Re: [OSM-talk] Making iD the default editor on osm.org

[Stephen Hope]

On 20 August 2013 07:57, Frederik Ramm  wrote:

>
> I think one shouldn't be religious about warnings/questions/popup messages
>> - sure it's a UI challenge to do them well but simply not doing them at
>> all, ever, doesn't automatically mean you have a good UI. However, a pop-up
>> message every time you have deleted something would surely be stretching it!
>
>
No, I don't think it is, as long as there is a "Don't show me this message
again" mechanism in the message itself, or alternatively you could just
show it once. Think of it like tutorial mode in a game, turned on by
default for beginners. The computer game industry has spent a lot of time
working out how to get casual users up to speed on new software, some of
their techniques are worth looking at.


> --> Going off on a tangent here and leaving the scope of immediate iD
> improvements - someone else has posted that a while ago in a different
> discussion. Maybe we are far too obsessed with trying to make sure nothing
> is ever broken in an edit session. Maybe we should focus more on
> post-processing of edits. Give users the option of saying "I'd like someone
> else to review my edit". If user does that, a special tag ("review=yes") is
> set on the changeset. A list/map of such "changesets for review" could then
> be generated and processed by users who are interested in helping. Before
> too long we'll have feature where changesets can be commented/discussed
> which would go nicely with this.



Yes - and if some-one asks for a review, we should ask the reviewer to send
a response - even if it just says "every thing looks OK to me"

 In fact, I'd go further - in whatever mechanism we are using to get the
changesets that need reviewing, I'd also add the option to review any new
users first (few?) changeset that did not ask for review. We don't
necessarily need to respond to these, but a mechanism to easily identify
ones that haven't been reviewed would be good.

I've seen this idea work in other crowd sourced efforts. As long as we are
upfront about the fact that your first few efforts might be sanity checked,
people don't seem to mind.

Stephen
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Re: [OSM-talk] Tag combinations: amenity and highway

[Stephen Hope]

It is an important point of difference to train and bus stations/stops as
to whether they have a dedicated Park and Ride carpark or not. It is
something I would find useful if I was searching for station POI's.  It's
not just whether parking is nearby, but whether it's dedicated to commuters
- not something you can figure out just from how close the parking is.  And
it is information that belongs to the station, not the carpark.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that just adding parking=-yes on the
station/stop is the best way to tag this.

Stephen


On 13 June 2012 22:23, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:

> I don't think that amenity=bus_stop parking=yes does make any sense.
> You can park in a lot of places, shall we add parking=yes to all of
> them? You can also chew gum there, should we also add
> chew_chewing_gum=yes?
>
> A parking is an area, a bus stop is more or less a point. If the two
> are close, you can see this in the db (and potentially also, if there
> are any linear barriers between them). IMHO there is no need or sense
> in combining the two, but if I were to emphasize on a parking with
> annected bus stop I'd see it as an extra property of the parking, not
> the bus stop.
>
> cheers,
> Martin
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Import guidelines review

[Stephen Hope]

Or how big almost any place not in Europe is.  I still remember somebody
suggesting a kayak safari to map the Australian coast rather than using
imagery/PGS imports.

Stephen



On 10 June 2012 14:56, Russ Nelson  wrote:

> Me too. I think that the people who wish that the USA had been mapped
> just like Europe have NO IDEA how big the USA is, nor how empty it is.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_County,_New_York
> It is comparable in size to Fiji, Kuwait, Slovenia, or Israel, but
> only 5,000 people live there. There is only one diesel station in the
> entire county.
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Mapnik rendering labels for unrecognised tags

[Stephen Hope]

On 30 August 2011 01:01, Tom Hughes  wrote:
> Yes I should have added that, in this case, my preference would be to remove
> the object altogether as aerial imagery coverage areas are not real on the
> ground objects that should be in our database.

Particularly in this specific case, as nearmap coverage can't be used
to derive OSM objects any more.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Automatic Map Plotting in OpenStreetMap

[Stephen Hope]

Parveen,

See this thread on this list from February 3 2011.

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2011-February/056310.html

Steve Coast announced the following.

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2011/02/03/automatically-detect-roads-with-bing-aerial-imagery.aspx

I don't know how finished it is.


Stephen



On 16 August 2011 03:12, Parveen Arora  wrote:
>
> But If he can have any Image Processing tool using by using which we
> can directly have maps over the area where there is not even any
> single point.
>
> Please let me know If anyone working on this?
>
>
> Thank You.
>
>
> --
> Parveen Arora
> www.parveenarora.in
> E-Mail: m...@parveenarora.in
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] shortened names

[Stephen Hope]

On 28 July 2011 21:52, Brian Quinion  wrote:
>
> Now that said I don't really care which tag is used for the 'full'
> name.  I'd personally prefer the name tag was used for this because it
> has always been the policy of OSM that the name tag includes the full
> unabbreviated name.  Really - this has been one of the few points of
> (until recent conversation) agreement.

The argument here is what the full unabbreviated name is.  You seem to
think it is Saint Albans.  The town says it is St Albans.  It's their
name, we shouldn't mess with it.  The St in this case is *not* an
abbreviation, it's an alternate spelling.  The name tag should have
the official name, not some expanded version because it's easier for
us.

I would add "Saint Albans" as an alt_name.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] shortened names

[Stephen Hope]

On 27 July 2011 10:40, Ed Loach  wrote:
> Yes, it is called Saint Albans, written St Albans, except where some
> websites seem to have expanded it.
>
> e.g.
> http://www.meteoprog.co.uk/en/weather/SaintAlbans/
> http://www.gomapper.com/travel/map-of/saint-albans.html
> etc...
> http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=%22saint+albans%22
>
> I personally would be tempted to store the name tag in expanded form
> so it is clear what the St abbreviation applies to (I've seen things
> like S St N on Google where they've abbreviated South Street North,
> for example, which just looks silly). This seems to agree with
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name#Notes
>

Um - no.  If a place wants to be written "St Albans", then that's the
name. Just because you pronounce it "Saint Albans" makes no
difference.

If they'd just shortened it for some signs to save space (like street,
road etc), then I'd agree with you.  But if they want the proper name
to be St Albans, not Saint Albans, we should respect that. If it is
how the name is officially spelt, then it's not an abbreviation, even
if it looks and sounds like one.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] new zealand, australia

[Stephen Hope]

It is confusing, but I don't think that I'd call it correct, either.
New Guinea can be considered part of the Australian continent, but New
Zealand is not. It's Islands, and not on the continental shelf.  It
and NG are sometimes listed as part of Australasia (not Australia),
and a bigger area still is called Oceania.

Stephen

On 7 July 2011 15:56, Toby Murray  wrote:
> Looking at the details it seems like the "Australia" being referred to
> is the continent, not the country. The New Zealand node has a
> "is_in:continent=Australia" tag and there is a place=continent node
> that nominatim is associating it with. So I guess this is "correct"
> but perhaps a little confusing in how it is displayed. Perhaps you
> should rename your continent to avoid this confusion!
>
> New Zealand node:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/248120384
>
> Continent node:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/249399679
>
> Nominatim details page where you can see the place:continent association:
> http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/details.php?place_id=697148
>
> Toby
>
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bandwidth limit/IP blocking - Error 303 on the OSM API?

[Stephen Hope]

On 6 June 2011 17:55, Jaak Laineste  wrote:
>  Also we have always started with P2, JOSM is too scary for the first
> introduction. So offline OSM files is not an option.

I keep hearing this, but I must be weird, because I had the opposite
reaction both when I first started and when I show somebody how to use
it.  I took one look at Potlatch and thought "I want something that
works offline to test with, with a save button when I'm happy". I'm
much happier teaching with JOSM than P2. I didn't use Potlatch for at
least a year after I started.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bike / Pedestrian directions on the MQ Open sites

[Stephen Hope]

On 6 March 2011 12:27, Paul Johnson  wrote:
> If it's a footway, unless it's clearly designed around foot use first
> and foremost with bicycle an afterthought, it doesn't allow bicycles
> unless explicitly tagged bicycle=yes.  Otherwise it's a path.  Maybe a
> cycleway if there is indication that it's use is primarily for bicycles.

Unless you live where I do, where you are specifically allowed to ride
on any footpath unless prohibited (which I've seen about 5 times). You
can't make blanket assumptions about defaults for items with no access
tags.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] 12nm territorial borders - useful or rubbish?

[Stephen Hope]

On 14 February 2011 16:52, David Murn  wrote:
>> Would the UK coastguard have a good laugh when I claim to be in international
>> waters at that location?
>
> If youre more than 12 miles from the coast (which is what is mapped)
> then youre in international waters, why would they laugh at that fact?

Actually, that's one of the areas where it's often changed.  If you
are in a bay, and the mouth of the bay closes enough that you can't
get in without going through territorial waters, it doesn't matter how
big the bay gets afterwards, all the waters inside it a belong to that
country also. There's an example here, and it looks like it is
displayed correctly, which makes me think this part of the boundary is
not auto-generated.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=44.52&lon=-65.52&zoom=8&layers=M

The question would be if that rule applied in that little triangle or
not - it's not a bay, but it is impossible to get to without going
through territorial waters, so I'm not sure.

There's a number of other places were the border has obviously been
corrected - not auto-generated.  Are we sure any of it was?


Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] address parsing by nominatim

[Stephen Hope]

2011/1/10 ヴィカス　ヤダヴァ (vikas yadav) :
> I used hamlet for my block as pop limit of <1000 is given = satisfied

The problem here is that population is only part of the definition of
a hamlet.  Less than 1000 people is correct, but it also has an
implied "and is surrounded by open land/farms etc".  You can't have a
whole bunch of adjacent hamlets sharing borders, they are not hamlets.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] protocol for adding buildings using aerial imagery?

[Stephen Hope]

On 28 December 2010 23:51,   wrote:
> Trying to estimate building height via the perspective in aerial pictures 
> will be tricky, as buildings that were closer to the flight path won't show 
> as much parallax as those that were farther away.

