Yes I know we shouldn’t but just sometimes it’s nice to think about the people who use the maps. Can we make life a little easier for them?
This post is aimed purely at 64 bit Windows users. The tools may work on other operating systems but I haven’t tried them. There are other tools around. These days end users like to type something in on their smartphone or other device and have something display. It maybe they are looking for a hardware store so what could go wrong? Locally a mall was mapped on the building outline and the stores were added store1=store name, store2 etc. If you type store1=xyz it will be found. Problem is most users won’t know this and the renderers will omit non standard tags. My preference would be nodes with shop=hardware name=xyz and simply adding these to the mall makes it all much more usable. Another example is a double space in a name. Makes it difficult to find but JOSM will warn about this. Locally a car rental company had its name spelt in four different ways, one of which was the same as the company’s web site. How do we find them in our local city? Step one is download the relevant part of OSM, download.geofabrik.de is one place to find it. Then we need to cut out just the bit we are interested in. osmconvert64 can do this but unless you have lots of memory and time I’d first convert the .pbf file to an .osm file. You need the longitude and latitude of the area you’re after. The easy way is start JOSM and use the slippy map to define the area. You aren’t going to try to download it, it will be too large. Click on the bounding box tag and that will give you the minimum and maximum longitude and latitude you need for osmconvert64. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmconvert#Clipping_based_on_Longitude_and_Latitude If you get a 1k file you’ve probably got the min and max values the wrong way round. This local file can be loaded into JOSM. It will probably take time to load. Most cities will load with 64 bit systems these days. Now run the validator. If you’re lucky there will be no warnings or errors. The ideal way is to use the JOSM todo plugin and look at each error or warning individually. Remember the map you’re looking at is probably a day old so for some errors you may wish to download that bit again on a new layer before correcting. Save the file. Now load the file into Maperitive. Use the command export-tags to export a list of tags in CSV format. Load this file into a spreadsheet and look through the sorted tag values. You may find addr:streetnumber rather than addr:housenumber, government misspelt etc. Once you know what to look for then you can use JOSM to search for the tag and correct. Have fun Cheerio John
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