Re: [OSM-talk] Automated edits code of conduct

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/07/2016 17:29, Éric Gillet wrote:


So at least one user should reach out to the contributor before 
involving the DWG ? That would be great but that's not currently the 
case in my experience.



The vast majority of my DWG interactions with other OSM users are "if 
you see something amiss, please comment on the changeset discussion so 
that the person making a mistake knows there's a problem".  It's 
actually rare for DWG members to see something and act immediately; most 
are reported to us directly, often by multiple users.


What might happen is that we jump fairly quickly on obvious sock-puppets 
(see for example the ones at the top of the 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/blocks_by list - but even 
in that case the recipient has a clear route to engage with the DWG to 
say "you made a mistake").


To my mind, the biggest and most important requirement in 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct is 
"document and discuss".  It's important that large-scale edits 
(especially worldwide ones) catch the ear of those mappers and data 
consumers that they're going to affect.  Also, sometimes well-meaning 
tag-changers sometimes don't have as much domain knowledge as others 
about the things that they're proposing to change (the "trees" change 
mentioned upthread was a good example of this - most needleleaved 
(coniferous) trees are evergreen, but not all, and the person making the 
(undiscussed) change didn't know that).  Discussing proposed changes in 
the open means that everyone can benefit from that wider knowledge.


It's also important to remember that OSM is supposed to be something 
representing the real world, not a bunch of data that is semantically 
described by the wiki.  Essentially, it's a geography project, not a 
computer science one*.  There will be cases where the data that's in OSM 
is "a bit woolly", and doesn't quite get the sense of a real-world 
entity across (but without an on-the-ground survey it's difficult to say 
what the problem is).  Sometimes the fact that OSM mappers have captured 
something that "doesn't quite fit" OSM's frequently used categories is 
really useful, because it identifies something that we should categorise 
better - so it's important that the _sense_ of what the original mapper 
reported is kept, rather than their square peg being hammered down into 
a round hole**.


I've read through your posts in this thread, and while it's clear that 
you have an issue with the way that things work now, I can't see what 
that problem actually is.  Can you provide some specific examples of DWG 
actions that you think were inappropriate?  What do you think should 
have happened instead?


However do bear in mind that just like the vast majority of people in 
OSM everyone in the DWG's a volunteer.  Some volunteered; others were 
asked to join but everyone's unpaid.  Also bear in mind that everyone in 
OSM's a human being and deserves a basic level of respect - even new 
users creating invalid POIs simply because they don't realise they're 
editing a worldwide map.


Best Regards,

Andy (aka http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse , member of the 
DWG but writing in a personal capacity).



* full disclosure - I'm part of the problem here, as I'm a computer 
scientist rather than a geographer by trade.


** part of my background was in statistical analysis of 
electromechanical data (while that was still a thing), and a key lesson 
from there is that you need to keep as much data as possible in order to 
be able to detect odd or expensive events as they occur - part of this 
has since been described as "black swan theory", but there's a bit more 
to it than that.


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Re: [Talk-us] Common names of highways do not match road signs.

[Andy Townsend]

On 08/07/2016 15:45, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:

... According to the Iowa DOT, it's official name is
"Interstate Highway 235" but ...


As Paul has already said, that sounds like a "ref" to me, not a "name".  
If something doesn't have a name, you don't need to create one for OSM...


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-us] Common names of highways do not match road signs.

[Andy Townsend]

I've tended to use "name:signed=no" and/or "ref:signed=no" if there's a 
name or ref that is agreed to be "correct" but not useful for 
navigation.  It's not used much:


http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/name%3Asigned

but it does mean that you can exclude "non-useful names" from maps made 
with OSM data, either in a slippy map:


https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L1762

or on a Garmin.

In the UK we've also had a problem with some (generally armchair) 
mappers thinking that "all roads must have a name" and "any name is 
better than no name" so they've been adding "names" that might have been 
in a news report ages ago along the lines of "Greater Chigley and 
Trumpton Bypass Scheme" which aren't signed and aren't useful.  I tend 
to move those to "description".


Cheers,

Andy

On 08/07/2016 15:07, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:

It's been a long time since I've messed much with turning OSM data
into Garmin maps, but even back then the main problem was mapping the
OSM data model to the Garmin data model, what kind of data to retain,
what data to leave out, what data needed to be massaged before being
included etc. It's more of an art than a science. If you're having
problems, they best thing to do isn't to change the OSM data (unless
it's obviously wrong) but to discuss with the OpenMapChest people what
sort of changes could be made to their translation process to improve
your results. This is the first I've heard of OpenMapChest (but it
looks cool, I still have a Garmin GPS that I get out now and then) so
I don't know what the best way to contact them is (there's nothing on
their web site that provides specific contact information).

On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 9:32 PM, Kevin Morgan  wrote:

It is confusing to use open street maps in my area(Central Ohio) for
driving directions since the "common names" of high ways do not match
road signs. The common names are used by open map chest for road names.
For example when turning on to State Route 315 with OpenMapChest loaded
on my GPS I am directed to turn on to Olentangy Freeway. However the
tiger name on open street maps is State route 315. Would it make more
sense to configure driving maps to use tiger names for driving
directions,  change commons names to include the state route number or
interstate number, or add state route number/ interstate number as a
different tag?

--
   Kevin Morgan
   morgankev...@fastmail.fm

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Re: [talk-au] Familiar with these places in WA?

[Andy Townsend]

On 07/07/2016 11:28, Nev Wedding wrote:

http://mmwatch.osmz.ru/?country=Australia=%E7%8E%8B%E7%90%B3%E9%9B%85


... one more thing to add - not all of their edits are unhelpful:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/34911431/history

now has opening hours on it and didn't before.

I am familiar with the subject of 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/40341630 though and will stick a 
comment on there.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [talk-au] Familiar with these places in WA?

[Andy Townsend]

On 07/07/2016 11:28, Nev Wedding wrote:

Anyone familiar with these places in WA to fix some of this mappers tags.

shop=dry_cleaning appears to be a booming business to me.
Also adding odd characters at end of names and parts of names in lower case

http://mmwatch.osmz.ru/?country=Australia=%E7%8E%8B%E7%90%B3%E9%9B%85


I'd suggest adding a changeset discussion comment to e.g. 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4285737789 saying "that looks like a 
winery, not a dry cleaning shop" (obviously pad the message out politely 
saying that OSM isn't a place for personal notes etc. etc.).  Although I 
presume they're a Chinese tourist they're in, or planning to visit, WA 
so I guess they may have a bit of English.


The UI in MAPS.ME is pretty confusing.  If you don't know what OSM is, 
then it's not clear that you're updating a public database at all.  The 
notes UI in there is similar (see 
https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/3712 ), but the MAPS.ME developers 
are apparently looking at that.


What I've done with similar users in Europe is (in the first instance) 
tried to communicate and then if that fails (which it does some, but not 
all, of the time) revert all the problematic changesets by that user.


Cheers,

Andy

(not in WA but an occasional visitor)


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Re: [Talk-GB] Next Quarterly Project

[Andy Townsend]

On 30/06/2016 18:13, Brian Prangle wrote:
... some farms seem to be little more than caravan storage, some have 
transformed into equestrian centres, small industrial parks or become 
just residential ...


Indeed, farms sounds like a good idea to me.  Quite a few to the east of 
me seem to have been added as nodes with "place=farm; name=whatever's on 
the OS OpenData" (and sometimes name is just obviously desciptive, like 
"Poultry Farm").  It'd be great to have landuse mapped instead of just a 
single node, even if it does take a note and a subsequent survey visit 
to resolve what's become just residential and what hasn't.


Is any of the farm subsidy data open (in order to figure out which are 
genuinely still farms)?


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] MAPS.ME edits - partly sub-standard

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/06/2016 14:40, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:


This defect has already been reported to their GitHub repository:
https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/2902



You've seen https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/3623 though?

("This bugtracker is not actively monitored, b...@maps.me could be used 
for reporting")


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Re: [OSM-talk] MAPS.ME edits - partly sub-standard

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/06/2016 16:23, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:


2016-06-22 17:07 GMT+02:00 Martin Koppenhoefer >:


yet another issue 



and another type of issue:

...

I suspect that this mailing list isn't the best way of logging bugs with 
MAPS.ME.


https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/3623 suggests emailing 
b...@maps.me ; maybe try that?


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Re: [OSM-talk] MAPS.ME edits - partly sub-standard

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/06/2016 10:12, joost schouppe wrote:
The scope for growth of our community with Maps.me is phenomenal. Of 
course there is room for improvement. But it's never going to be easy 
to lower the barriers to participation without losing quality.




I don't think that it's an explicitly MAPS.ME problem - it's a "new 
mappers" one.  There have been "ban iD", "ban Potlatch" etc. complaints 
since those editors have existed, and new mappers using JOSM are just as 
likely to make a mess of things as with other editors, but the resulting 
fallout tends to be rather more nuclear.


That said, there may well be some mileage in the ideas below:


Some ideas:

- maps.me  should probably stick to simple-to-map 
objects when it adds data. Complicated stuff should go in a note.


- if the maps.me  data is old, any added object should 
be a note by default


We get "notes by default" from other apps that use old data (e.g. 
Navmii) and in that case it's just as annoying to deal with - actually 
more so in that case as the notes are anonymous.


- maps.me  should investigate why response is so low 
to changeset comments. Maybe OSM messages can be integrated in the 
app? Maybe added info should be Note by default until they have 
responded to a test message sent through the OSM messaging system. 
(though in my experience response to any OSM message is low, not just 
maps.me  users)


I'm not convinced that the reply rate from MAPS.ME users is much lower 
than other new mappers.  As you say, new mappers often don't reply - 
probably because they think of OSM as a map or a database rather than a 
community, and databases don't in general talk back to you.  However, 
that's just a gut feeling on my part - someone would need to go through 
changesets and discussions and count up to be sure.


The same options are available with unresponsive MAPS.ME users as with 
other users - try and contact them via changeset discussions, and if 
that doesn't work drop a mail to the Data Working Group explaining the 
problem.  We can send them a message via the "block" mechanism that they 
have to read before they can continue editing (without actually stopping 
them from editing for any length of time).  Usually the problem is a 
language barrier one, or they're just not getting emails because they 
don't monitor the account they signed up with, or they're just "not very 
communicative", and once it's clear that the problem won't go away of 
it's own accord they'll engage positively.


