking the outgoing board members for their service to the OSM community in the US over the past year and welcome the new members to the challenges ahead for next year. Toby ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us -- @osm_seattle osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Coastal Maine needs love
...Eric Kidd emk.li...@randomhacks.net wrote: Special thanks to Peter for his experience with similar issues in New Hampshire. I want to more widely also thank Peter Dobratz for stepping up nicely to the USBR 1 in Massachusetts effort. Not only did he quickly complete yeoman work on entering the route data, he corrected my erroneous (mistaken) request to conflate actual and proposed route data into one relation. Purely a careless oversight on my part: of course, there should be two relations (one actual, one pending). Thank you Peter: now there are. SteveA California ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board
Congratulations to the newly elected members of the OSM US board! I look forward to the continuation of the fine work the board has been doing. Richard -- rwe...@averillpark.net Averill Park Networking - GIS IT Consulting OpenStreetMap - PostgreSQL - Linux Java - Web Applications - Search ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board
Thanks to Toby and Michael for overseeing the elections, and congratulations to the incoming OSM U.S. Board. I'm looking forward to seeing where the organization goes this year, and plan to be involved regardless! Saludos, Robin ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Presenting your new OSM-US board
Congrats to the board and everyone who voted! Don't forget to keep up the momentum with the upcoming OSMF elections. Richard Weait has a great writeup here: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2014-October/002683.html It should be noted that this US election looks like it had more voters than last year's OSMF election. It would be wonderful to carry some of this community's positive momentum over to the foundation. -Randy ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