It will be even trickier if you are using imagery that has been
morphed using radar height data to try and correct it's horizontal
offsets from angled shots.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Objects versions ready for ODbL

[Stephen Hope]

On 21 December 2010 09:52, David Murn  wrote:
> So, can you tell from every edit you did, whether you used nearmap as a
> reference while doing the edit?  If so, you must be one of the very
> small percentage of people who tagged 100% every change they made,
> including even just shifting a node or realigning a single node on a
> way.

I do mark my changesets (not each node or way changed, necessarily)
with the sources I used while editing them.

And even if I find one unmarked, I can tell whether it was possible
for me to have used it, yes.  Many of my edits were either before
nearmap imagery was available for an area, or where they still don't
have any, or overseas.  They only cover a small percentage of
Australia, even now, and I've done some overseas editing as well..
Nearmap is not the only source I've used which is no longer
compatible, but I do know what I used, and where.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Objects versions ready for ODbL

[Stephen Hope]

On 20 December 2010 20:25, Simone Cortesi  wrote:
> this is no way different from GPL released software:
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

Actually, it's quite different.  The FSF tell you upfront what the
requirements are.  The OSMF let you spend years working on the
project, then change their minds.  Then they tell you that because
you've done part of your work in a (now incompatible) licence, all
your work must go. Then they say, no, we'll let you split it up, but
that seems to have gone away again. It's not the end result I object
to, it's the mushroom treatment.


Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Objects versions ready for ODbL

[Stephen Hope]

On 20 December 2010 12:53, David Murn  wrote:
> Because of the impossibility to be able to distinguish whats what, any
> user who has ever made a change in this situation will have to have all
> their edits removed from the system, to avoid any possibility that one
> edit might infringe the rights of another source.

Well, no actually.  In my case I've been around doing this for long
enough that a lot of my work was from before nearmap showed up.  And
even after then, I've kept a good record of what I did with and
without them, in the changeset notes, and also because I know where
I've been, and what I did while editing those areas.  If I'm unsure,
I'd throw it away, but I've got a lot of good data I'd like to keep.

I must admit, however, that basically handing the keys to the OSMF,
which is what the new CT's amount to, is not filling me with joy
considering their track record to date. I'm willing to do a certain
amount of work to make sure the data I've provided over the years
isn't lost, but if they jerk me around too much or make it too hard
I'll just write it off as a loss and spend my free time somewhere it's
appreciated.


Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Objects versions ready for ODbL

[Stephen Hope]

Fabio,

I cannot sign every edit I've ever done over, because I don't have the
rights to do so.  I can OK many of them, however, that were based
purely on my own work, and not CC-BY-SA sources.  There was some talk
of a tool being made available that would let me specify which were OK
by changeset.  Does your tool take this into account?

Does anybody know if that tool has even been made?  If I'm supposed to
go through every changeset I've ever done and sort them out before
March, I'll need to start soon.


Stephen

On 18 December 2010 19:36, Fabio Alessandro Locati
 wrote:
> Hi guys :),
> I've written a tool to check the amount of object versions available
> for relicensing.
> You can find the data here: http://repo.grimp.eu/osm .
> At the moment, only Europe is there, but I have a couple of computers
> working while I'm writing to make available all the other countries
> too ;).
> Each nation is in it's continent folder, and has two files '_status'
> and '_not_accepted'.
> The first one is a quick summary of the actual situation of that
> country, while the second is an ordered list (based on the versions
> they own) of the people who have not already agreed with CT/ODbL.
> You can find the same two files for each continent too ;).
>
> PS: There are two known bugs:
> - Cyprus seems to have 0 edits (I think this is a problem with CM polygon;))
> - Ireland and Europe miss of the last two lines of the _status file.
> The problem is somewhere in the Irish list (I guess a user has a name
> that my script does not appreciate), but is transfered also to the
> Europe one.
> --
> Fabio Alessandro Locati
>
> Home: Segrate, Milan, Italy (GMT +1)
> Phone: +39-328-3799681
> MSN/Jabber/E-Mail: fabioloc...@gmail.com
>
> PGP Fingerprint: 5525 8555 213C 19EB 25F2  A047 2AD2 BE67 0F01 CA61
>
> Involved in: KDE, OpenStreetMap, Ubuntu, Wikimedia
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Suggestion for an Unconference

[Stephen Hope]

On 27 November 2010 08:45, Martijn van Exel  wrote:
> I'd much rather see a relative completeness grid map to inspire people to go
> out and visit those grids that seem less than perfect.

There's a tool I'd like to see available, with it own data store, that
overlays the main database.  I'd try and write it myself, but I'd suck
at it.

I'd like a map that I can go to, draw a polygon, add a date, and
declare that every street in that area is mapped/checked as per that
date.  You can have various levels of completeness if you want -
mapped, mapped and named, all turn restrictions, etc; but just
checking that all the roads exist is a good start.  The no-name map
and similar can take it from there.

I happened to be in a area recently I mapped some time ago, so I
checked an area where developers were working at the time.  They seem
to have stopped, no new roads have been added since.  But because I
have nothing new to add, there's no sign on the map that I checked it
last week, nothing in that area is newer than 18 months. In a
completeness grid (or on OSM), this area would look unfinished. I
guess one day when the housing market picks up a bit, it will get new
roads eventually, but for now it is actually correct.

The other thing that would be nice in the same tool would be the
ability to add a marker were a check will be needed in the future. If
you know something will need mapping in a month or two (or six), mark
it down as a reminder that anybody will be able to see when the time
is up.

I'd really like to be able to bring up a version of the map, with
colour shaded backgrounds that show how long ago an area was last
declared checked, and maybe some markers were people think something
is going to need to be looked at.  I keep something like this on paper
for my immediate area, but a group tool would be more useful.


Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] A warning about gates and other barriers

[Stephen Hope]

On 20 September 2010 21:48, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> Firstly, what is "behind" the gate differs depending on your location.
> Secondly, the way "behind" the gate may well be reachable by other means
> (i.e. a detour) - it is easy to imagine a gate where vehicles cannot pass,
> but still vehicles are allowed on both sides of the gate!

There's an example of this near where I used to live. A developer
built a new residential road, which got a lot more traffic than
intended because it cut the distance out to the main streets for a lot
of people.  So he put a gate across the middle, and made two dead end
roads.  You can visit either side of the gate, you just can't go
through. He left it as a gate instead of blocking it off completely so
that it can be opened in an emergency, but it's never been opened that
I've ever known. Every map I've every seen shows it as two separate
roads, and ignores the gate.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Place of worship

[Stephen Hope]

On 21 August 2010 04:29, Pierre-Alain Dorange  wrote:
> Yes it seems strange to tag "place_of_worship" the whole area. According
> to the wiki should apply to the church, synagoge, temple... the place of
> worship, not the office, the garden and so on.
>

To me, it's not strange at all.  To me, the place of worship is the
church and all related grounds, just as a school is the buildings and
all related grounds. Now, just because a church owns a building, that
doesn't make it a place of worship, but the immediate grounds of a
church are, to me.

On the other hand, I have no problem with using landuse = religious if
that's what is decided.  It will certainly make it easier to mark
those sites where you have a church,  church school and other
functions all in one spot.  But then we have to start making edge
decisions on that.  Is a church run orphanage landuse = religious?
How about a church run unemployed support centre? (gives out food,
clothes, advice and help to get jobs, etc)

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Beaches at lower zoom levels

[Stephen Hope]

On 19 August 2010 17:27, Malcolm Herring  wrote:
>
> The usual convention (Ordnance Survey for example) for land maps is to use
> "Mean High Water". (Marine charts usually use "Mean High Water Springs" as
> their dry land datum.)

There are exceptions.  If a given area is covered in vegetation (eg
salt marsh, or mangrove swamps) then it is usually put on the land
side, even if it is technically below the high water mark.  Otherwise
you get situations where hundreds of meters of tangled plant growth
are treated as sea, which just seems totally wrong. I've never seen a
paper land map which listed a mangrove swamp as outside the coastline,
though some of the PGS data does list them that way. (I don't know
what marine maps do).

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] RFC: what are empty nodes and how should we use them?

[Stephen Hope]

On 16 August 2010 07:42, Jonas Stein  wrote:
> Are there any empty nodes that make sense, or is a empty always node nonsense?

The only thing I can think of , is that when I upload a way, the nodes
go first, then the way joins them all up.  Is it possible for somebody
else to get the data while I'm still in the process up loading?  If
so, they may get empty nodes from that, while if they load again later
the whole way may be there.  I don't know if this is possible - we'd
need to ask a dev how the upload works.

I know that I've had a couple of uploads crash, and when I looked at
the data later, a lot of nodes were there but the ways weren't.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Suggestion to add SA clause to CT section 3, describing "free and open license"

[Stephen Hope]

On 19 July 2010 23:19, Frederik Ramm  wrote:
> And honestly, if at any future time two thirds of active OSM contributors
> want to change to a non-SA license, why should we keep them from it? In one
> or two years, "two thirds of active contributors" will be a greater number
> of people than all of us today. Who are we to tell them what to do? We're
> the minority ;)

We're the minority with the data at present.  Future users can do what
they like with stuff they add.  But if they want to change what I've
added, I feel like I should have a say.

Personally, anything I add can be PD for all I care.  But if I've
based it on a BY_SA source, that source has a legitimate right to be
concerned what happens to it in the future. From what I can tell, what
we are saying to them in rough terms is:

1) We're currently BY-SA
2) We're planning to change to ODBL, which is BY-SA compatible.  If
you don't like the change, you can yank your data out now.
3) Oh, and any time in the future, we can change the licence again,
and you can't take your data out that time if you don't like the new
terms.

Or in other words, - "Trust us.  We promise not to be evil" (except of
course it won't be us, because as you said, we'll be in the minority
then).  Why should they?

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] maori/english search oddities for nz towns

[Stephen Hope]

Chrome - Pahia, New Zealand
Firefox 3.6.6 - Pahia, New Zealand
IE 8.0 - Pahia, Aotearoa

Weird.  Checking my language options in IE, the only language listed
is English, Australian.