- maybe we should have a manual review system in place for ALL maps.me 
 changesets, until someone marks the account as 
"experienced"


That's pretty much what's happening already (just not with MAPS.ME users 
only).  In many places around the world new mappers are either 
explicitly welcomed or helped along through their first few edits. 
There's even been a recent help question about using whodidit for the 
purpose:


https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/50331/how-to-search-for-go-map-editor-in-whodidit

Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] How to handle Maps.Me garbage?

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/06/2016 14:13, Michael Reichert wrote:


I decided not to write a changeset comment because it seems to me to
be a waste of time to comment a Maps.Me user's changeset. (There less
frequently respond to comments than iD users)


Because of the language difference I suspect that the chance of a reply 
from this MAPS.ME user will be less than from others (unless you try an 
address them in Korean - but that really isn't difficult these days with 
machine translation).


I've certainly had replies from MAPS.ME users in the UK, including 
someone doing similar things (in Danish - I commented on the changeset 
in English and Danish).


Best Regards,
Andy


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[Talk-GB] Removal of "sport" from recreation grounds, adding fixmes (was sport=soccer not sport=football.)

[Andy Townsend]

As a bit more background to this, see the changeset discussion comments 
on https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39809705 and 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39812846 .  I got a reply re 
"football vs soccer", but not about any of the other questions raised in 
there.


I didn't revert 39809705 but did correct the stuff that I could see was 
wrong based on what I was familiar with, although some that I've left 
are pretty questionable. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/422897831 is 
a barely perceptible netball court on a MUGA* "currently" (at the time 
of the Bing imagery) used for tennis.  Suggesting that there are 3 
sports that can be played at that particular pitch is correct; 
suggesting that there are 3 pitches is not.  In that changeset I did 
re-add the sport tag where it'd been removed from facilities that were 
only used for football such as recreation grounds, and removed the fixme 
from football pitches where it was obvious what sport was being played 
(not withstanding the tagging of it, as discussed in the other part of 
this thread.


Changeset 39812846 made a number of changes to items that I'd mapped 
locally that simply didn't match the local reality (in terms of tag 
changes, roughly 52 errors, 2 "differently wrong", and 3 "may be 
correct".   I therefore, and because it had so long to manually correct 
the previous one, reverted that and re-added the pitches added in it 
(though some of those are a bit questionable, similar to the "netball 
pitch" mentioned above).


Other changesets doing the same sort of questionable changes are:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39851311
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39835766
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39834172
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39828662
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39808654
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39807666
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39807083
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39858684
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39897226
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39897254
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39897284
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39899623
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39920451
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/39920520

I'd suggest that local mappers check the changes in these and make sure 
that they match their sense of what these facilities are best mapped as.


Cheers,

Andy

* multi-use games area - typically a hard surface with a fence around 
it, often seen in a local park and primarily used by local kids for 
ad-hoc football matches



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Re: [Talk-us] Tile cache issue?

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/05/2016 23:39, Kevin Kenny wrote:

On the main server with the default layer, I notice that

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/42.6437/-74.0033

has paths that abruptly disappear at a tile boundary.



I suspect that for whatever reason (server move related perhaps?) it 
just got missed.  As viewed from the UK a /dirty worked OK, so just 
working as per 
http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/178/how-often-does-the-main-mapnik-map-get-updated/183 
I suspect?


Cheers,

Andy


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

[Andy Townsend]

On 20/05/2016 16:29, SK53 wrote:
In my experience there are certain prescription which I can only get 
fulfilled by a hospital pharmacy (those written by a consultant).


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


Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [Talk-us] Restoring bus routes in Portland

[Andy Townsend]

On 20/05/2016 13:20, Arun Ganesh wrote:


Reverting the changesets are causing multiple conflicts and there does 
not seem to be a mechanism to just restore relation membership to a 
historical version. Any help and ideas appreciated


[1] https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/issues/185


If it helps, what I've done when things like this have happened in the 
past is:


1) Edit failing OSC files to not include relation changes that cause 
problems - i.e. get all the ways and nodes in OSM how you want them.


2) Find the "desired version" of the relation that you want to update, 
and try and apply that (e.g. via level0).  It'll fail, so find out which 
ways don't exist, take them out of the relation details you're trying to 
upload and try again.


3) Obviously now you'll have gaps in the relation - either fill them in 
manually if it's obvious, or figure out where the deleted ways that used 
to be in the relation were (by looking at undeleted nodes and the 
history of deleted nodes), and use that information to fill in gaps.


As to "what caused it", there were examples of "relation contents being 
lost in JOSM uploads" a while back, but I've not heard reports of recent 
problems**, though there were reports of API upload slowness a few days 
ago (much discussed elsewhere - and in fact the message at the top of 
#osm still says "Ongoing server issues, sysadmins are on the case").  
With any change in OSM it makes sense to double check the changes that 
you've made immediately after you've made them - did you really mean to 
make all changes in the resulting changeset?  Are all relations intact? etc.


Cheers,

Andy

PS: and FWIW I guessed that it was the Portland with the homelessness 
problem* and the nice river running through it, not the one with a crab 
fixation or the one that's scared of "underground mutton" :)


* when I last visited, which was a while ago.  They might have got their 
act together now.


** The DWG often gets cries for help when big relations disappear


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Re: [OSM-talk] Slipways connected to highways

[Andy Townsend]

On 16/05/2016 17:30, Clifford Snow wrote:
I've always added slipways to the last node of a service road. Now 
JOSM is complaining of leisure=slipway connected to a highway. It seem 
logical to me that the if you wanted to get routing to a boat launch 
that the node would be on the highway. How do others tag slipways?


I had a look at "how people tagged slipways" a week or so ago in answer 
to a question (either an IRC or a "help" one ) and most people do that too.


If the JOSM validator is wrong, raise a bug on JOSM trac with the JOSM 
validator. I've always found the developers there very helpful about 
fixing such issues.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] New user renaming highway=cycleway with NCN references

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/05/2016 23:13, David Woolley wrote:


They started their life being purely for private profit, got 
nationalised, then handed to a charity, but never got made public 
rights of way.


It depends where you are, I think.  Certainly the canal towpath nearest 
to me (Cromford Canal) is mostly public footpath. It's all been 
surveyed, and the designation has been added fairly conservatively, i.e. 
only where there's signage, and even on that basis most is still public 
footpath.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-gb-westmidlands] Incorrect 'suburb' in 'reverse nominatim' search

[Andy Townsend]

(top-posting because it probably does make sense to keep the whole of 
the previous email together at the end)


I suspect that this might be partly related to this enhancement request:

https://github.com/twain47/Nominatim/issues/231

The tl;dr of that is "nominatim works much better with areas rather than 
nodes".


and of course I suspect from what you're saying that 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/8096746 shouldn't be tagged "place=suburb".


Another thing to think about might be that even when you fix it in the 
data, I'm not sure that Mapquest's nominatim will update (they recently 
changed the technology they're using and tile layers such as 
https://otile2-s.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/osm/17/64777/42820.png don't seem 
to be being updated; not sure if their nominatim is still being updated 
too).


Answering the questions:

> 1. Is there any recognised use of 'suburb' in the UK (or West 
Midlands) for smaller towns ?


I think so - there's certainly been discussion in London over what is a 
"suburb" and what a "town".  I can't comment on the West Mids though - 
not really a local.



> 2. Why is this appearing in the description for places well away from 
the location ?


That's the issue above I believe.

> 3. I assume that it is OK just to delete the 'place=suburb' tag (I 
haven't done any OSM editing for some time &

> I'm a bit out of touch) ?

That "place=suburb" on a way looks wrong to me too - I'd just delete 
it.  That mapper has made relatively few edits, and the last was over 8 
years ago so I doubt they'll be contactable.


Cheers,

Andy



On 24/04/2016 11:26, Iain Simpson wrote:
I'm creating a database of all my geotagged photos and using a 
'reverse nominatim' search to describe the location (using Mapquest).


Some of the descriptions are peculiar in that they return a 'suburb' 
which is inaccurate.


Example

lat="52.8186007" lon="-2.1179502"
returns :

Marston Road
Salcombe Avenue
Stafford
Staffordshire
West Midlands
England
ST16 3BT
United Kingdom
gb

'Salcombe Avenue' is a minor residential street 2km to the SE.
(52.795,-2.0818)

Much of east Stafford is designated as part of this 'suburb'

On investigation the only 'suburb' ref is for way 8095766 changeset 
35344 created in 2007 and never changed.




Questions
1. Is there any recognised use of 'suburb' in the UK (or West 
Midlands) for smaller towns ?


2. Why is this appearing in the description for places well away from 
the location ?


3. I assume that it is OK just to delete the 'place=suburb' tag (I 
haven't done any OSM editing for some time & I'm a bit out of touch) ?


(I'm now going to try and find out how the Reverse Nominatim actually 
works.)






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Re: [Talk-GB] Remove tag "priority" from railways

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/04/2016 09:32, Brian Prangle wrote:

Hi Roland

If it's only one line affected it looks like it's the work of one 
user.  Have you tried contacting him/her? Otherwise I have no 
objections to your proposed mechanical edit


As I understand it, that one user was also working for Mentz.  I'm not 
even sure that "User B working for company C removes tag added in one 
changeset in error by user A working for company C" would count as a 
mechanical edit.


Other tags on that line look like they could do with reviewing - 
although I'm not a local, I suspect that the maximum speed signs on 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/150215887/history actually say "100 
mph" not "161".  Looking at the history, it appears that an unsuccessful 
attempt was made to revert that.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Revert request: #38048227 and #38048737

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/03/2016 14:16, Ed Catmur wrote:


Could someone with access to the revert scripts please rollback these
changesets?



Dee's just mentioned on IRC that she's reverted them - so all sorted now 
I think.


Cheers,
Andy


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Re: [Talk-us] Caliparks re-tagging paths?

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/03/2016 12:50, Frederik Ramm wrote:

Hi,

On 03/24/2016 11:26 AM, Marc Gemis wrote:

They tagged them as "social_path", according to their blog entry [1]

Thank you for the link. This is what I feared.

highway=social_path is certainly unacceptable - a self-made tag that
essentially deletes the data for all other consumers.

...

To make matters worse, it seems that the issue has been pointed out
almost half a year ago, and has not led to the issue being fixed:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34599982

It is obvious to me that all occurrences of highway=social_path need to
be replaced with whatever they were before. I'd normally say let's give
them some time to come up with a better idea but seeing that the problem
has been highlighted to them pretty much at the time they made the edits
5 months ago, and they haven't come up with a better idea, I'd say the
time is up now.



