Hi John,

On 9 February 2011 00:47, John Kennedy <[email protected]> wrote:

> I never used polygons before but I think I have got my head around it on the
> dev box - thanks for setting it up. Will know for sure when I start seeing
> updates after it goes live. I must admit I found some of the polygon
> highlighting inside JOSM counter-intuitive. e.g. When I highlighted a meadow
> outer, it highlighted the area outside the meadow rather than inside it.
> This might be related to the large meadow that was split.

Probably this is because you were selecting part of a relation not all
of whose member elements had been downloaded. As you say, this is
particularly likely for large polygons. JOSM has an option inside the
relation edit dialogue to have it download any missing elements - it
looks a bit like the normal download toolbar button, and you'll
probably find that the highlighting will fix itself up once you do
this (but only for the relation in question, so it's often quicker
just to download a bigger buffer around your editing area).

> The difference between farm and meadow seems arbitrary where I checked -
> browsing osm wiki I guess most meadow will turn into farm - but if there is
> Irish preference to e.g. tag pasture as meadow pls advise.

I've already mentioned that we may need a consensus on bog, and it
looks a lot like farmland will need the same thing. If there is a
sufficient consensus that Corine pastures should not map to OSM
meadows then we have the option of regenerating the import data set
with whatever different tagging proves most popular.

But understand that Corine has a few different agricultural land cover
types, of which the most common ones in Ireland seem to be arable and
pasture. So far I have been mapping arable to farm and pasture to
meadow. This is what has been done in at least some of the other
countries to perform a Corine import. It has the IMO important effect
of retaining the knowledge that the two uses are different, though I
note your point that the difference may seem arbitrary - keep in mind
that this might be due to the fact that many Irish farms are
sufficiently mixed for the Corine surveyors to have to choose one of
the two classifications for the entire area. In such cases, the real
fix is to map the reality at a more detailed level, not to assume that
the differentiation has no value.

As a non-farmer with _some_ awareness of the countryside, I'll outline
my gut definitions of the words in question:

Arable: Tillage, the growing of any crop. The brown rendering of the
OSM farm type seems to suit this
Pasture: An area under grass for grazing by animals. Seems to merit
green rendering but may not be a good fit for OSM meadows
Meadow: An area under grass, ungrazed, to be cut for hay. Seems to
merit green rendering and to match well to OSM meadows

What is interesting is that Corine has only a pasture category, but
nothing for meadows. One comment I have read on Corine (unrelated to
farming) is that it is to capture land cover, not land use. This can
be the same - a bog being harvested by Bord na Móna is both a land
cover of bog and an industrial use of that bog. But it's not clear
that Corine's surveying methods can readily tell the difference
between areas under grass, nor that they particularly care about the
difference.

Richard Canwell, who is on this list, may be able to clarify this. OSM
does have other grass-ish tags, including landuse=grass, so we do have
options other than to map Corine pastures to meadows just because
others have done so.

> I have distinct landuse=residential for each estate I mapped. I just used
> simple continuous way areas with adjacent estates almost touching. I might
> use this import cleanup as opportunity to go the 'refined' route which if I
> understand correctly is:
>  - create individual ways for each individual border between adjacent areas
>  - create relation of all ways that make an estate border.
>  - tag the relation with estate name
> If I have misunderstood pls advise.

Opinions differ about this. Most Irish mappers dislike the gluing of
areas to linear features like roads, but many do find it useful to
glue areas together, especially where they have confidence that they
will not later wish to map something else in between (this is one of
the better reasons for not gluing residential areas to roads - if you
later want to map the perimeter fence, where can you put it?)

I map residential areas exactly as you have described above, and I
think I'll keep doing it this way because it gives me, for instance,
the option to later map a belt of trees (which is an area, though a
thin one) between adjacent residential areas, as can arise. Even for
simpler mapping, the visual separation gained from the hairline
between adjacent residential areas is IMHO desirable, as it shows the
extent of a named estate.

> One last thing, it is a signficant change so would recommend a blast to all
> (recent) Irish mappers via internal OSM mail ...just like was done for the
> license change...to bring everyone up to speed before the live import. I for
> one only came across this list recently.

The idea is good, though I'll note that the messages sent regarding
the licence were sent manually, something that would be cumbersome on
this occasion. Rorym does have, I think, a script that can do the job
and has used it before to announce mapping parties, so that option
remains open to us. My own feeling is that, if we do it, we should
attempt to exclude mapping tourists and low-volume mappers from the
notification. The former because the area of imports is rather tainted
in many OSM circles and a strong opinion not founded on local
community considerations doesn't necessarily get us anywhere. My one
concern here is that I'm aware of a very few visitor mappers who have
mapped landuse, though even those mappers would probably find it
difficult to recall enough to make their cleanup services useful.

My reason to exclude low-volume mappers is that there is a seriously
long tail of contributions in Ireland. Low-volume mappers often
contribute a handful of POIs and/or some road names. Much of our
message will go over the heads of such mappers, many of whom are using
simply POI-collecting apps and not full editors.

Regardless, I think we should learn as much as we can from this thread
before going broader, as it will give us a chance to tune our message
in a more helpful direction and take some of the techy edge off it.

Thanks for the very useful feedback, and please let's have yours and
others' suggestions for how to resolve the pasture/meadow issue,
Dermot


-- 
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Igaühel on siin oma laul
ja ma oma ei leiagi üles

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