Stephen

On 7 July 2010 12:40, Robin Paulson  wrote:
> well, here's an odd thing:
>
> if i search for pahia from firefox 3.6, it returns 'Pahia, New Zealand'
> if i search from IE7, it returns 'Pahia, Aotearoa' . Aotearoa is the
> Maori name for New Zealand. or rather, new Zealand is the English name
> for Aotearoa
>
> any suggestions why?
>
> can someone else try this, and see what happens
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Rendering: nature_reserve and national_park

[Stephen Hope]

I'm a bit confused as to what exactly counts as a nature_preserve.

Take a look at this area

http://www.nearmap.com/?ll=-27.277213,152.952728&z=18&t=k&nmd=20100608

The land around the creek there is a council designated reserve.
However, it's not really to preserve any special nature area, or even
to act as a greenbelt, but mostly because it's a flood prone area,
plus the creek gully is really steep.

Should this be tagged as a nature_preserve?  It's not really
preserving anything, it's just a bit of left over bush that's too hard
to put houses on.  I wouldn't call it a park - though there is a path
along the south side of the creek behind the houses, and some swings
on a patch of grass, so public access is allowed.

If it's not a nature_preserve, what is it? The individual parts could
be tagged as woods, grass, etc, but what is the unit as a whole?

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging for street danger levels

[Stephen Hope]

On 23 June 2010 00:14, Paul Houle  wrote:
>
>    I'd like to see some tagging that tells cyclists not to ride on
> sidewalks,  for instance:  as a pedestrian I've been involved in
> accidents where cyclists were ~illegally~ riding on a sidewalk and

Surely that is just highway=foot, bicycle = no?  Or are you talking
about sidewalks that are implied, not actually mapped?

Either way, make sure you only use it where it is actually the case.
Where I live, it is entirely legal to ride on any footpath unless it
is specifically signed otherwise (rare), or there is "a parallel
dedicated bike path" (even rarer). You may think that people shouldn't
ride on the paths, but we don't map opinions.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Stack Overflow-like site for geographic information systems

[Stephen Hope]

On 23 June 2010 02:44, Tom Hughes  wrote:
> I think it would be rather bad of us to try and take it over and use it
> for our own ends like that.
>
> Some of us have already been talking about setting up an OSM specific
> Q&A site like this which would be a much better fit than trying to use
> something that is intended to be more general.

Somebody is already trying.
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7486/openstreetmap

I note that one question asked about that proposal is if it shouldn't
be merged with the general GIS one.

No matter what we end up doing, it probably wouldn't hurt for some of
us to keep an eye on the GIS area if it get going, just so we can
answer any questions related to OSM that come up.  I do think we
shouldn't take it over, but that doesn't mean we can't participate.


Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] On the ground rule on the wiki

[Stephen Hope]

On 2 June 2010 12:08, Robin Paulson  wrote:
>
> this reminds me of a situation i've come across in auckland, which i
> don't know the solution to. there's a major road, which apparently has
> three names:
> The Strand (on signposts)
> Shipwright Lane (on different signposts)
> another name which I can't remember off the top of my head, not on any
> signs or maps i can find, but which some (older) locals refer to it as
>
> what to do?
>

I would think about using name= and alt_name= for the The Strand and
Shipwright Lane, and either loc_name or old_name for the third name.
See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name  This would get them
into the system for namefinder etc to use, but only one would be
printed in most renderings.

The hard part is which one would get the main name.  Are you sure that
both names apply to the whole street?  There is a similar case I've
seen, where a lane was parallel to the main street - when the street
was widened, the intervening building(s) were removed.  The buildings
on one side of the street for one or two blocks were still on
(Something) lane, the rest of the street and the other side of the
road had the other address.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Updates for JOSM

[Stephen Hope]

When you first start JOSM, it has a loading screen, then it comes up
with a news page.

A few lines into that page, it has a line that tells you what your
version is, what the current stable (tested) version is, and what the
very latest version is.  Keep an eye on that, and if the stable
version it higher than your version, you should think about updating.
I'm not sure if there is a mailing list.

Stephen


On 21 April 2010 19:52, Irene Pucci  wrote:
> Ok! Thank you so much!
> Do you know if there is a way to know when the updates come out? Like by mail 
> or other by other nstruments...
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] New "Highways" view in OSM Inspector

[Stephen Hope]

2010/1/9 John Smith :
> No it isn't, the preprocessing software could do that if it needs it,
> this isn't a reason to add extra nodes to the database.

We are talking about the API for editors and casual use of the
database.  There are no pre-processors involved.  Sure, rendering
engines that are working with huge parts of the planet set and doing
pre-processor runs can handle long lines (if they know they have to).
But if you want to edit a small area in the middle, your editor won't
download the huge outer areas required to find that such a line
exists.

This was done by design, because it makes processing an API request
much easier, and cheaper on server resources.  It may well be that
your ideal of two points only is the best way, but unless the API is
changed to work that way it is irrelevant. It doesn't work.

The whole great circle issue is a red herring - it doesn't matter as
long as the API doesn't change.  Don't expect the API to change in a
hurry.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Public notary (Map feature POI proposal)

[Stephen Hope]

2010/1/8 Pieren :
> I would like but we need some clear definition about "office" and what
> makes the difference with the existing "amenity" and "shop" keys.
> For instance, the current definition of shop in Map Features is:
> "A shop is a place of business stocked with goods for sale or where a
> service is provided to the general public."
> Should be the "service" removed from the shop definition and says
> that's exclusively for goods retail ? Then "office" would be "Any
> private/business/customer services where there is no goods exchanged"
> ? Should we exclude the public services (staying in amenity) ?

If I go to a tattooist, he doesn't sell me any goods, he provides a
service.  But I would call that shop, not an office. On the other
hand, I can buy stuff at places that I would consider to be offices.
My vet sells medicines, special dog food, etc, and I've been to an
accountant/lawyer's office who had a couple of related items (business
software, tax books, etc) they stocked as a service for their
customers.  I don't think there can be a rule based just on whether
you can buy goods - maybe it should be "where exchange of goods is not
the primary purpose"?

I can't easily give you a rule as to what an office is, but I can tell
one when I see it  :)

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] What's the policy on unsurveyed roads from imagery?

[Stephen Hope]

2009/12/27 John Smith :
> In Australia there is this legacy speed limit sign for people with
> racing licenses that they can drive any speed they wish, everyone else
> is limited to 100, how exactly do you map that? (and I saw one such
> sign only the day before yesterday).
>

Umm, actually that one's a bit of an urban myth.  The sign (and it's a
UN standard sign, not just Australian) means "end of local speed
limits, back to State/Country default speed limit."  The racing
licence thing comes from very old rule in NSW where they didn't
enforce the limit (for anybody) as long as you were not driving at
"excessive or dangerous" speeds, and no longer applies.  Somebody once
used the "I'm a racing driver, it's not excessive for me" excuse and
got off.

As long as you know the state default speed limit, this is easy to
tag.  It is exactly the same as a sign with that limit.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Contribution graph

[Stephen Hope]

There was a similar study that has been done in Wikipedia - and it got
similar results. Then somebody else did some closer studies, and found
that the last edit may have been done by one of the 10%, but they were
often cosmetic cleanups.  The bulk of creation was done by other
users. I wonder how much this applies to mapping.

2009/12/18 Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists) :
> The graph looks the same if I remove the top 5 user accounts (all greater
> than 1% of the data and between them totalling 39% of all way data) however
> the amount contributed by the top 10% of users (ignoring the top 5) reduces
> to 91.5%. So basically the 90/10 rule appears to apply for normal
> contributions made by the humble mapper. This is in line with what I see
> locally in my own patch.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] connection between 2 islands

[Stephen Hope]

I think this is a case where the different versions of English are not
quite the same. To me:

A ford is a crossing that is usually underwater all the time. However
the water is shallow enough that you can cross anyway, just expect to
get a bit wet.  It may be dry if the whole river dries up, or unsafe
to cross if flooding, but this is not the usual state.

A causeway is a crossing that is built up above the usual water level,
so you can usually cross dry.  This may be an embankment or concrete
slab with culverts under it for the usual water flow, or a very low
bridge/pier structure.  However, when high water comes, water is
expected to flow over the causeway as well as under it. It may or may
not still be crossable depending on flow.

A bridge is built high enough above the water that there is an
appreciable gap between it and the water level, and water is not
expected to cover it at any time. However, a structure like this that
is on a continuous series of pillars (like a pier) instead of some
sort of arch structure may still be called a causeway, even if there
is no chance of it ever flooding.

Stephen

2009/12/2 John F. Eldredge :
> Yes, US English would also call that a ford.
>
> --
> John F. Eldredge -- j...@jfeldredge.com
> "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to 
> think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] [Talk-us] proposal for deletion: talk-us-ga and

[Stephen Hope]

2009/10/22 Lester Caine :
>
> There is not currently a single solution, but I see no reason why a good
> email based list can't simply add a web based interactive archive as well?
>

There are solutions, but all the ones I know about are commercial.  I
use a board based on MPNews from MessagePixels - I access it via NNTP,
others use it as an email list or a web based board. There is a bit of
culture clash - people who use the threaded (web based, nntp) forms
tend to snip more than the email people like, for example, but it
seems to work.

I'm a bit surprised that there isn't an open source equivalent.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Instead of voting

[Stephen Hope]

2009/10/11 Russ Nelson :
>
> Stephen Hope writes:
>  > However, I have seen proposals which have improved considerably after
>  > a little bit of feedback during the voting process.
>
> We now have a tagging mailing list for that.
>

Of course, and it's a good place to talk about these things, no
question.  So why don't you mention it?  This sounds like an "advice
for beginners list."  You need to cover what to do if they still have
any questions or doubts after reading the list you've made.  And
beginners, by definition, are less likely to know how to ask for help.
 Mentioning the tagging list, and any other options for getting some
quick feedback, can only help them out.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Instead of voting

[Stephen Hope]

2009/10/9 Russ Nelson :
>
> The benefit is that people spend more time mapping and less time
> coordinating with each other on things that don't need to be
> coordinated in advance.