Agreed.  I don't always agree with Gerd's somewhat doctrinaire approach 
to tagging, but he's spot on here.


It's an excellent advertisement for why people locally should monitor 
local changes - that way they'll get picked up way before 5 months have 
elapsed.  That does happen in lots of places in the US (such as to the 
east in places in Nevada and Arizona) but obviously not here.


However, people creating "unofficial trails", and adding trails based on 
GPS data that in reality doesn't match any kind of path on the ground is 
a real problem, and there does need to be a way for people managing 
these areas to deal with it.  Thankfully, there are a few options:


1) The first (already mentioned, and which is actually already in the 
tagging of https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/284562871 ) is to use 
"access=no" if something really isn't legally accessible, but the 
physical path exists on the ground.  Similarly "bicycle=no" or 
"horse=no" might be needed on things that are only foot trails. Having 
something in the database with "access=no" is better than deleting it or 
setting a made-up highway tag because someone is less likely to come 
along later and "correct" the data.


2) Another thing to consider is "trail_visibility".  That might be 
really useful where something _almost_ exists (a legal trail that isn't 
well-maintained, say).  There are lots of other tags that might be 
useful here too - surface, sac_scale, tracktype, maybe even smoothness.  
Having lots of properly descriptive data in OSM means that people that 
are preparing maps for different purposes can create maps based on their 
target customers easily - do they want to highlight "official" trails?  
Trails for horseriders?  People on inline skates?  People that can't 
climb over stiles?  etc.


3) Consider adding "official" routes to local hiking, biking or 
horseriding relations so that they'll show up on e.g. 
http://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/#?map=11!37.9361!-122.5436 .


4) Make it clear what the source of a particular edit is.  This is 
mentioned just for completeness, as here 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34599982 makes it very clear 
what the source of the changes in that changeset were.  This one isn't 
particularly helpful to mapmakers but it is to future mappers - it 
allows them to understand perhaps why something is mapped as it is.


5) Finally, if an trail has been added in error (perhaps following one 
Strava user who got lost), and there's really nothing on the ground, it 
does make perfect sense to delete it.  The only caveat is if you're 
worried that someone might add it back based on e.g. old aerial imagery 
or an old GPS trace - what I've sometimes done in those situations is 
left the way without a highway tag in but with a note on it saying that 
it used to exist, but I've surveyed recently and it doesn't any more.  
That will hopefully prevent it being added back in error.


Best Regards,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

PS  Although it was a while ago, I have walked some of the trails here 
and elsewhere in Marin county.  It's a beautiful part of the world, 
really not very far from SF / Berkeley and far less busy than any of the 
nearby "tourist trap" destinations such as Muir Woods. It's highly 
recommended for a visit.



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Re: [Talk-GB] Incorrect spelling of "cemetery"

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/03/2016 11:26, Andy Townsend wrote:


I added a bunch of notes for misspelt cemeteries


For completeness, this list will include the notes that I added for this 
particular misspelling:


http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/notes/search?q=cemetary=0

(just for info in case anyone wasn't aware you could query the notes API 
like that)


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Incorrect spelling of "cemetery"

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/03/2016 11:14, Stuart Reynolds wrote:

Can I propose that someone who is more knowledgeable than me does a mechanical 
edit within the UK to correct “Cemetary” to “Cemetery”?



I added a bunch of notes for misspelt cemeteries a while back (mainly 
trying to provide an "in" for new local mappers) so if anyone does pick 
this up please check for local notes too - and also for other variations 
such as "cemetry" etc. :)


There are occasionally "valid odd spellings" ("Kilbourne Road", which 
goes to "Kilburn", comes to mind) but other than in made-up business 
names, I can't think of a valid misspelling of a regular English noun.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] [BOT] [RFC]: water surfaces

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/03/2016 12:22, Frank Villaro-Dixon wrote:

On 16-03-23 12:20:35, Andy Townsend, wrote 0.3K characters saying:

On 23/03/2016 12:07, Frank Villaro-Dixon wrote:
Again, that's not the goal if it. As said above, the role is NOT to 
change

tags, but to remove redundancies.


It doesn't matter.  All of the screed that I wrote yesterday applies 
to "redundant data" too - we need to understand how it got there, and 
what actually is wrong.


Yep,
as I said on another mail: 


Link please.  You've said lots of things, but much seemed very 
"handwavy" and not really understanding of the issues.


the majority comes from two 'bad' imports. 


Link please - exactly which ones, run by whom and when?

The rest is so scarce that it could be considered as noise (edits made 
before multipolygons existed, etc…).




... and again, where users have edited any of the data post import, we 
still need to understand how the current situation (imported data + 
modifications) got to be as it is.


Cheers,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] [BOT] [RFC]: water surfaces

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/03/2016 12:07, Frank Villaro-Dixon wrote:
Again, that's not the goal if it. As said above, the role is NOT to 
change

tags, but to remove redundancies.


It doesn't matter.  All of the screed that I wrote yesterday applies to 
"redundant data" too - we need to understand how it got there, and what 
actually is wrong.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] [BOT] [RFC]: water surfaces

[Andy Townsend]

;kow" correcting the spelling to "cow" does not make the description 
correct.


Finally, please remember - OSM is about geography, not computer 
science.  Your account has made relatively few edits and few if any of 
these seem to be based on actual survey.  I would strongly suggest that 
you take a little time out to actually do some real survey-based 
mapping, and in addition spend a bit of time understanding the human 
causes of the sorts of problems that you're aiming to detect, and 
helping those people understand the resulting problems in the data.  
Don't just say "you did X wrong" - explain to them politely how and 
offer to help them get it right next time.


Best Regards,

Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse)

* as well as being an "ordinary mapper", I'm a member of the Data 
Working Group and saw the discussions as these changes were made and 
reverted.



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Re: [OSM-talk] Bug in iD?

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/03/2016 22:44, Adrian wrote:

A user of the iD editor has added a new way along an existing way, with the two 
ways sharing the same nodes. In so doing, he has replaced all the nodes of the 
existing way with new nodes. The old nodes have been deleted. The new nodes are 
in exactly the same positions as the old nodes. If an old node had tags, the 
tags are reproduced on the new node. If an old node was a member of a relation, 
the new node replaces the old node in the relation, with the same position and 
role. These things would be difficult to do in JOSM.

See, for example
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/37338712 - 144 nodes deleted
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/280996572/history versions 1 and 2
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/155392067/history versions 1 and 2


It's not a problem that I've heard of with iD before.  It might be worth 
mentioning it to the iD developer over at 
https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues , but without some idea of 
how it was created I suspect it's going to be difficult for them to do 
anything.


What I'd suggest is to try talking to the mapper via a changeset 
discussion comment, politely explaining what the problem is and what you 
did to fix it, and asking how the data ended up as it did in the first 
place.


I'd add the comment to the discussion in both English and French (if you 
don't speak French machine-translated between those languages won't be 
perfect but will I'm sure be good enough; if you're worried that the 
results might be wrong machine-translate it back to English to 
double-check).  You may not get a reply, but at least you've tried to 
find out :)


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-us] mapRe: (Second attempt) Potential data source: Adirondack Park Freshwater Wetlands

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/03/2016 19:00, Nathan Mills wrote:

That said, without TIGER, OSM would have been useless (and still would be!) in 
large swaths of the US.


(stating the bleeding obvious) there are divided opinions on this - when 
exactly this topic has come up previously people have said both "I only 
felt able to start because there was something already there" and "I was 
only able to start because there was nothing there - the map was blank 
so I couldn't affect anyone else's work".


Obviously with the imports that have happened we are where we are (as 
Edward O Wilson said in a very different context we have "one planet, 
one experiment").  Some communities (Germany, GB to an extent) are 
mostly import-free and seem happy about it, some (Japan, The 
Netherlands) have lots of imported data and seem happy with that too.


What I am a bit surprised about is that in the Adirondacks there's 
relatively little track data in OSM.  Sure, New York State is big, but 
it's not _that_ big.  It's roughly twice the size of Scotland and 
(excluding New York City) about twice the population.  Parts of the 
Adirondacks are about as far from major centres of population as parts 
of the Cairngorms in Scotland are, and the Cairngorms seem to have many 
more hiking trails mapped*.


One thing to be said in favour of a wetlands import is that these are 
features that by definition it's difficult to map the entirety of from 
the ground (it's a problem I'm familar with as it's the same reason I'm 
only able to map the western part of the Derbyshire Peak District in 
late summer when it's been dry enough for long enough). However a worry 
is that because there's so little surveying done here no-one's going to 
be able to sense-check the data so there's a worry that it'll just "sit 
there" without any future modification. When I've done stream and river 
mapping in e.g. South Wales I've always found it useful to compare all 
of survey, government open data and imagery to see what things should be 
mapped as, where imagery (or GPS data) is offset and where government 
open data is inaccurate.  Do you have any way of sense-testing any of 
the data to be imported?  Maybe it might be useful to create e.g. a umap 
overlay of some of it that's immediately usable and you can start 
collecting feedback from hikers about what they'd categorise the 
features you're suggesting be imported.


Another question - if not OSM, what maps do hikers in the area use now?  
Something from the US Forest Service, or something else?  The reason I 
ask is that in GB the generally excellent "Ordnance Survey" mapping has 
been used by hikers' clubs as a reason not to need OSM. My limited 
experience with US outdoor maps suggests that they're not generally of 
the same quality.


Best Regards,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

* though fewer and with less detail than similar "destination" areas 
that are much closer to major centres of population.



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Re: [OSM-talk] Please check the work of 00crashtest

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/03/2016 15:39, Chethan H A wrote:


Just to add a few more observations about the user 00crashtest 
 editing behavior.




Thanks.  If you (or anyone else) thinks that there a might be problem 
with the edits that they're making right now*, can you ask them about 
that in changeset discussion comments?  That way comments are visible, 
and if a mapper doesn't reply to legitimate questions asked we can see 
that too (that was one of the things that I specifically mentiond in 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/903 ).


Best Regards,

Andy (SomeoneElse).

* or anyone else, actually
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Re: [OSM-talk] Please check the work of 00crashtest

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/03/2016 08:02, Colin Smale wrote:


Hi,

I would like to put out a worldwide alert for the work of 00crashtest 
who has been tweaking things since




See also https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/00crashtest/blocks , which I 
added on behalf of the Data Working Group yesterday and today.