And the disadvantage is that by saving a little time on the lack of
coordinating at the start, we then end up spending a huge amount of
time arguing over whether we should be using yes, true or 1 later  ;)

Seriously, though, you have a point.  Most of the voting is simply a
process, with no real benefit.

However, I have seen proposals which have improved considerably after
a little bit of feedback during the voting process. I think the
discussion can be valuable, even if the voting itself isn't. It's not
required for every new tag value, but I think we need an extra step in
there somewhere that talks about what to do if you want some feedback
on a new idea, or just need help finding the right English word for a
tag value.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Patch to render names from routes and custom highway shields on a per country basis

[Stephen Hope]

2009/9/22 Richard Weait :
> Now everything I know about Australian highways I learned from Mel
> Gibson in _The Road Warrior_ so I have much to learn.  What is the
> shield landscape like in Australia?
>

Queensland is in the (slow) process of changing to alphanumeric
designations, starting with the main highways. It also has a lot of
local (state) routes.  The main problem with them, is that many of the
numbers are used twice.  They only use two digit numbers, and they
have more than a hundred local routes, as the state is enormous -
bigger then Alaska, or about 3/4 of the area of Western Europe.

Pretty much every secondary (or better) road in the SE Metropolitan
area is a State route, and a lot of these numbers are reused on rural
roads in other parts of the state. It's generally not too much of a
problem, but something to be aware of. These numbers would be B roads
in the new alphanumeric system (I think), but I've never seen a Bnn
sign in Qld, the signs are just a blue shield with the number. They've
pretty much changed all the A and M roads to the new designations, but
I'm not sure if they're going to keep working down the list to the
lower roads or not.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Google Maps v.s. OSM routing in Berlin

[Stephen Hope]

2009/9/18 Dan Karran :
>
> and 'turn right' to stay on the same road, even though it just
> continues past the junction with a curve to the right.
>

Well yes, but there is a road going straight ahead as well. I've seen
plenty of situations where it is not obvious that the road you are on
is not the one going straight ahead.  If the instructions say "follow
this road" but didn't tell me that the road I'm supposed to be
following turns right at a certain intersection, I would tend to go
straight ahead.  I have in fact done this several times, at different
places.

In this situation, looking at the aerial photography, it would be
obvious which road to take.  But I'd rather it warned me unnecessarily
than not warn me when it was needed.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Train station names: "Place Station" ou just "Place" ?

[Stephen Hope]

And the difference between them is pretty easily explained.  If you're
on a train, you know you've just pulled into a station, the only
question is which one, so the word station is redundant.  If you are
outside the station, you may not know what the building in front of
you is, and you are normally going to be in the suburb with the same
name. Therefore the Waterloo part is fairly redundant, it is the
station part that is important.

So the question becomes - what do we want to display on the map?
Which situation is the map reader in?  There is a railway line marked,
with some sort of station symbol, and a name. Can we assume the word
station is implied?

Stephen


2009/9/18 Pieren :
>
> Mmm, not sure that's enough because the name may differ between the
> public entrance (your photo) or the one on the platform itself. If I
> look this:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/London_Waterloo_stn_signage.JPG
>
> it should be "name=London Waterloo"...
>
> Pieren
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Additional parking types for amenity=parking

[Stephen Hope]

I think the problem there is they are usually a lot of small
buildings, rather than one big one.  I think we're looking for a tag
to cover an area, I'm not sure building= is appropriate.

Stephen

2009/9/14 John Smith :
> Since they're buildings wouldn't using a building=* tag be more
> accurate in describing them?
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] How to map cemetery ?

[Stephen Hope]

What landuse would you recommend for a cemetery?  It's been said that
all land should be covered by some landuse or other.  Like putting in
Landuse=retail but also listing the individual shops as amenities.

So should we put both landuse=cemetery and an
amenity=cemetery/graveyard node, or are you suggesting we deprecate
landuse=cemetery and use some other landuse (residential? - retail =
they're often a business?)

Stephen

2009/9/10 Roy Wallace :
>
> By the way, I think a cemetery is better described as an amenity, not
> a landuse, as I think it is "a useful and important facility" moreso
> than "an area of land used by people" (from the wiki definitions of
> Key:amenity and Key:landuse).
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] [RFC] Deprecating the use of Tag:highway=stop in favour of Key:stop

[Stephen Hope]

2009/8/26 Roy Wallace :
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:29 AM, John Smith wrote:
>> --- On Wed, 26/8/09, Roy Wallace  wrote:
>>
>> Pre-processor finds a stop sign, looks for the nearest junction node which 
>> it would already know is a junction for routing purposes.
>
> Not too bad when you put it like that. Thanks :) If this is written up
> as a proposal, I would prefer it worded like that (with reference to a
> *requirement to stop* at the *nearest junction node* when *approached
> from the way on which the node is placed*), rather than referring to
> "stop signs".

What about railway crossings?  I've seen railway crossings with no
lights, gates or similar, just a stop sign.  Usually way out in the
middle of nowhere, so there may not be a routable junction for quite
some distance, and even if there was, the sign doesn't apply to that
junction anyway. Would a railway/road crossing count as a "nearest
node junction", or would it try and apply it to something else?

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Escalators and Travalators

[Stephen Hope]

2009/8/23 Tobias Knerr :
> Therefore, I'd prefer to restrict highway=conveyor to human transport
> (or human+bicycle or some kind of vehicle, if this exists somewhere, by
> using access tags) and use a separate top level tag for goods - for
> example man_made=conveyor.

I don't have a problem with that, the question came up because when I
see the word conveyor it's not escalators or travelators that come to
mind for me.  Can I suggest that the documentation for the human
conveyor has a section that states clearly that it is not for goods,
and pointing to the goods tagging.  And maybe the reverse in the other
tag.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Escalators and Travalators

[Stephen Hope]

2009/8/23 Tobias Knerr :
> I believe the best way to solve this is to create a new top-level (that
> is, highway) value for all variants of conveyor transport. So, for
> example, we could do:

Is this intended to be only for human transport?  I know of some quite
lengthy conveyors for goods - eg coal, grain etc. There's two main
types, belt and screw, and I've seen a mix of both. Escalators and
travelators are both belt conveyors.  I don't know if we want to try
and differentiate for goods use, or just lump them together under
something like "conveyor=goods, type = grain/coal/gravel/etc".  We
certainly want to make it easy for routing programs to differentiate
between goods and human ones.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Lane turn restrictions

[Stephen Hope]

Well, I don't know about Hebrew.  But at least some of the languages
that use Arabic script (there are many) write the sentences and words
from right to left, but the numbers from left to right.  I have no
idea about Chinese/Japanese etc.  But I think that left to right for
numbers, while not universal, is possibly the most known version.

Stephen

2009/8/20 Yann Coupin :
> Plus what does "inner" mean on a oneway road? I think it's crucial
> that lane 1 is either left or right depending uppon what is decided
> but that it stays the same accross the world. It'll be unusable
> otherwise.
>
> I propose 1 is left because we start to write from the left. It's
> completly arbitrary, but that way at least it follows a logic that
> stays the same accross the channel :) And since the tags are in latin
> characters, it's just to be consistent, not to ignore people writing
> in arabic or hebrew (if people still take offense, I did my best not
> to ;)
>
> Yann

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Re: [OSM-talk] Historic Mapping needs help Now!

[Stephen Hope]

I hope to be there long enough to map some(most?) of it, yes.

The basic plan of the Muster is remarkably stable.  There have been a
few minor changes, but the basic camp grounds are pretty much forced
by geography and the few permanent tracks, and there's only been one
big change in the performance area layout (adding the blues pavilion)
I remember, and that was quite a few years back. (though I've missed
the last couple of years - I could be out of date).  Even most of the
food/craft stalls stay in the same place every year, though I don't
think I'll be mapping to that detail - at least not this year.

Stephen

2009/8/19 John Smith :
> --- On Wed, 19/8/09, Stephen Hope  wrote:
>
> Going to the Muster?
>
> Even when events are on the same space wouldn't the venue be laid out 
> differently each year?
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Historic Mapping needs help Now!

[Stephen Hope]

Yes - not sure what dates to put on it though.  The Festival is the
last two weekends in August and the campers start arriving a week or
two before that.  Ideally I wouldn't have to go back and reset the
dates on all the tags each year.

Maybe we need a dating plan for yearly (seasonal?) features.  A main
map may ignore them, or shade them, or even make a point of rendering
the tiles at the start and end of the dated events to make them appear
and disappear.

Stephen



2009/8/19 Joseph Reeves :
> Sounds like start_date and end_date would work fine in this situation.
>
> "Historical mapping" doesn't really mean much; we're only talking
> about adding information about dates to features, and there's no limit
> to how fine grained you could get with this. Ephemeral features are
> just as welcome as things like buildings that might exist for hundreds
> of years and are, in many ways, much more exciting examples of the
> proposal.
>
> That's my opinion at least; load the database with all the dating
> information you can and leave it to those who control the renderers to
> decide what they want to show.
>
> Cheers, Joseph
>
>
>
>
> 2009/8/19 Stephen Hope :
>> I am hoping in a couple of weeks to map the grounds at a festival that
>> occurs yearly in the same spot. This is not so much historical data,
>> as data that's only true for three weeks a year. The rest of the time,
>> it's just fields, with a few items (some toilets, etc) that stay in
>> place year round.
>>
>> Would this come under historical mapping, or some other tagging scheme?
>>
>> Stephen
>>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Historic Mapping needs help Now!

[Stephen Hope]

I am hoping in a couple of weeks to map the grounds at a festival that
occurs yearly in the same spot. This is not so much historical data,
as data that's only true for three weeks a year. The rest of the time,
it's just fields, with a few items (some toilets, etc) that stay in
place year round.

Would this come under historical mapping, or some other tagging scheme?

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM status POIs?

[Stephen Hope]

I've seen todo="job" used for this purpose.  And todo tags show up in
a number of verification tools, so it will be brought to people's
attention.

Stephen

2009/8/14 Morten Kjeldgaard :
> I realized when mapping today that it would be very useful to have a
> set of OSM status POIs that you could use to mark the status of the
> mapping at certain places.
>
> I find I sometimes have to skip roads, tracks or paths, because I am
> too tired, don't have time, or that I'm going at good speed downhill
> and don't want to stop. I've tried to make mental notes to return and
> map those missing roads at a later time but as time goes by, you tend
> to forget.
>
> It would be very useful to have a POI saying for example "unmapped
> highway/path etc. starts here". Then you could check out and select
> those points in your area, and they would serve as a reminder to you
> (or others coming along) that there's something here not yet mapped.
>
> These POIs would also serve as "bite-size" mapping projects if you're
> looking for quick things to do in your area.
>
> I guess there are other instances where an OSM status POIs would be
> useful.
>
> Cheers,
> Morten
>
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] GPS Accuracy under Forest Canopy

[Stephen Hope]

I've done some rain-forest hiking, and I've noticed similar results.
If you really want to see some wandering tracks, try hiking along the
base of some cliffs, in dense forest.

I have noticed that the errors do seems to be less the faster I'm
moving.  If I stand in one place for a while, the path can wander over
quite an area if there is dense cover.  If I walk fairly quickly, then
it still has errors, but not as large.  I think it must be finding
more open patches and correcting itself more often.

Stephen

2009/8/10 Mike N. :
> I'm using netbook with  just your average $30 GPS dongle to collect data.
> Today I took a 5 mile out-and back hike under dense forest canopy.   The GPX
> traces for the same trail out and back are separated by as much as 100
> meters.
>
>   I didn't record PDOP information and such, but are there any solutions to
> record decent GPS traces on trails under forest canopy data collection other
> than a high end professional GPS datalogger?
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Business listings

[Stephen Hope]

2009/7/28 John Smith :
>
> In Australia in Telstra won a lawsuit against people OCR'ing the street 
> directory and selling white/yellow pages on CD. For all intents and purposes 
> Telstra owns the copyright on all Australian White/Yellow page directories 
> and now Telstra is a publicly listed company.

A similar lawsuit (on TV program listings) was appealed earlier this
year, and got the opposite result.  It's a lot more complicated now,
but in some situations you can get away with it.  Basically the judge
said that sweat of the brow did not a copyright make - so a collection
of facts can't be copyrighted, thought the presentation of those facts
can.  There was some commentary at the time that this affected the
Telstra rulings earlier, though as far as I know nobody has tried to
do anything about it.  I'd want to talk to a lawyer about it before I
tried. And I don't know if the TV company counter appealed at a higher
level.

> Also in Australia it's not free to list in the yellow pages for anyone, it's 
> free to be listed in the white pages though I think.

Um, that's not quite accurate.  Everybody who has a "business" phone
line, as opposed to a residential one, gets one free simple listing in
the yellow pages, under the main category for your company.  If you
don't have a business line, or want more listings under other
categories, or a bigger add, or even just bold or coloured print, then
it costs. It's actually to YP's benefit to list as many as possible,
because then people are more likely to pay more for a bigger add to
stand out.

The company I work for has never paid for a listing, and would like to
get rid of the one free one, as we don't get customers that way and
the only people who call us from it aren't actually looking for what
we do. YP won't remove it, though.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Same physical road, diff maxspeed.

[Stephen Hope]

Yeah, you're right - this is more what I was thinking of seeing, but
the relationship is the one that came up when I searched.  I don't
understand the wiki search results sometimes.  Try this page.  I think
the one I listed earlier is not the best option.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Scope_for_access_tags

Also - oops - my bad.  This *is* the talk list.

Stephen


2009/7/22 SLXViper :
> I think using maxspeed:forward and maxspeed:backward would be the best
> solution.
> This was also discussed for access= depending on the direction you come
> from: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-July/038503.html
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Same physical road, diff maxspeed.

[Stephen Hope]

I'm sure somebody somewhere has used a tag like max_speed_opposite or
something like that, but the closest I've actually seen to a
recomendation is this

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Segmented_Tag

Look at the discussion tab for more info.  I don't knwo how widely
this is actually used, either in the data or processing it.

You may want to ask on the main talk list, rather than talk-au to get
a wider opinion.

Stephen



2009/7/22 John Smith :
>
> A section of the Bruce highway just north of Gympie has 2 different speed 
> limits depending what direction you are traveling.
>
> While I guess this could be solved as 2 single lanes is there a more elegant 
> solution?
>
> http://osm.org/go/ueTQy4AfL-
>
> When going south you hit an 80 sign 300-500m before the school signs, however 
> when going north you hit a 90 sign as you leave the school zone, I'm pretty 
> sure I've come across other dual speed zones on the same piece of road 
> depending on the direction of travel, but they're rare.
>
>
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] 'Distance to feature' maps?

[Stephen Hope]

Good luck changing their minds.  We have a similar rule near here - no
bad winters or wild animals, but some kids were supposed to walk
across a major multi-lane highway that had no crossing at all for
vehicles for several km each way, but they were within a 1km circle of
the school, so no transport.

2009/7/15  :
> Local school board is trying to drop school bus service school kids (from
> grade 1 up) within 2.0km of school and get them to walk to school (bear in
> mind this is a rural community with -40'C winters, wildlife such as
> bears/cougars and an ungated CPR train route through it).
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] [Tag] "Ref" in "link"

[Stephen Hope]

What is your suggested ref for links that are an entrance, not an exit?

And can you give an example of what you mean by an exit ref?  Where I
come from, some exits have numbers, but the number is associated with
the highway ref, so you'd still need that as well.

2009/6/25 Xav :
> Hi all,
>
> On this page :
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dmotorway_link
> it is implicitly written that the "ref" of a "link" should be the reference of
> the road from which the link depends. For example, a "motorway_link" to/from
> the motorway "A 1" will be referenced as "A 1".
>
> Generally, this schema doesn't work. Indeed, links depends of TWO roads, and
> regularly with two roads of the same type. Examples in France : link between
> the "A 11" and the "A 10" near Paris, or a lot of links between secondary
> roads.
>
> What do you think about referencing the links with the exit reference ? I do 
> not
> know how it works in other countries, but in France, every exit usually has a
> reference.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Highways tagging vs Polygon

[Stephen Hope]

2009/5/22 Richard Bullock :
> Am I missing something, or can we not just assume that e.g.
>
> each highway=residential has a speed limit consistent with urban areas in
> that country - unless explicitly tagged otherwise
>

Actually, that wouldn't work where I live in Australia.  Each state
can have it's own 'default' speed limit, not the country as a whole.
And in fact, different areas in the same state can have different
default speed limits.

For example, Queensland traffic law says that on any unsigned, built
up road, the speed limit is 60 kph.  Except for the SE corner, where
they decided a few years ago to make it 50 kph instead. (this is about
a 150 by 100 km rectangle).  All the main roads leading into this area
have signs pointing this out, but otherwise 50kph signs are few,
you're just supposed to know.  They may decide to make it cover the
whole state at some point, but not yet.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] zones for motorway/in town/outof town?

[Stephen Hope]

In my part of Australia, we have a speed limit that applies to every
non-rural street that is not specifically signed as being another
speed - basically case (b) below.  The wording used in the law is
"built up area".  (In practice, the test for a "built up area" seems
to be "does it have street lights?".)

Unfortunately, if that is the best they could come up with for that,
then there probably isn't a good English word that covers it. Urban is
close, but has connotations of the city centre, not the suburbs or
villages.  I think it's probably going to be the best, though.

Stephen

2009/5/20 Guenther Meyer :
> hi,
>
> currently there is a discussion on the german list about tagging speed limits
> respectively different "zones". as there are implied also other things than
> maxspeed there are proposed three default zones, derived from the signs
> standing at every border crossing point:
>
> a) motorway: that's very clear, therea are no or very high limits.
> b) "city" areas with limited speed and some restrictions
> c) everything else, mostly out of town.
>
> so this questions goes primarily to the native english speakers:
> what would be the right term for a value for these zones?
>
> a) motorway? this one would be very clear I think.
> b) in_town? place? urban? it's the thing we call "geschlossene ortschaft" in
>   germany, which inludes everything from very small villages to really large
>   cities (bounded by yellow squared signs in germany).
> c) out_of_town? rural?
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] coastline accuracy?

[Stephen Hope]

There are large parts of tropical coastlines where the coast is marked
as the outside edge of mangrove swamps.  These are covered with water
most of the time, and adjacent to the sea, so are below the "high
tide" line, but are considered to be part of the land.  You can't take
a boat through them, and they're covered with trees. These have been
discussed on the mailing lists several times. The general consensus
seems to be that if it's covered in plants, it's inside the coastline,
even if there happens to be water cover as well.

In some places, we're talking about differences of 15-20km or so in
where the coastline goes, so it's easy to see what paper maps have
done, and every one I've checked includes coastal swamps (fens?) and
mangrove flats on the land side of the coast.


2009/4/30 Cartinus :
> I can't find anything about moving the coastline away from the high-tide line
> in either:
> 
> or
> 
>
> The second page e.g. talks about a sandbank at the coast of the isle of Wight.
> Which, according to that discussion, should be on the sea-side of the
> coastline.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] best GPS for trekking

[Stephen Hope]

Make sure you test it in the cold though, as noted before,
recharchable batteries especially tend to work worse in cold weather.
Doesn't mean they won't work, just that you'll get maybe half the life
out of them.

If you are going to use good alkaline batteries, don't expect them to
be easily available anywhere except maybe Kathmandu.  Cheap batteries
will be readily available, but they will be crap quality. You
generally need to find a store that aims specifically at higher class
customers before you will find good batteries. This is a general rule
through most of Asia, I find.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] What is amenity=food_outlets in map features?

[Stephen Hope]

I'm guessing a food court. That's the term I've always heard, anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_court

Stephen

 2009/3/29 Ulf Lamping :
> Hi!
>
> Someone added amenity=food_outlets to the map features and even after
> reading the comment "An area with several food outlets" I'm quite unsure
> what this could be.
>
> Is this a collection of several amenity=fast_food or a kind of
> vending_machine or ...?
>
> Can someone explain this a bit?
>
> Regards, ULFL
>
> P.S: A photo would also be nice and may explain it even better ...