We also had to intervene on a couple of previous occasions 
(reverting/redacting data and contact about invalid edits by 
messages/changeset discussions).


Best Regards,

Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse)
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Re: [Talk-GB] UK Quarterly Projects

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/03/2016 20:50, Rob Nickerson wrote:
My concern with rivers is that we don't have tools to measure progress 
- taginfo gives a count of nodes/ways/relations whereas we'd want 
total length of features per region (in miles/km).


I'd agree that tracking progress with that one would be tricky. I've 
mapped lots of rivers and streams from a combination of survey, imagery 
and OS OpenData, and while we've got something approaching the "length" 
of major rivers and streams, what we've got in some areas is largely 
ex-NPE, and in many cases some distance from the actual waterway on the 
ground.


GPS traces (unless there are lots) and Bing imagery can of course be 
misplaced, but OS OpenData is normally pretty good (actually better than 
the OS vector data that people have imported in a couple of areas) 
although it can be wrong when watercourses have changed, and the top end 
of small Welsh streams is often a bit "wishful thinking" in OSSV - where 
in reality there's just a boggy mess the OS sometimes has well-defined 
streams.


The other problem with the waterways we've got in OSM is that many are 
just either "stream" or "river" - with things that I'd normally map as 
drains and ditches just in as "stream".  Obviously changing a tag 
post-survey is pretty straightforward, but it's something else to bear 
in mind.


There is a real benefit of having OSSV streams, ditches and drains in 
though - it's often clear that a watercourse hasn't moved for years, and 
it can then be used to help align imagery and GPS traces.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)



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Re: [Talk-GB] Pubs as areas: should be map the property or the building?

[Andy Townsend]

On 11/03/2016 17:26, SK53 wrote:

A quick query on IRC and Andy (SomeoneElse) also maps pubs this way


True, but not with a zealous committment to it "absolutely being the 
best way".  I'm open to persuasion.


Part of the reason might be that I'm probably more likely to sit in the 
beer garden than most people (as evidenced by the mapping trip to 
Consall Forge where my suggestion that we sit outside was met with 
disbelieving "are you mad?" looks from all around).  Another is that 
I've tended to map the entire site of other businesses - see for example 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/241928696 , which is a large site 
surrounded by a fence - it's very clear what's part of the car 
dealership and what is not.


To take a deliberately problematic example 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/374419244 - how would you map them if 
you weren't going to map the whole area as the pub?  How would you say 
that http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/374419080 and 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/374419082 belong to the pub? That's 
"deliberately problematic" because clearly a section of road there isn't 
owned by the pub.


Maybe if people have got better suggestions they could show how they'd 
do it by editing at 
http://api06.dev.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/51.87134/-3.24177 (on the dev 
server, preferably after dragging the imagery to one side so that other 
people can also have a go)?


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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[Talk-GB] Sad News

[Andy Townsend]

News reached the OSM Weekly team recently that Bogus Zaba*, occasional 
poster to this list and regular contributor to www.weeklyosm.eu, has 
passed away after a short illness.  According to a note from his wife 
"the cause of OSM was very dear to his heart and he greatly enjoyed his 
virtual interactions with the OSM community".  We'll all miss him - 
whether it's wrangling the OSM Weekly into English, #OSMSchools updates 
in North Wales, or all his other contributions.  Best wishes to all who 
knew him and especially to those close to him.


- Andy

* http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bogzab

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Re: [Talk-GB] OSM with Wikidata: now covers UK and Ireland

[Andy Townsend]

On 11/03/2016 12:40, Andy Mabbett wrote:

Tickets have also been raised


(to save anyone else looking it up)

https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/2680

https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/11541

I don't see anything for P2.  I haven't looked for other editors.

Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] natural=coastline vs natural=water fix and refresh tiles

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/03/2016 10:55, Jérôme Seigneuret wrote:

...

It is possible to refresh the base water layer if it is the unique 
solution?




For info just in case you haven't seen it, this previous thread on the 
"dev" list explains why coastline updates stopped temporarily:


https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2016-February/thread.html#29068

Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Vandalism

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/02/2016 21:09, Mike Thompson wrote:



...
appear to be of very poor quality, or out right vandalism.

How should this be handled?



In this particular case, the changeset comments suggest it's a remote 
HOT project ("#hotosm-project-1401#MissingMaps #CHAI Source=WorldView-2, 
Digital Globe, NextView, 28 Sep 2013"), so I'd probably mention it on 
the #hot IRC channel.  They may be able to pin down where the edits were 
made from and work out who the instructors / supervisors of the "missing 
maps" session was (if it was one of their "group edit" sessions).  
Notwithstanding "Doodle the Dog", I would cut new mappers a bit of slack 
though - I'm sure my first 27 edits were a bit rubbish too.


On the more general point, especially where mappers don't seem to be 
"getting the hang of things" after extended periods editing, I'd just 
try and concentrate on what they need to do to get from where they are 
to where everyone would like them to be.  This normally means things 
like "zoom in a bit before editing" and "don't over-trace from aerial 
imagery if you're not sure what it is".


It is difficult though - we have a process for dealing with vandalism 
(which is thankfully rare) that works well*, but as a project we deal 
less well with edits that are well-meaning but "just a bit rubbish".  We 
are getting better though - 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions is full of people being 
polite, helpful and trying to make especially new users better mappers.


Cheers,

Andy


* as Chris said, email the data working group (which is actually 
d...@osmfoundation.org).
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Re: [OSM-talk] Vandalism

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/02/2016 20:55, Mike Thompson wrote:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/37315914

Should I just manually delete, or would it be better for someone to do 
a revert.


In a a case where someone has made a few valid edits and then something 
that obviously isn't, I'd personally start with something like "I think 
you may have left your keyboard unattended and your seven-year-old 
brother has been playing".  It's an (artificial) way of saying "this is 
not OK" without saying "you did a bad thing". I'd add this publically to 
the changeset discussion so everyone can see what's happening.  I'd then 
go on to explain why it's not OK to do things like this in OSM, and to 
point to places where it might be OK (like OpenGeoFiction, though I'm 
not sure they're big on pictures of animals).


I'd also check the previous edits, to make sure that there was nothing 
hidden in there that was also dodgy, and I'd revert the dodgy stuff.  It 
looks like a straight revert should work here (JOSM revert plugin*).


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse, a member of the DWG, but all of the above is doable 
without any DWG "special powers").


* a slight caveat applies at the moment - when I last looked, the latest 
version of JOSM's reverter plugin didn't work with the tested version of 
JOSM.  If prompted to update plugins by JOSM don't, and you should be OK.


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Re: [Talk-GB] New users and P2

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/02/2016 07:59, Marc Gemis wrote:

How do you detect that stuff is gone ? I'm thinking of benches,
waste-bins, telephones, etc. All those little things that are not or
hardly visible on aerial imagery ?
Do you constantly look at the screen of your smartphone or GPS to see
whether there is such a "small" thing mapped ?

The maps I use on both the phone and the Garmin try and make the sorts 
of small things that I'm interested in fairly obvious (on Garmin maps I 
use the Garmin Office "G" symbol for gates, for example, and the map I 
use on the phone goes up to z20 overzoomed to z21, so it's easy to see 
small details there too, and read the text on a small screen).


I still end up marking that (e.g.) "there is a bus stop here" and 
getting home and finding that it's already mapped, though :)


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] New users and P2

[Andy Townsend]

On 25/02/2016 17:04, Nick Whitelegg wrote:



One thought I've had for a long time (and have probably mentioned in 
the past) is a walkers' editor (app rather than web-based). To be 
used something like:



User goes for walk and records GPX trace, following this sort of pattern.


Each time the type of right of way changes, the user selects a high 
level type ("Public Footpath", "Public Bridleway" etc in the UK) 
together with optional surface tags.



User can also enter relevant POIs like stiles, gates etc when they are 
encountered.



When user returns home, track simplification algorithm used to make a 
way from the GPX trace and tags it with the tags equivalent to the ROW 
type.



User downloads data from OSM and algorithms are used to auto-join the 
user's new ways to existing ways where appropriate (or alternatively, 
the user does this manually)




That's not a million miles from the way that I map right now, albeit 
without the benefits of an "app" as such:


I record a GPS trace (on a Garmin) with numbered waypoints in it. The 
symbols for the Garmin waypoints "mean" something, so the "boat ramp" 
symbol means "public right of way".  If it's a bridleway I'll add "BR" 
to the comment on the Garmin.  If more text is needed (e.g. the name of 
a shop I've created a waypoint for) I'll create an line in an email to 
myself, the start of which is the Garmin waypoint number and the rest of 
which is the comment.


When I get home I'll split the individual traces out programmatically, 
merge the comments from the email into the GPX file (likewise) and 
upload to OSM.


I'll then edit in OSM using the uploaded trace directly (using P2 - JOSM 
can't process waypoints in a way that's useful to me).  Usually the 
combination of new GPS trace, previous GPS traces, Bing imagery, OS 
OpenData StreetView imagery and my recollection is enough to figure out 
where the path should go, but none of those (unless there are really 
_lots_ of old GPS traces) are good enough on their own.


On an introductory level, I can definitely see the benefits of something 
that can suggest to people "here are the other attributes of $thing that 
you've just added", like iD does, and like Kort does/used to do (see 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kort_Game ).


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Other Routes With Public Access

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/02/2016 18:34, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:


Routes marked by OS as "Other Route with Public Access" will most
probably be routes that appear on the local Highway Authority's "List
of Streets Maintainable at the Public Expense", but are not maintained
to a standard for regular motor traffic. They will generally be
Unclassified Highways (i.e. not an A, B or C road) and unless there is
a specific Traffic Regulation Order to the contrary, there will be
full vehicle, horse and pedestrian rights over them.


I suspect that depends what part of the England/Wales you're in. Whilst 
that's certainly true in some cases, near me (Derbyshire) it's more 
likely that they're just public tracks that have got "forgotten" about 
(not necessarily even on the "list of streets").


http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/189123170/history was a case in point - 
"everyone" assumed it was a bridleway but just lacked signage until some 
of the local horsey folks looked into it and got it properly designated, 
so it didn't get lost in 2026.


http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/38048629 is a slightly different 
example - it is signed as a "Right of Way" (that's exactly what the sign 
says).  I used that for the designation and guessed a bit about access 
tags - a cyclist may want to amend them there if they're aware of cycle 
access.  You changed the designation there and added a fixme presumably 
because you didn't like things being "untidy" - unfortunately the real 
world sometimes is :)


https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/230688755 is similar (but signed 
"Public Right of Way").  Based on previous experience in Derbyshire I'm 
guessing that both of these examples will end up as restricted byways at 
some point (i.e. not BOATs, and not Unclassified County Road or the 
local county's version of that).





As far as tagging is concerned, I would strongly advise against
designation="other routes with public access", designation=orpa and
similar. The "Other Route with Public Access" is an OS-specific term,
and even if that status hasn't been copied from OS, such tagging may
give the impression that it may have been -- which is not something we
want to give or accidentally encourage.


Absolutely agreed with that - unless it actually says ORPA on a sign the 
ground (which I'd be very surprised to see).


Cheers,

Andy


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

[Andy Townsend]

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

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


Sounds good to me.  No uses yet (obviously), but would allow a more sane 
"place" tagging for e.g. St David's, which isn't a really city in any 
normal sense.


Cheers,

Andy


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

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/02/2016 17:10, Philip Barnes wrote:

The original node, http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3216768/history


http://osm.mapki.com/history/node.php?id=3216768

Thanks.

So mostly city, but it did spend a couple of years as a town and a 
couple of shorter periods as village.


Cheers,

Andy




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

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/02/2016 13:15, Colin Smale wrote:


According to Wikipedia, ...



... I wouldn't assume that what wikipedia says has any particular 
relevance with respect to how something is mapped in OSM.  The language 
used in the English wikipedia is a mix of American and English (and 
other) usages, and how things are mapped in OSM doesn't always match 
"common [British] English usage".



it is country-dependent.



That, however, is entirely correct.  The Irish, for example have a very 
clear idea of what their "cities" are.  It's less clear on this side of 
the Irish Sea.


In the UK of course it is a matter of status to be called a City, and 
there is an unambiguous list of cities. 


That's the legal definition, not the OSM one.  Perhaps you are 
unfamiliar with the previous discussion, but this has been done to death 
before.  See these threads among others:


https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2014-February/thread.html#15867

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2014-April/thread.html#15982

and particularly this post:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2014-April/015983.html

which makes it clear why using the "legal city definition" might not 
make sense in OSM _across the board_.  It might in some places (it's 
essentially what the Irish do, I believe), but I'd argue it doesn't here 
because of e.g. St David's (see below) and Telford, which despite its 
size doesn't really feel like a city to me - although if someone more 
local says I'm wrong, I'll believe them.



This list can only be changed by the Crown through parliament. The 
smallest city is St Davids in Wales, with a population of 1841 (2011 
figure). Any attempt to retag it in OSM to place=village will probably 
be reverted within 0.1 nanoseconds 


I'd be interested to see the history of St David's.  The current node

http://osm.mapki.com/history/node.php?id=3712052604

was only created in August 2015; I wonder what it was before?


 but it is a point of civic pride for the inhabitants as the 
council becomes a Town Council ...




A number of places _call_ themselves a town council, because they can.  
It's pretty irrelevant to status in OSM.  See Jerry's post above (from 
that for example I'd call Bingham a town and Keyworth not because that's 
what they feel like to me).


What doesn't work with city/town/village classification is someone 
diving in and making lots of changes without explaining why; what does 
is a bit of discussion first so that we know that yes, there are still 
different opinions on this and that of the various options XYZ tagging 
has the least oponents.


Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] weeklyOSM 290

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/02/2016 00:08, Manfred A. Reiter wrote:


The correct links are:
English: http://www.weeklyosm.eu/archives/6864
Spanish: http://www.weeklyosm.eu/es/archives/6864




... well nearly :)

English: http://www.weeklyosm.eu/en/archives/6864
Spanish: http://www.weeklyosm.eu/es/archives/6864

Default (will use whatever language you have previously selected, or 
English if you haven't previously selected a language): 
http://www.weeklyosm.eu/archives/6864


Cheers,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] weeklyOSM 290

[Andy Townsend]

On 11/02/2016 20:43, Michał Brzozowski wrote:

Can you tell me what's up with this "This entry is available only in
Spanish"? I think people won't care if it got delayed a day later or
so. Also weird it's Spanish if you have to aggregate multiple mostly
English sources anyway.



What seems to have happened is that the text of the HTML link in the 
announce email was changed from Spanish to English, but the destination 
of the link itself was not.


The English version is available, but after clicking on the "Spanish" 
link you appear to need to reselect your desired language (by clicking 
on a flag) in the blog itself to switch.  Once you've done that, 
clicking on a "non-language specific link" shouldn't change the language.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Changeset #36985172 revert request - Deal area, Kent

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/02/2016 16:50, Gregory Williams wrote:

I did the original mapping of Deal, so I'll take a look later, when I can get 
to a PC.




Brilliant - thanks!



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Re: [Talk-GB] Changeset #36985172 revert request - Deal area, Kent

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/02/2016 15:49, Colin Smale wrote:


Actually, this user has done a lot more damage, in many other 
changesets over the past few weeks... Methinks a candidate for a block 
pending contact... Anyone with an interest in the Deal area is 
recommended to check the area...ent




I'd suggest that a friendly "hello and welcome and by the way something 
seems to have gone a bit wrong" message would be more helpful at this 
time - it's technically much easier to sort out the data than it is to 
get a keen mapper back who was scared off because they don't understand 
what they've done wrong.  Currently I can see only 2 comments in 
changeset discussions (saying essentially "you broke stuff and I fixed 
it"; not offering to help).


Obviously any help and assistance would be better coming from someone in 
the local area; 
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc?zoom=9=51.19266=1.54631=B00 
may be useful here to try and get someone local involved.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [OSM-talk] Applicability of wiki tagging and votes: may, should or must

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/01/2016 19:16, David Marchal wrote:

Hello, there.

On a GitHub issue 
(https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2027#issuecomment-174443685), 
I've been told that Wiki tagging votes are only advisory and that the 
community is only invited, neither required nor recommended, to follow 
them. As I understand this comment, the community MAY follow the Wiki 
tagging or votes, it does not SHOULD nor MUST follow them. I was under 
the impression that the community at least SHOULD apply the votes 
results, MUST looking unenforceable due to the free tagging principle. 
Am I wrong on that? What is the applicability of the Wiki content?




What are you going to do when a new mapper comes along and adds a tag 
that they "SHOULD NOT"?  They won't have read the wiki, because no-one* 
does.  Are you going to send the wiki police around and tell them to 
delete the offending tag with no other sudden movements? :-)


More seriously, any dataset that has no rules enforced at the API level 
must be assumed to have data in it that doesn't meet a specification 
that is written down somewhere, but not enforced. Someone wrote that 
wiki page long ago but didn't actually do anything else, presumably 
expecting the magic code and project management fairies to look after 
all the other changes that they expected to happen.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


* to a reasonable approximation across all mappers in the project, just 
like "no-one" reads mailing lists or forums.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Wilingness to contribute to OpenStreet

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/01/2016 11:17, K2K wrote:
> Hi
> I'm a second year student of Informatics Institute of Technology Sri 
Lanka, and I hereby express my willingness to contribute to any on-going 
developments of OpenStreet .
> My fields of expertise are version controlling, Object Oriented 
programming, design patterns,java web 
applications,javascript,angularjs, Object Relational 
Mapping(ORM),handling apache tomcat servers.

>

There's an introductory wiki page for all things development here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop

Also, there are various IRC channels (have a look at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC ); of those, #osm-dev is probably 
going to be most relevant to you.


... but what I'd actually do first is spend a bit of time mapping your 
local area.  That way you can get more of a familiarity with the project 
than just the software side, and you can see what various pieces there are.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/01/2016 17:19, Walter Nordmann wrote:

Hi,

any reason why there are only admin boundaries with admin_level=10 in 
Northern Ireland?


No counties (AL6), no cities (AL8), no Suburbs(AL9) - nothing



Ireland (the island) is normally handled as one entity in OSM, so tends 
to be covered by the talk-ie list and the #osm-ie IRC channel.  This 
makes some sort of sense even in the context of admin boundaries as as I 
understand it the underlying Townland etc. structure predates the 
establishment of "Northern Ireland" (the part of Ulster that is in the UK).


Someone from the Irish community has already answered your original 
question over here:


http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=573526#p573526

That links to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ireland/Boundaries

As has already been said, politically it's complicated... :

http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=573232#p573232

Cheers,

Andy

(not Irish, just an occasional tourist - any locals please feel free to 
correct any of the above)



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Re: [OSM-co] No puedo cargar la capa de imagenes de Bing aerial Imagery

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/01/2016 11:01, Luis Mejia wrote:


Recientemente instalé JOSM en un equipo con el S.O. xubuntu. Cuando 
hago click (adjunto pantallazos) para cargar la capa de imagenes 
satelitales de bing para aparece el error:

*input == null!*


ver también 
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/47652/i-got-input-null-when-i-used-bing-aerial-imagery-in-josm


Cheers,

Andy

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Re: [OSM-talk] Dealing with internet_access=wifi

[Andy Townsend]

On 06/01/2016 14:18, Jakob Mühldorfer wrote:

Hello,

according to taginfo "internet_access=wifi" is used almost 80 times 
globally.
Would you agree it is safe to automatically change all of these to 
"internet_access=wlan"?


As I understand it, "wifi" means "one of the 802.11 variants" whereas 
"wlan" means "any sort of or wireless local area network". However, I 
can't think of a single example in the last decade of something other 
than 802.11 used for _local_ wireless networking, so I'd say they were 
pretty much synonymous, and so no information would be lost.


Can anyone else think of an exception?

Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Not sure what to think

[Andy Townsend]

On 07/01/2016 11:00, Nicolás Alvarez wrote:


El 7 ene 2016, a las 07:47, Hans De Kryger > escribió:


So i just came across an edit of a user near me that listed the 
source of his edit as (Google Maps Street View) (1)


This is obviously wrong. Google Street View is not an allowed data source.



Indeed - although no so long ago a new user in the UK used 
"source=Google Street View" simply because they misunderstood the source 
field.


The street was half a mile up the road from them and they changed the 
name based on local knowledge.  They then thought they had to 
"demonstrate" to other mappers that what they knew was correct (a bit 
like wikipedia's references) and so added a Google Street View link.  I 
explained that "source=local_knowledge" is perfectly OK, and all was well.