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[Stephen Hope]

OK, so while we're talking about this, there are a number of paths
near me.  Nice smooth concrete, about 2m wide. They run through parks,
and there are signs on the park as a whole that say "No motorised
vehicles".  These paths are marked with a sign that has a pedestrian
and a bicycle, and another sign that says "Cyclists give way to
Pedestrians".  How would you normally mark these?  I've used footway,
plus bicycle=yes.  I don't feel right calling it a cycleway if they
have to give way to other users.

Just to confuse the issue, some of them also have name signs, and most
of these names are "Xxxx cycle trail" (or similar). Even on these,
though, pedestrians still have right of way.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Mapnik: strange prioritisation/appearance of place names

[Stephen Hope]

Having an automatic algorithm that figures all this out is a nice
dream, and we should work towards it, but I don't think it will ever
be perfect. A map-maker uses a lot of information to decide which
places to show on a given map. Some of it is available to a renderer,
and some isn't. A "relative importance" tag that can have +2, +1, -1
etc to modify the otherwise automatically calculated values for the
object may turn out to be required. A renderer can ignore the tag if
the programmer is sure they have figured out a way to do it that does
not require the information.

Also - for those trying to figure out an automatic method -

In Australia, we have a different problem to Europe and the US.  We
want places that wouldn't normally show at higher zooms to do so.
Otherwise we end up with huge areas of blank map, that actually have
locations in them that are smaller than would normally show in that
zoom, but are important to the local areas.  Any rule that looks at
just the population or other size factors will fail in this case.

The further you are from any other displaying object, the more
important smaller objects become. If you are a hamlet with a petrol
station, a general store and 5 houses, but there is nothing else on
the road for 200km (or even 100) in any direction, then you should
show on much higher zooms than a similar place in the middle of a
group of towns. It should be possible for some sort of distance
algorithm to be used to bump the importance of such places, but I
suspect this would slow rendering a lot.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Cloudmade: "We are the Wikipedia of maps"

[Stephen Hope]

And you can't always blame the journalists, either. Once they send
their copy in, the editors can have a go at it as well. I've seen
perfectly good and factual articles become very inaccurate as the
editors try and make it fit in half the space with bit of cut and
paste. You'd think these days the online version would at least be the
longer, hopefully more accurate version, but that's not always the
case.

Stephen

2009/3/11 Tim 'avatar' Bartel :
> As a long time member of the Wikimedia Press Team and also beeing
> responsible for the Wikia press work, I *really* do know that
> journalists can mix up things and write whatever they like with little
> connection to what you have told them. Especially they do like mixing
> up Wikia and Wikipedia and how these two projects are connected. This
> is neither wanted by Wikipedians, nor by Wikia.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] amenity=doctor or amenity=doctors ? [tagging]

[Stephen Hope]

It's laziness in the language - doctors is the short hand form of
"doctor's surgery/office/place". Some (me included) would write it as
doctor's, though the shortened form sometimes loses the apostrophe. It
has nothing to do with how many doctors there are.  "I'm going to the
doctor's" is talking about the place, "I'm going to the doctor" is
talking about the person.

As we are marking the location, not the person, doctors is arguably
more accurate. Quite possibly more confusing, though, specially for
those unskilled in English slang. Personally, I don't care, but it
would be nice to have a recommended form.

Stephen

2009/2/20 Andrew Chadwick (email lists) :
> Also true of doctors' offices quite a lot of the time, where you'll have
> more than one GP, each with his/her own nameplate and consulting room,
> and a shared waiting / reception area. That's the pattern for many city
> GP practices in .uk anyway.
>
> Could also be laziness in use of language: albeit a sort of laziness
> that's common to both tags. And being a lazy developer, I'll probably go
> with established JOSM / t...@h practice: plural.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Wiki: chriscf vandalism

[Stephen Hope]

What I like about the tag voting system is the discussion.  The
discussion pages around a tag proposal are often quite useful - often
more so than the main page on the tag. The number of times a tag
proposal has been improved from the original proposal after discussion
suggests that any system that bases itself on only tag usage without
any discussion area on a tag is a backwards step.

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Re: [OSM-talk] yahoo and josm

[Stephen Hope]

I originally had problems with that as well. Things to check

- Are you sure you have replaced the wms plugin?  The text in the
plugin area of preferences should say something like "This is the
enhanced version of the WMS plugin..."  If it doesn't, disable it,
restart JOSM, then enable it again and select the option to download
it again when asked.

- Make sure you click Yahoo (Webkit), not just Yahoo on the WMS menu.

As I understand it, if you are using webkit, you don't need any
version of Firefox - it uses the webkit to get it directly instead.  I
must admit I haven't tried it on a Firefox free machine.

Stephen

2009/1/28 Nathan Mixter :
> I copied the web-kit folder to the same directory that the josm build files
> are in. I am still getting the red exception occurred when trying to run the
> wms layer. Any ideas why its still doing it? Do I need firefox 2 rather than
> firefox 3? I tried to install both at the same time but haven't tried
> running just firefox 2 yet.
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Temporary Items, overlays, changes

[Stephen Hope]

No, don't delete them if they may be of historical value (or if they
come back again).  Tag them with something so they don't show in the
"current day" maps.  We already have historical tagged items - things
that don't currently exist. (US Civil war battlesites, etc).

There is a festival near me that lasts for 1 1/2 weeks each year. Some
people start camping there two-three weeks early to get a good spot.
The rest of the year there is a couple of permanent roads, with a lot
of permanent toilets and not much else, in the middle of some state
forest. I would like to map the site next time it occurs, and then
leave the temporary ways in a disused state, but in the database so
it's easy to turn them on again when they actually exist.

2009/1/8 Rory McCann :
> I think the OSM database should have the current map of the world. If
> something is created, then map it. If it then gets torn down 2 weeks
> later, then delete those nodes/ways from the database. Just because the
> main slippy map is only re-rendered every week doesn't mean we can't
> have more instananeous changes in it.
>
> Rory

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Re: [OSM-talk] Which entry level budget garmin

[Stephen Hope]

I didn't give it because I didn't remember, and it isn't what he's
looking for.  It was the testing of the snap-to road functions and the
track-logging I remembered.  It is a Mio PDA, model 7nn (720, 730?).
I can't look it up right now because I loaned it to somebody for the
Christmas holidays, and haven't got it back yet.  It works fine as a
PDA, which is why I was given it. The GPS unit was an unexpected
extra.  When it is turned on, the battery life of the unit goes down
to 15-20 minutes, which basically makes it unusable as a portable GPS.
 Works fine in the car, while attached to a power supply, though. The
GPS software is on a seperate SD card, and the track logs go into a
directory on that card as NMEA sentences, which GPSBABEL can convert
to gpx. I can access the GPS directly from the PDA, so I could load
Gosmore or another package, but I haven't bothered, as for my normal
day to day mapping, I use a handheld Garmin unit on a bike mount.

Stephen

2009/1/6 Ulf Lamping :
>
> @Stephen: Instead of "For my specific device (not a Zumo)" it might be a lot
> more helpful if you would tell us what your "specific device" really is!
>
> Regards, ULFL
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Which entry level budget garmin

[Stephen Hope]

It's not hard to test.  When I was unsure if my device was doing this
or not, I set it to snap to road, and then took it for a little walk
along the edge and then cut some corners in a park, then looked at the
tracks.  For my specific device (not a Zumo), I discovered that the on
screen and main track log snapped to the roads, but I could also turn
on a background data saving log that saved the raw data, which was
quite usable.

Stephen


2009/1/6 D Tucny :
>
> I think ULFL's point was that with his Zumo there isn't such a configuration
> option, so while it does save track logs, he's not confident that they are
> acceptable due to the potential that it is just snapping to road and as
> such, copying the copywrited built in maps rather than saving tracks based
> on the GPS recorded position... A nuvi could have this problem too if this
> is not configurable...
>
> d
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Some more shops and amenities for the map features page ...

[Stephen Hope]

2008/12/21 D Tucny :
>
> What makes an optician's a shop whereas a dentist is an amenity? NHS?
> Opticians selling sunglasses?
>

Because an opticians tend's to look a shop, and I can go in, buy
something (new frame, glasses case, cleaning materials) without an
appointment or seeing an optician at all?  I've never seen a dentists
place that looked like a shop.


2008/12/21 Dermot McNally :
>
> It's "doctors" that puzzles me. Why not "doctor"? I know that you are
> reporting reality here, but maybe we have a chance now to document a
> more consistent set of tags and perhaps the (possibly few) mappers
> already using "doctors" would be prepared to retag.

It's a shortened form of "doctor's (surgery/office)".  It's common
English usage, so I can see why people would start using it. Whether
or not it should be encouraged, however is another question.

I think if we are going to get serious about POI's we need to come up
with a tagging scheme for things that are businesses but are not
shops.  Just thinking about things in the immediate vicinity of where
I work, there is a business park (named, and known by the name), a
state tax office, several office buildings, various other government
departments. I'm not sure amenity or shop really works for any of
them.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Seasonal Roads?

[Stephen Hope]

Start using it - the ultimate test of tag in OSM is whether it is used or not.

However, if people are actively discussing it, try and get a consensus first.

Stephen


2008/12/11 Colin McGregor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> So, what can I do to help advance the cause of getting a seasonal tag
> (be the season "winter" or "dry season") into OSM?
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Edit war on the wiki "map features"

[Stephen Hope]

>
>  Where you have the sign post for 4WD only, is that an access restriction or
> a suggestion?
>
> I.E. If you go on that road with a motorbike, or a 2wd vehicle, could you
> face prosecution? Or would you just be considered a bit foolish?
>

It's a warning, not a restriction.  I regularly take my 2WD on one of
these roads, every time I visit my aunt. On the other hand, I'm only
going about 2 kilometres, I know I can handle that bit of the road as
long as it isn't raining so hard the surface has turned to porridge,
and the really bad parts are past her house. I've gotten a few odd
looks from 4WD drivers going the other way (passing isn't easy,
either), but no one's ever tried to stop me.