Obviously what needed to happen here was for someone to contact the 
mapper, which Hans has already done, so thanks for that.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned buildings

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2016 23:14, John Doe wrote:


I tagged some abandoned building in my native city with 
abandoned:building=yes (as wiki) and the building name but now i can't 
search these ones with nominatim (no results) and none of these 
appears on mapnik.

Is prefix abandoned before building=yes really correct?




With regard to the tagging, a link to the actual area (and maybe a photo 
of the actual building) would help, and (in case you're not aware) 
there's a "tagging" mailing list 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/ that discusses such 
things.  Obviously I realise you're actually asking about searching not 
tagging; just mentioning in case it's useful...


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)



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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned buildings

[Andy Townsend]

On 06/01/2016 13:48, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
shop=vacant seems a bit of a hack, "vacant" is not a shop type. 


That's debateable, I'd say it was.  "disused:shop=blah" (or "yes") would 
work too and is used, though not nearly as many as shop=vacant (9k vs 2k 
for http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=disused%3Ashop ).


You would better use a dedicated tag for this, e.g. vacant_shop=yes 


Now you're just making it up as you're going along* :)  No uses in OSM, 
though


http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=vacant_shop%3Dyes

finds 8 shop:vacant=yes.

Cheers,

Andy

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvoXJCrBhQ

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Re: [OSM-talk] Tile Server manual build 15.10 troubleshooting

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2016 10:45, Lester Caine wrote:
MANY of the tools listed on the switch2osm site are no longer actively 
supported by their originators, 


I can't speak for everything on there, but I do know that I tested (and 
tweaked slightly) the "manual 14.04 instructions" about a month ago 
because I suspected that some of the changes to the OSM stack might 
require a change (though it turned out it was mainly the way that the 
Natural Earth data was packaged that did).  I suspect that the Leaflet 
stuff should be still OK too (though very unrepresentative of what is 
possible with Leaflet now).


so we do need an overhaul of the whole process, but a reliable base 
framework does not exist and the diversity between linux distributions 
is making that more and more difficult. Personally Ubuntu is not 
practical for me as all my production servers are SUSE based, 


Ubuntu may not be an option for you but it doesn't mean that "a reliable 
base framework does not exist".  It'd be like saying that a recipe for 
pizza doesn't work because you can't digest cheese**...


... And apache is perhaps not the best choice for production web 
servers anyway ...


Using something other than Apache would require using something other 
than mod_tile (perhaps see *), but that would be a different set of 
instructions, which I'm not aware of existing currently.


Cheers,

Andy


* 
http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/70881/tile-server-with-dynamic-mapnik-rendering-caching-and-pre-emptive-rendering


** I once saw a friend of mine ordering a "pizza sans fromage" in a 
restaurant in France.  The result was not pretty.



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Re: [OSM-talk] switch2osm documentation upgrade

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/01/2016 15:51, Daniel Koć wrote:

...

So my second question is: what do you think about upgrading part of 
the site (with installation instructions) the way I just proposed - or 
maybe some other way?




(as is clear from Richard's message above) I'm not the maintainer of the 
"switch2osm" site, but I'd be happy to have a go at testing a 
"dockerised" version of the osm2pgsql setup on an empty virtual server 
at some point.  Maybe add a page in your wiki area or similar*?  It'd 
need to be fairly basic (my only knowledge of Docker is that I've heard 
of it and can probably spell it).


Cheers,
Andy



* I have some notes at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SomeoneElse - and I'm sure other 
people do too.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Tile Server on Ubuntu 15.10

[Andy Townsend]

  The "switch2osm manual 14.04 lts" instructions should work ok (on 14.04, obviously). I ran through them on a clean server in December and fixed a couple of problems (missing "sudo"s, changed how to extract one of the files as the content has changed, and added a couple of "make sure you replace 'username' with your username").If I remember correctly, around the time that 15.10 came out a few people tried it and had errors, so I'd expect any pre-existing instructions to want tweaking to work there.From: Skyler FSent: Sunday, 3 January 2016 05:43To: talk@openstreetmap.orgSubject: [OSM-talk] Tile Server on Ubuntu 15.10Hi, I am a linux newbie and I really want to get a tile server working on my Ubuntu computer. I have been trying for weeks but nothing is working. Trying from this link:  http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Installing-your-own-tileserver-on-Ubuntu-td5172494.htmlEverything works until I get to install libapache2-mod-tile. Even though I have added the correct repository, I still get this error:E: Unable to locate package libapache2-mod-tileI also tried many of the other tutorials on the web including manually building but I just can't get anything to work whatsoever. I always get stuck on a "package not found". On a previous install of Ubuntu 14, I was able to get the slippymap to show, but only pink tiles were visible.From this tutorial: https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-14-04/I am stuck in the python bash herepython
>>> import mapnik
>>>ImportError: /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mapnik/_mapnik.x86_64-linux-gnu.so: undefined symbol: _ZN6mapnik6filter19parse_image_filtersERKNSt7__cxx1112basic_stringIcSt11char_traitsIcESaIcEEERSt6vectorINS_4util7variantIJNS0_4blurENS0_4grayENS0_14agg_stack_blurENS0_6embossENS0_7sharpenENS0_11edge_detectENS0_5sobelENS0_10x_gradientENS0_10y_gradientENS0_6invertENS0_10scale_hslaENS0_14colorize_alphaENS0_14color_to_alphaSaISP_EECan someone lead me in the right direction for getting a tile server up and running? I need it for Amateur radio emergency communications with APRS using the XASTIR program.I need a lot of tiles, and don't want to stress the server by downloading them, so it would be great if I could get a tile server running.Thanks,Skyler 


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[talk-au] Northern NSW again

[Andy Townsend]

Hi,

Just for info, I've suggested that a relatively new mapper in Northern 
NSW might want to contact other mappers here in a comment on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/35480438 
(https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/332351666 is clearly unjoined, but 
there may be other issues).


It's a similar area and the same mapper as in the thread 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-au/2015-January/010499.html 
.  Maybe there's been a major road project there, but there do seem to 
be quite a lot of deletions in that changeset - it might need a local to 
double-check that things haven't been deleted by mistake.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [talk-au] Inappropriate tagged areas

[Andy Townsend]

On 16/12/2015 21:58, Warin wrote:

On 17/12/2015 8:35 AM, Ben Kelley wrote:


Use is not consistent.


Situation normal.


(If you harvest the natural trees, which one is it?)



forestry.


See the Forest page on the wiki,





The http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Forest page describes 4 different 
approaches, and unfortunately because of the different approaches 
someone consuming the data will struggle beyond "here be trees" for any 
of them.  As I understand it that's why the approach of the OSM 
"Standard Style" is what it is (though there's no reason for mappers to 
try and capture more detail though).


Cheers,

Andy



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Re: [OSM-talk] Fixing Starbucks Wikipedia Tags (Was Nominatim Weakness)

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/12/2015 17:36, Clifford Snow wrote:
... Is there someone on the list that is familiar with China, Japan, 
Spain, Poland and Thailand that could fix those?


For info I did comment (in English) on one of the changesets that added 
the tag in Japan:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/32108345

The mapper concerned is fairly prolific and is still editing, but 
there's no reason to expect them to be able to understand a message in 
English.  I didn't include a machine translation because I've not been 
impressed with Japanese -> English machine translation, and I suspect 
that the other way would be just as much of a problem.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [Talk-GB] route relations type=road

[Andy Townsend]

On 07/12/2015 11:35, Colin Smale wrote:


Where two roads are multiplexed, it looks like one of the refs is the 
primary and is shown without brackets, and the other is shown within 
brackets, such as the A22 near Uckfield which multiplexes with the 
A26. It is shown as "Eastbourne A22 / Lewes (A26)". Is this done 100% 
consistently?





If it helps, here's an Overpass query to search for refs with a 
semicolon in:


http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/d8v

An example mapped like that near me is 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/33276389#map=19/52.92697/-1.47667 , and 
I'm pretty sure that's not signed A601 (nothing is).  It may be signed 
A52, or perhaps nothing at all.  If you believe OS OpenData StreetView, 
it's the A601.  Other alleged examples locally are roundabouts which 
have signed exits but aren't obviously part of one road or another.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

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Re: [OSM-talk] A message to our friends at HOT, Peace Corps etc. about Changeset Comments

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/11/2015 10:16, Ben Abelshausen wrote:


You can go the tasking manager and see exactly what the goal of the 
mapping activity was, who is the admin that created the task and who 
validates, what mappers contributed and so on.


Can you please explain where any of that is documented within 
OpenStreetMap?  As an example, I recently came across this:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/381043577

It's a building that is a closed way, but only just.  How can I offer to 
help that mapper do what they are trying to do better?  All the 
changeset comment says is "#MissingMaps #hotosm-project-1254 Lubumbashi, 
Congo (DRC) #100mapathons #OSMGeoWeek " - to me the only useful 
information in there is "Lubumbashi, Congo (DRC)", which I already know 
since that is exactly where this edit is.


More importantly, how do I contact the person who told this new mapper 
that "#MissingMaps #hotosm-project-1254 Lubumbashi, Congo (DRC) 
#100mapathons #OSMGeoWeek" was a suitable changeset comment, to explain 
to them what we use changeset comments for and what makes a good one?  
If I can talk to them, I can probably help them help other new users 
too, and not just with stuff about changeset comments - as an OSM mapper 
think of all the "how to interpret imagery" latent knowledge that you 
have simply by being able to compare a place you visited with the 
imagery of that place.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-us] 0,0 Cleanup

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/11/2015 06:42, Elliott Plack wrote:


There's a lot of sandbox type data at 0°, 0° on OSM. Any special 
method to clean that up? I noticed it on the Mapbox Foursquare map, 
because creating lists defaults the map to 0,0 at z10. Any way we can 
polish that area up?




There's not a huge amount at "null island" in OSM at the moment. There's 
a buoy that genuinely exists (and even has its own web page!):


http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3815077900

It's a bit of a stretch to call that a "locality", perhaps, but it does 
actually exist.  Lots of other mistaken imports show up there (open the 
area up in Potlatch 1, hit "undelete" and wait a bit and you'll see the 
effect), but they tend to be spotted and deleted fairly quickly.  
Learnosm have a "virtual sandbox" a bit north of there too, but nothing 
should get uploaded there any more because they fixed their test data to 
make it not uploadable in JOSM.


If you're seeing lots of data in Foursquare maybe it's not an OSM issue 
but perhaps Foursquare data overlaid over an OSM map?


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [OSM-talk] Undiscussed (?) edits removing lesser-used highway=* tags

[Andy Townsend]

On 10/11/2015 12:15, GerdP wrote:
Now what is meant with oneway=yes;no (or no;yes) ? 


(at the risk of stating the obvious) that's likely to be a merged way, 
where a new user didn't spot a difference in a key that they weren't 
looking at before merging two ways.  Just look at the changeset that 
introduced the key, look at the extra nodes added to the way in that 
changeset, and look at what ways were deleted in that changeset that 
those nodes were previously part of.


It's a great opportunity to have "the conversation"* with newish users 
about OSM's data model, and how as well as what they can see to the left 
in iD there's a whole universe of "all tags" and "relations" hiding below.


However, it makes no sense to force people to have to understand this 
stuff before adding e.g. a POI in iD or a simple mobile editor.  We want 
local users with "local area" knowledge and not non-local users with 
"GIS tool" knowledge.


Is that an error or did someone try to express the same as others do 
with oneway=reversible or oneway=alternate or oneway=alternating ? Do 
we have to allow users to invent more oneway tags like oneway=2, 
oneway="Marsh Lane" without telling him that this is likely to be an 
error ? 


Bluntly, I'd say "yes".  Better that someone adds something that is 
"wrong" that they can correct later (or another mapper can) than they 
don't map at all.  It really doesn't matter that there's some data in 
OSM that "makes no sense" that data consumers have to ignore because:



There will always be "invalid" data in any large dataset, and data 
consumers always need to detect and discard that.



It's 2015 - are we still writing stuff that assumes valid data? "xkcd 
327" was years ago (and it was an old joke then).



Will this be frustrating for any mapper? I doubt that.


We need to think a little beyond people who know about "nodes", "ways" 
and "relations" here.  Anything that says "you can't do that because" 
had better be really clear about what the problem is (and not use words 
like "tag" or refer to OSM's wiki) otherwise this _will_ be frustrating, 
and will stop people contributing.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

* which you've been doing a lot with "odd key values", so thanks again 
for that.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Unrepentant Vandal

[Andy Townsend]

On 07/11/2015 10:36, Andrew Errington wrote:

Hi all,

Here is a link to a random point on a light rail system:
http://osm.org/go/546Jvddtd--?m=

Soon after it opened I travelled on it from end to end, collecting gps
data and photos of all the station signs.  There are two railway
lines, one in each direction, and I mapped them both carefully.

Recently I discovered that someone had helpfully deleted one of the
lines and tagged the other with tracks=2.  I really don't think this
is acceptable.

I found the changeset and asked the user who did it why they destroyed
my work.  They replied:
"The OSM wiki implies that a single way with tracks=2 is the preferred
way of showing rail lines with two tracks. This was the method used
most in S. Korea, I was attempting to create consistency."

This is not actually true (and I double-checked the wiki, just in
case).  I pointed this out but the user did not acknowledge this was a
mistake, or offer an apology.


I'd definitely suggest that changeset discussions are the best place to 
have this sort of conversation.  That way, it's visible, so that other 
people can be aware of the problem (and also discussions in public 
tended to be conducted with more politeness).  I'm sure that they 
generally believed that they were doing the right thing, but didn't 
think through the implications of what they were doing on data 
consumers* and other mappers.


From looking at their edit history, which appears to be wide-ranging, I 
suspect that they're a non-surveying mapper who may not actually have 
been to all of the places that they've edited.




So, my question is, am I being unreasonable, or am I right to think
this is unacceptable?  How can I guard against this?


There are a bunch of "who's been editing where" tools - one that's 
especially worth mentioning is 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance#WhoDidIt which 
looks for changes in an area and can provide an RSS feed.  I also use 
ITO's OSM Mapper http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ITO_World#OSM_Mapper 
.  That works a few days in arrears, but is very useful at helping you 
to visualise what has changed.



I have no
problem with people improving the map by improving the data, but I am
starting to see a lot of deletions, incorrect tagging, and generally
shoddy work appearing, especially in Korea where I have done a lot of
original work.


There might be a couple of issues here.  One possibility is people using 
"QA tools" to identify "problems" and "fixing" them.  We've had a lot of 
issues in GB with this - people changing the tagging on oneway roads in 
carparks incorrectly when the _real_ problem was that not all of the 
roads had been mapped is one example that springs to mind.  Where a QA 
tool identifies a problem, it should really be a prompt to carry out a 
local survey rather than apply a "remote guess" of what might be wrong.  
If I spot a problem like that I'd usually add to the changeset 
discussion of the original mapper, or add an OSM note or a fixme, to try 
and get it looked at properly.  Sometimes not of this works and there 
really are no local mappers, and the problem is bad enough that a remote 
fix really is needed (perhaps a newbie has broken a major road by 
mistake), but it's surely best that edits are done by people who either 
actually are there, or at least have been there.  Previous OSM tags + 
imagery don't always give a full sense of what something actually is.


Related to this is people "correcting" tags that are "wrong".  Often a 
"wrong" tag is a really useful indicator that an inexperienced mapper 
has been active, there are other things besides the "wrong" tag that 
might been checking, and the QA report is a useful indicator of this.  
Fixing the "wrong" tag removes the QA report but leaves the other data 
that doesn't match the real world in OSM.


The other possibility to people causing problems using QA tools is 
actually good news - lots of new mappers!  People new to OSM will get 
things wrong, whichever editor they're using, and any attempt to get 
them to trudge through the mire that is the current "beginners' guide" 
in the wiki will cause many to stop mapping before they've even 
started.**.  New mappers need help and understanding rather than "you've 
done it wrong!".  Often asking "what are you trying to map - how can I 
help?" is a good way of getting to the root of the problem.  I'd also 
give new mappers a week or more to "find their feet" - I suspect that 
the feeling of being watched would put some off too.



Do I have to set up some kind of watch on all of my
contributions and check them if someone edits them?


I did actually used to do this - I postprocess OSM data before using 
mkgmap to create a Garmin map, and one of the things that that did was 
to enable a list of "things edited since I last edited them" to be 
produced.  It's not something I've looked at of late though, since most 
edits are perfectly valid and there are plenty of other ways 

[Talk-co] Problematic edits in Cúcuta

[Andy Townsend]

(apologies for the out-of-thread reply - only just subscribed to the list)

There are actually a few new mappers in the area (though only one in the 
past week)


http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm?c=Colombia#6/8.081/-74.158

It looks like they are trying to create bus routes, but don't know how 
to do it.  Maybe it's a school or college project?  If you look at the 
POIs in town, many were added exactly 12 months ago :)


The process of restoring the data is underway (see 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=11/7.8583/-72.5122 ) but I 
wonder if it would perhaps make sense to try and contact the other 
mappers to explain the problem - and if possible perhaps to contact the 
person at the school or college running the course as well?


Best Regards,

Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse)


(en español mediante traducción automática)

(disculpas por la respuesta fuera de hilo - recién suscritos a la lista)

En realidad, hay a pocos nuevos creadores de mapas de la zona (aunque 
sólo uno en la última semana)


http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm?c=Colombia#6/8.081/-74.158

Parece que están tratando de crear rutas de autobús, pero no saben cómo 
hacerlo. Tal vez es un proyecto de la escuela o colegio? Si nos fijamos 
en los puntos de interés en la ciudad, muchos se añadieron hace 
exactamente 12 meses :)


El proceso de restauración de los datos está en marcha (ver 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=11/7.8583/-72.5122) pero me 
pregunto si sería tal vez tenga sentido para tratar de ponerse en 
contacto con los otros creadores de mapas para explicar el problema - y 
si es posible tal vez para ponerse en contacto con la persona en la 
escuela o colegio corriendo el curso también?


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Re: [OSM-talk] Undiscussed (?) edits removing lesser-used highway=* tags

[Andy Townsend]

On 06/11/2015 20:42, Andrew Guertin wrote:


An in-between example: on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/38089492/history, 
highway=stepping_stones was replaced with highway=path. While this 
helps consumers use the data, it loses information that should have 
been kept (perhaps with surface=* or something similar).


Hmm - that does look like somewhere where data has been lost. Previously 
there were quite a lot of changeset discussion comments from GerdP 
asking about odd values:


http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions (scroll down a bit)

I'd have expected that that change would have merited a request to the 
original mapper too - surprised it didn't get one.




Does anyone know if this was discussed anywhere? I've contacted GerdP 
with a changeset comment at 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/35109232 but there hasn't 
(yet) been much time for a response. 


Given how quiet OSM traffic normally goes at weekends, I'd certainly 
wait until next week before assuming that you won't get a reply.




P.S.: We should have something like a clean...@osm.org mailing list so 
that these kinds of things have a place to be discussed, because there 
are a lot of positives to be had...




I'm not especially convinced of that - we've got the "tagging" list 
already for "how should X be tagged", and it's important that 
discussions about edits which at the very least border on the mechanical 
should be discussed by the wider community though. Sometimes "tagging" 
can turn into a bit of an echo chamber; it can appear to be full of 
people who tell other people how to map rather than do it themselves*, 
and I'd expect that "cleanups" would too. The "discuss" section of 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct 
covers this already.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

* 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2015-October/027053.html 
guilty as charged :)






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

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/11/2015 12:54, James Tait wrote:

... I stumbled upon a changeset[1] that highlighted questions
I already had about the tagging of roads in Mickleover.


I'd tend to agree that Mickleover's "over-tertiarised" (and it's not the 
only place).  It might be something to raise at the next East Mids pub 
meetup (which will probably be in Derby in mid-November). Something that 
I've done elsewhere where people have gone a bit mad with tertiaries is 
to also map the road width; that way renderers can choose to use that if 
they want (3).



...
If I were to follow the guidelines in that changeset,


(which was [0] below)


Uttoxeter Road
(B5020) would be a tertiary road, and Etwall Road would be
unclassified.  I don't know which roads are maintained by the Highways
Agency, but my gut says that the A38 would be a trunk road, and the A516
might be primary.