On the other hand, some of these roads are hundreds of kilometres
long, with possible fords/flooding, steep hills, bad ruts, and no
inhabitants to turn to for help. I wouldn't want to take a single 4WD
on those roads, let alone a 2WD.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Turn restriction docs

[Stephen Hope]

As well as "You can't do this" and "You must do this" we need "You may
do this (that normally you can't)". Where I live, you can't do a
U-turn at traffic lights unless there's a sign that says you can.  If
we try and mark this by putting relations at every light banning
U-turns, we'll just end up with the no-street name problem - how can
you tell the difference between somewhere you can do a u-turn and
somewhere that hasn't been mapped. If we can mark the places you can
turn, then it matches the signs, and we can preprocess the data to
something routers can use.

There's a challenge for the router dev's as well.  Add an option to
your routing software that disables u-turns at traffic lights unless a
restriction specifically allows it.  You'll be ahead of both of the
commercial GPS devices I've tried.

Stephen

2008/11/30 Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hi,
>
> Nic Roets wrote:
>> At T junctions the ambiguity is resolved using
>> restriction=no_left_turn/no_right_turn.
>
> For the record, I am strongly opposed to automated processing of the
> "restriction" except to see if it is "only..." or "no...".
>
> I want a situation where the two parts of the road are unambiguously
> identified by the "from" and "to" members, meaning that if any of these
> do not start/end at the junction they have to be split.
>
> The "restriction" tag would then be used to check whether I can "ONLY"
> go from "from" to "to", or whether I can "NOT" go from "from" to "to".
> Whatever follows after "no_" or "only_" can be used to paint nice
> matching signs on a map or to give voice commands, but should not be
> used to identify which ways the restiction applies to!
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED]  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Contraflow bus lane

[Stephen Hope]

"Passenger service vehicles (PSVs) are:

* vehicles used in a passenger service (no matter how many seating
positions they might have)
* vehicles with more than 12 seating positions (whether they're
used for hire or reward or not)
* heavy motor vehicles with more than nine seating positions"

So Taxis, Shuttles, Buses, some minivans (the big ones have 14 seats).
 I have a friend with a horse float that qualifies.

In reality, it's almost always buses that use the PSV lanes, but some
other vehicles are allowed in some places.

Stephen

2008/10/23 Matthias Julius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> "Stephen Hope" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> Not all PSV's are buses.
>
> What else?
>
> Matthias
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Contraflow bus lane

[Stephen Hope]

Not all PSV's are buses.

2008/10/23 Matthias Julius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Shaun McDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> Usually psv for public service vehicle is used for access restrictions.
>
> I missed that.  It would have been too easy to call a bus "bus", I
> guess ;-)
>
> Should we rename "bus_stop" to "psv_stop"?
>
> Matthias
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Turn restrictions vs allowances?

[Stephen Hope]

We have a similar thing here in Queensland, Australia.  You can't do a
U-turn at any traffic lights unless there is a sign specifically
saying that you can. I think this is the same across the whole
country, but I'd have to check. There are no signs saying you can't at
the other lights, you're supposed to know (or at least infer it).
Intersections without traffic lights are the opposite - you may do a
u-turn unless there is a sign saying you can't.  I haven't got around
to tagging any of them yet, so haven't had to figure out how to do it.

Stephen

2008/10/23 Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Matias D'Ambrosio wrote:
>>Sent: 22 October 2008 8:21 PM
>>To: talk@openstreetmap.org
>>Subject: [OSM-talk] Turn restrictions vs allowances?
>>
>> What is the opposite of a turn restriction? I can't find it and no one
>>answers on IRC.
>> Turning left is forbidden everywhere in my country on two way roads when
>>there is no specific traffic light for it, and I assume it's the same in
>>many
>>other countries.
>
> Interesting, which country are you talking about since clearly it does
> differ around the world. Essentially in the UK you can turn left or right at
> any junction, with or without a traffic signal. Generally the only time you
> cannot is when a no left turn or no right turn sign is present. I'm guessing
> that the reason the "turn restrictions" tagging has come about is because
> most countries are the opposite to yours rather than the same?
>
> Anyway, I agree it sounds like to need a turn_permitted= type tag for your
> area.
>
> Cheers
>
> Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC -Motorway_linkimpliesoneway=??

[Stephen Hope]

2008/10/9 Matthias Julius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> This leads to a nightmare.  Those rules would need to be implemented
> in every tool that works with OSM data (and cares about oneway
> properties).
>

It's a nightmare we're probably going to have to address at some point
if we want to do good routing. There are many traffic rules that are
local, affect routing, and are not explicitly signed on the roads.

Here's an example. In Queensland (and I think the rest of Australia)
it is illegal to do a U-turn at traffic lights unless there is a sign
that specifically says you can. It is legal to U-turn at road
junctions without traffic lights unless there is a sign that says you
can't.

If you want a routing application to take this into account, we're
going to either have a local rule that says "Don't U-turn at lights
etc" or get every intersection with lights mapped with U-turn
restrictions in every direction that aren't signed in the real world
(good luck with that).

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_link impliesoneway=??

[Stephen Hope]

Bad assumption.  This may be the case in parts of Europe and the USA,
but certainly not in most parts of the world.

2008/10/3 Matthias Julius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Trunk roads are probably mostly oneway, too ...
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap routing service

[Stephen Hope]

That is certainly the case in Australia.  Parts of our 'National
Highway 1' are motorway standard, other parts are labeled trunk, but
are one lane each way, not divided road, and anything is allowed on
them.  And the only alternate route may well be several hundred km
longer.

2008/9/8 Dermot McNally <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I agree with the second half of what you say here, and that's because
> I disagree with the first bit. I know that German tagging practice has
> evolved to consider "trunk" to refer to vehicle-only routes, but
> there's no reason to suppose that other countries will use the same
> reasoning. The term originates in the UK road classification system,
> where it's simply the highest category of non-motorway road. Within
> that category, quality can vary greatly between motorway-standard
> roads and glorified cart tracks.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] mailing list behavior

[Stephen Hope]

2008/9/2 Sascha Silbe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> There's no way OSM could change that default, it's up to your MUA vendor.
> The buttons you're currently using are "reply" (with an implied "to author")
> and "reply to all", not "reply (default)" and "reply (alternative)".
> The only thing OSM can do is to trick your MUA into believing the "reply to
> author" function should reply to the list instead. And note the last word I
> used: _instead_. It doesn't work as expected anymore, rendering the expected
> function unavailable.

But this is where the problem is.  You did not send me this email, the list did.

Reply does not imply "send to author" it implies "send to who sent me
the message".  If I forward an email to someone, a reply comes to me,
not the original author. If the list forwards an email to someone, the
expectation is therefore created that a reply would go back to the
list. The fact that lists work differently in the background is not
obvious.

An OSM thread is supposed to be creating a group conversation.
Setting it up so the default way of replying breaks threads away from
the list into private conversations might work well for a advertising
list, but is strange for a list of this type.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Is it land or sea: how to map a swamp?

[Stephen Hope]

The northern coast of Australia has many Mangrove marshes at river
mouths, some of them extending many kilometres away from the dry shore
line.  PGS shows these areas as sea, because they are not dry land -
and that is were the coastlines would have been imported from.  Note
that "being submerged for half the year" doesn't mean the trees are
covered with water, just the mud under them.  The tree tops would be
above water all the time, I suspect.

We've (mostly) tagged them as land, with the coast being on the sea
side of them.  Technically they may be water covered (or partially
water covered, usually about 6 inches deep), but if you can't swim or
boat in them and plants and trees grow there it's land as far as I'm
concerned.  They certainly are not ocean.  Marshes in the UK are also
treated as land from the coastline point of view, even were they edge
an ocean.

See 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-16.9642&lon=145.7843&zoom=13&layers=B00FTF
for an example near Cairns.  More examples are further up the coast.

Stephen


2008/7/9 Alan Millar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I came across an interesting area which I don't know how to map or tag.
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=22.066&lon=89.047&zoom=9&layers=B00FTF
>
> This is the Sundarbans mangrove forest on the border of India and
> Bangladesh.  The map doesn't look like much, but look at the map with
> aerial photos like in Potlatch edit mode and it starts to get interesting.
>
> I read that it is submerged for up to half of the year.  The Yahoo aerial
> photos clearly show the forest areas, so I assume they were taken at a
> low-water period.  Google Maps shows it as land.
>
> Our oceantiles file has it as land, but our coastlines treat it as sea.
> Our coastlines stop at the farmlands which border it.  During the high
> water period, I suppose our coastlines make sense.
>
> Does anyone have any recommendations of how to treat an area like this?
> Any similar geography already mapped somewhere?  Thanks
>
> - Alan
>
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Wide roads and traffic signals

[Stephen Hope]

If you can't cross from one side to another anywhere, then it should
be marked as two separate ways.

When you have a twoway road connect to one of these,  it will connect
to each side, with a little crossing piece in the middle. When you
have two such roads connect, then it will look like a hash symbol (#)
with four nodes.  Each of these nodes would have a traffic light tag
if there were lights.

Stephen

2008/6/25 Moshe Sayag <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am trying to map my area (that is very sparsely mapped in OSM
> currently), so I bought a GPS device and started cycling / driving
> around and edit my tracks.
> The results so far can be seen at
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=32.1878&lon=34.8714&zoom=14&layers=B00FT
> (Notice that the street names is not shown in Mapnik but only in Osmarender)
>
> My questions:
>
> 1. How do I map a wide road with a separation (line of trees) between
> the two directions?
> Something like:
>
> -->-->-->-->-->-->
> -->-->-->-->-->-->
> *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
> <--<--<--<--<--<--
> <--<--<--<--<--<--
>
> Do I set it as a one two-way road or two one-way roads?
>
> 2. If I set it as two separate ways, how do I mark traffic signals
> (traffic lights) where two such roads cross each other?
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] pronunciation tag

[Stephen Hope]

 2008/6/24 Michal Migurski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I'd also take
> issue with your rendering of Divisadero - it's a lot like Sepulveda in
> in LA, apparently the wrong pronunciation is the right pronunciation. =)

 That's a whole other can of worms.  Is the right pronunciation:

 - The way the locals says it?
 - The way a subgroup of locals of a particular linguistic group say it?
 - The way the rest of the country says it?  (In Australia, there is at
 least one town were the inhabitants pronounce it different from pretty
 much everybody else in Australia. I understand Maine in the US has
 similar examples)

 There are a few places in Australia and New Zealand that were named
 after places in Europe, but aren't pronounced the same. Well, not
 pronounced the same by everybody, in any case.  Who's right?

 Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] what road am I travelling along?

[Stephen Hope]

2008/6/21 OJ W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> one of the more pathetic tricks of those proprietary gadgets on the
> car dashboard, is that they tell you what road you're on, as if you
> didn't know from the signs...
>

Actually, that is quite useful where I live.  The sign posts around
here show the names of the little streets, but the bigger streets you
are turning on to are named much less frequently.  You're supposed to
know them.  They'll be marked at either end, but not at every little
intersection.  This doesn't help you much when you're trying to get
out a of a suburb by a way you haven't been before.

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Re: [OSM-talk] [talk-au] should we migrate to osm forum

[Stephen Hope]

There are definitely tools that do this seamlessly.  I'm not sure if
there are free ones or not.  I belong to a group that allows you to
send and receive messages by mailing list, newsgroup, forum, rss feed
(receive only).  It uses MPNews, which is commercial.  As I understand
it, it is a newsgroup (NNTP) at it's base, with the others methods as
different interfaces to the group.

Stephen

2008/6/11 Sjors Provoost <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> More specifically about the mailing lists: does anyone know a tool that:
> * is an online forum, with threads and whatever 'forum people' like
> * is a mailinglist: with threads and where you can still use the reply 
> function
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] difference between waterway=canal and waterway=drain

[Stephen Hope]

What is your definition of an artificial waterway?  Dug and designed
by man?  Made of non-natural materials?

Near me a few years ago was an open marshy field that was fed by a
stream, with a stream exiting.

Now the developers have put houses up in the field.  They brought in
dirt and raised the ground level, dug a connection between the entry
and exit streams and landscaped around it. Is it a stream or a drain?
It's not concrete (except for one bridge area), it looks like a
stream, but it is man made.

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] area topology

[Stephen Hope]

Says who?  The boundary of the forest IS the road.  :)

This is one of religious discussions - both sides KNOW they are right,
and no amount of discussion is going to change things.  Unless we have
a central decision making force of some sort lay down the law, (in OSM
- hah!) you'll continue to see things mapped both ways.

Stephen

2008/5/14 Raphaël Jacquot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>  the "boundary of the forrest run in parallel to the road" is actually
>  the correct way to do it.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Mapping distant objects by triangulation.

[Stephen Hope]

In theory, yes.  In practice, maybe.

You would find that if you did a third measuring line, it probably
wouldn't intersect where the first two did.  Small errors at the
measuring end cause massive errors at the other end.  Even the guys
with the specialist measuring equipment working on a building site can
have trouble.

It's all about levers.   If your first two known points are say 100
meters apart, and the object you're trying to measure is 2,000 meters
away, a five meter sideways error at this end on one of the points (an
easy error with a GPS) would cause a 400 meter variation at the other
end.

Which means if you want to do this, you need to do the following.

1)  More than two lines.  Three minimum, more is better.  Also come
from as wide an angle as possible.
2)  Get your two known points as far apart as you can.  If your
telepone pole is halfway between you and your target, then the errors
at the other end are the same as the errors at your end.
3) Make sure you mark the target source as not by GPS (maybe
source=triangulation?)

Stephen

2008/5/13 Jeffrey Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I couldn't find the other thread on this topic.
>
>  How do you map an object, like a tower on top of a mountain, that
>  you don't have access to without expensive survey equipment?
>
>  My thought is to use a plumb bob to line up the unknown object
>  with some known objects. I would find something like a phone
>  pole between me and the mountain tower. I would move along
>  a road until the pole and the tower line up. Now I have a straight
>  line. Do it again with another strait line and I have two lines
>  to define the location.
>
>  Would that work?
>
>  --
>  http://bowlad.com
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Overhaul of voting process (was: Road crossings proposal - status?)

[Stephen Hope]

But what is a significant amount of use?  You can't just go on
numbers.  Based on the posts a month or so back about badly formed
tags, there are probably more misspelled versions of the main highway
tags than legitimate versions of many other tags.

I would, in fact, think that a well thought out tag that covers some
obscure feature that only occurs maybe a thousand times world wide,
and is currently only mapped 10 times is equally as valid in Map
Features as something that is found every few miles.  I want to go to
Map Features to look for that odd thing I've found, not have to hunt
through Map Features, then try the Proposed Tags as well.

Though I'd be happier to do that if somebody could come up with a
decent search on the wiki that only looked at the tags pages, not
everywhere else that something may have been mentioned, when I'm
trying to find what odd tags are being used for whatever I'm looking
for.

Stephen

2008/5/8 Celso González <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I agree with that, i think we still need the Proposed_Features just as a
> reference to clarify ideas and when a tag reaches a significant amount
> of use in Tagwatch move it to Map_Features.
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] GPS recommendations

[Stephen Hope]

I think it's just as important to have a list of models NOT to buy.
Of course, this may get us into trouble with those manufacturers, but
as long as we stick to facts and not opinions, we should be fine.  If
a particular model only records data points every 10 seconds (or not
at all), we need to know it's not suitable for this purpose.

Unless I order online, any shop around here is going to carry maybe
5-6 models, and probably on have 3-4 of those on hand, so my choice as
a shopper would be limited.  If the recommended ones are not in the
few available, it would be nice to know if any lemons are.

Stephen

2008/4/24 Gervase Markham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/GPS
>  says:
>  "Thinking of getting a GPS Receiver to add data to OSM? These reviews
>  are here to help."
>

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Re: [OSM-talk] Rocky beaches

[Stephen Hope]

I agree, high water would seem like the 'natural' coast.  But I think
you have to modify this when you look at deltas with swamps and fens.
If you look at the outline on most (any?) maps with a major river
system mouth, they show all the swampy areas as part of the land, and
don't try and distinguish between the bits that have a couple of
inches of water over them all the time and the ones that are tidal.
It seems to be "if it has plants/trees growing on it, it's land".

Detailed maps can and do break it down much more, but the "simple
coast" outlines usually seem to include tidal swamps as land.

Stephen

On 15/04/2008, David Groom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> - Original Message -
>  From: "Cartinus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>  To: 
>  Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 10:24 PM
>  Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Rocky beaches
>
>
>
> The approach I have been taking is to tag natural=coastline as an
>  approximation of high water.  Any area of sand which is normally above the
>  high water mark I have tagged as natural=beach.  To tag the coastline as the
>  low water line would I believe in many instances give an outline which would
>  not be recognisable to most people as "the coast".  As an example see the

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Re: [OSM-talk] Rocky beaches

[Stephen Hope]

Also, if you are in an area with extensive coastal swamps (mangroves
for example) be aware that the PGS data usually traces the land side
of the swamp.  This makes sense, looking at the statement below, but
the mangrove swamps can extend for many kilometres to sea, and I
wouldn't want to sail through them.

Stephen

On 15/04/2008, Cartinus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Lots of coastline in OSM comes from PGS data. According to
>  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/PGS_whitepaper
>
>  "This new shoreline is an approximation of the High Water Line; it is NOT a
>  Mean High Water Line since the source data have not been tide coordinated."
>
>  This of course says nothing about other coastline data.
>
>  Dutch topographic maps don't consider tidal flats a part of the land. It is
>  coloured the same colour blue as the sea, but it has lots of black dots in
>  it.
>
>  --
>  m.v.g.,
>
> Cartinus
>
>
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Re: [OSM-talk] Raw GPS layer

[Stephen Hope]

This would be good.  But even better, let me select a portion of a
track log and upload it.  My track logs tend to be a nightmarish
tangle, with possibly hours of stuff before, after and during the
interesting bits.  I can use them because I was there, and know where
I went, when and why (this is why I take notes).  But somebody looking
at the raw track would actually be confusing, and possibly wrong.

However - bits that I'm actually mapping tend to be much better -
actually tracking roads, paths etc.  If I could easily select the bad
bits of the track log (just points) in JOSM and remove them, then
upload the rest, I'd be willing to put them up.

I keep meaning to go back over my old track logs (all of which I have)
and clean them up with some 3rd party tool, bit I always seem to have
new stuff to work on instead.

On 22/02/2008, Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  I think we should provide a track upload facility within JOSM. I
>  started work on that once but got distracted, maybe its time to
>  revisit that.
>

Stephen

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Re: [OSM-talk] Place of worship: wayside crosses

[Stephen Hope]

Christoph,

There was some discussion about this on the list last month, (in a
thread that started by talking about the Icon tag), and there is now a
proposed tag as wayside_cross (there is also wayside_shrine).

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/wayside_cross

Wayside crosses are not common in English speaking areas. Well, people
put small white crosses up were people died in car accidents, but
that's not the same thing.

Stephen



On 04/02/2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED]>  wrote:
> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hi,
>
> on the german list one inhabitant wondered how to name a proposal for wayside
> crosses:
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croix_monumentale
>
> How do you call them in english speaking countries? What would you recommend
> for a proposal? An additional tag for place_of_worship or an tag of its own?
>
> Thanks & best regards,
>
> ce
>

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[OSM-talk] JOSM upload failure

[Stephen Hope]

I was uploading a big section of data when I had an connection failure
of some kind, and the upload eventually timed out. It had uploaded a
lot of nodes, but hadn't got as far as the ways yet.

Can I assume that if I just try and upload the same data again (I have
it saved) that it won't duplicate the nodes that uploaded last time?
Is there some rule that says you can't have two nodes in the same
place?

Stephen Hope

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