No - the "rules" for trunk, primary and secondary are as spelt out by 
Tom Hughes, and have worked well.  There are minor exceptions where the 
official classification hasn't caught up (e.g. something that's 
"officially" an A road that you can't drive down most of the time) but 
let's try not to make things more complicated than they need to be.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


JT


[0] http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/26773899
[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/25091307

- -- 
- ---+

James Tait, BSc|xmpp:jayte...@wyrddreams.org
Programmer and Free Software advocate  |Tel: +44 (0)870 490 2407
- ---+

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Version: GnuPG v2

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(3) 
https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L232



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[Talk-us] Maxweight in the USA

[Andy Townsend]

Just a heads up...

There's a bit of a discussion going on at the moment as to whether it 
makes sense to store SI units (or actually a derivative - metric tons) 
in maxweight tags.  I noticed a few changes (initially to other values 
in the UK), and commented on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/35009662 , and the person making 
a changes (who's the author of one of the popular routers using OSM 
data) wrote a diary entry here: 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/karussell/diary/36220 .


The argument in favour of the change is that storing an SI derivative 
makes the data easier to consume; my counter-arguments are that (a) it 
makes it harder for mappers to verify values and (b) anything consuming 
data shouldn't assume the data is valid anyway (for "Bobby Tables" 
reasons if for no other).


Whilst doing this I noticed that a bunch of other "x tons" weight limits 
had had values changed a while back (see for example 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/32719427/history ).  That's now been 
changed to "maxweight=4.5359237" which is at least not heavier than the 
actual posted restriction.  However there are still some other integer 
values without units which implies metric tons (see for example 
http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/cqw ).  It may be that Pittsburgh has woken 
up one morning and decided to adopt SI units ahead of the rest of the 
country, but I doubt it.  Logically I'd expect a router encountering 
"maxweight=10" in the USA might want to interpret it as "10 US tons" 
rather than 10,000 kg, but based on the above I suspect that at least 
one router isn't going to do that.


The relevant wiki page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:maxweight 
does say "as of September 2014 only metric units of weight (metric 
tonnes or kilograms) are supported for this tag".  I'm unaware of any 
discussion prior to the 17 September 2014 change (not that that means 
that it didn't happen, just that I'm unaware of it).


I'm not from the US, and I'm not sure what the right answer is (if as a 
community you're happy entering maxweight=4.5359237 it'd certainly make 
everyone's lives easier), so I'm posting this here and then retiring 
back across the Atlantic :)


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [OSM-talk] Improved new Icon set for Open Street map

[Andy Townsend]

On 02/11/2015 16:53, Nasir Khan wrote:

...

One thing i faced every time and asked from many that, is there a way 
to improve the icon set to make the map more attractive.


(apologies if I'm stating the obvious here, but...)

"OpenStreetMap" isn't just "the standard map that you see at 
openstreetmap.org".  There are five different tile layers available from 
the layer switcher there, designed for different purposes. Elsewhere, 
there are other styles.  For example,


https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93=project+extension%3Amml=Code=searchresults

currently finds > 700, and no doubt there are lots of others elsewhere.  
Depending on what data you're showing, I'd expect that a different map 
style would make sense.  Just today I was using a commercial application 
that showed locations using "MQ Open" tiles (they wanted a road-atlassy 
thing I guess); something that wanted to show location in a mountainous 
area I'd would expect show contours or hillshading.  OpenStreetMap's 
"standard" style has as one of its goals feedback to mappers, so it 
includes more detail (for example of different sorts of shops) than I'd 
expect most general purpose maps to want to show.


It's very possible (and not terribly difficult) to come up with a map 
style that highlights the data that you want - making it then look nice 
is the tricky bit, as to me would be figuring out how to host and serve 
the data to allcomers (though as Wikimedia I suspect you've solved that 
last bit).


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [Talk-GB] Restoring a usable map service!

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/10/2015 02:09, Lester Caine wrote:

OK ... what do we need to do to get a working UK map again?


Simply put, if you're relying on a remote resource staying the same over 
time (perhaps you're selling services based on that resource and don't 
want the customer re-education cost of a future change) then you need to 
have control over that resource.  That's true if you're paying for it 
(you'd make sure that your contract with the provider and SLA covers 
you) and even more so if you're not.  The colour change was widely 
trailled months before it happened, and there was a list thread about 
the best way to retain the existing UK style back in August***.


The good news is that setting up a server of your own is pretty 
straightforward these days*.  If you follow the recipe at 
https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-14-04/ 
you will get a working tile server**.  If you stray from the path 
outlined there and, say, try a different server OS with different 
packages then success won't be guaranteed, but if you just want a 
working map server it's difficult to know why you'd want to start elsewhere.


OSMBright (which those switch2osm notes guide you through), OSM Carto as 
it is now and OSM Carto as of any preferred data in the last 18 months 
(and probably more) will work on such as tile server (I currently have 
them installed on a small VM at home).  I'm sure that the French style 
would work there too.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


*Quite a few people pitch up on IRC et al saying "I've installed a tile 
server, now what?" so I think the tile server part of the OSM ecosystem 
is definitely one of the better documented bits.


** I ran through it "soup to nuts" on a newly-installed small 14.04 VM 
the other day.  The only caveats I found were that it doesn't make it 
explicitly clear that you need to do a couple of things as root, the 
.pbf file that you choose to use will probably be different to a full 
planet, and the osm2pgsql command will vary based on local resources 
such as memory.  However, all of the error messages you'll get back 
(even from osm2pgsql) will make it clear what you need to do.


*** 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2015-August/017659.html



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[Talk-GB] Cerne Abbas Giant - how best to tag it?

[Andy Townsend]

Currently the Cerne Abbas Giant is suffering from an extreme bit of 
"tagging for the renderer" - for example 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/320313087 is apparently a "driveway".


Is there a more usual way to tag the constituent parts of this sort of 
thing?  A couple of the white horses are "tourism=attraction"* - e.g. 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/116991392 and 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2390028/ .


I'm asking here rather than trying to make something up because I'm not 
local, and if anyone adopts it I suspect that they'll need to keep an 
eye on changes to it to stop people "helpfully" tagging it for the 
standard renderer as something it isn't.


Cheers,

Andy

* chosen I suspect in part because OSM Carto did used to render 
"tourism=attraction" areas and multipolygons as other than a label, but 
this was changed - see 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1063 and 
references from it.


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Re: [Talk-GB] User dataone: "splitting into 2 way to tag restriction "

[Andy Townsend]

For info - I've added a comment to the discussion on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34799530 (a recent changeset by 
Zain Ahmad Hashmi) and also one to 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34777018 (dataOne).


It'd certainly be interesting to see what correlation there is between 
the changes made and roadsigns in the real world.  Lots of the edits 
(press "Load More" a few times on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Zain Ahmad Hashmi/history) are where 
OSM has lots of local mappers - London, Oxford, Cotswolds - it'd be nice 
to see a review based on actual signage of these edits.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [Talk-GB] PIE Mapping (Was: User dataone: "splitting into 2 way to tag restriction ")

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/10/2015 00:08, Rob Nickerson wrote:


>Phil (trigpoint) wrote:
>
>In http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34325458 comments Zain Ahmad
>Hashmi mentions PIE mapping, which is is for commercial truck routing.
>

Hi all,

PIE mapping were at the London OSM mobile themed dev hack weekend at 
Geovation's office a few months ago. In fact they were an sponsor. I 
remember speaking with one of them about OSM. We talked about how to 
map turn restrictions and I gave some suggestions over how to engage 
with the community. I'm not 100% sure as the details are sketchy but I 
think they may have legit survey data. Harry Wood, Matt or Andy Allan 
may be able to put you in contact with the employee who sorted the 
sponsorship should you need to contact them but lets focus on helping 
them not bombarding them with "PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU ARE DOING OR 
STOP NOW" type questions (apologies for caps).


Indeed - the first thing that I said to one of their mappers was a 
"hello and welcome" on https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34040216 
- just trying to find out what their goal was so that (in this case) 
they didn't think they'd added a restriction of some sort to a road in 
OSM when they hadn't.


Whether they're paid mappers for a commercial company or not makes no 
difference to me (other than that OSM data being used commercially is 
great - it's there to be used after all!), but it doesn't excuse them 
from having to work together with the rest of the OSM community in the 
same way that we all do, replying to comments on changesets, fixing 
obvious errors they've introduced (such as roads with 
semicolon-separated names) etc.  Introducing themselves here on talk-gb 
would be a good start.


In this case they seem to be doing a substantial "manual import" using 
data the source of which isn't yet known.  It might be survey-based or 
otherwise be entirely appropriately licensed, but we don't know that yet 
(despite having asked several times).


Cheers,

Andy



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Re: [Talk-GB] name=Driveway & more "splitting into 2 way to tag restriction"

[Andy Townsend]

On 07/10/2015 00:05, Dave F. wrote:

Hi

Two parts to this post.

1) A user https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mustafa_geo has made some 
country wide amendments where service roads are being named 'Driveway' 
They all appear to be related to parcel delivery stations. It seems 
very unlikely they all have the same dubious 'name'. You may want to 
check in your area.




I did try and offer to help on 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34448963 (one near me) but 
haven't had any acknowledgement on there.


Recent edits such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34798952 
seem to be propagating the same error (creating a node that duplicates 
an existing way). I've added a comment explaining the problem on this 
changeset too.


2) Looking back through his history he's made similar name edits of 
"Splitting into 2 way to tag restriction" as to my previous post. 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34037732


I'm assuming, based on that and the comment on 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34325458 , that it's the same 
company.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Tagging street areas controlled by rising bollard barriers

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/10/2015 18:29, Michael Maggs wrote:


How do I go about tagging rising bollard barriers that are used to 
control vehicular access to an area of streets? There have been some 
new rising bollards installed in Bath recently which block most motor 
vehicles between the hours of 10am and 6pm, but which allow access at 
other times.   Both the bollards themselves, and more importantly the 
street areas that are controlled by them, need tagging in some 
suitable way.  Selecting either cars=yes or cars=no seems wrong.


(to slightly tweak Rob's answer elsewhere)

I'd go with "motor_vehicle:conditional" rather than 
"access:motor_vehicle:conditional".  Taginfo has 3000 for the latter and 
12 for the former:


http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=access%3Amotor_vehicle%3Aconditional

http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=motor_vehicle%3Aconditional

Cheers,

Andy


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[Talk-us] Growing OSM (was OpenStreetMap US elections: October 12 townhall with candidates)

[Andy Townsend]

On 14/10/2015 16:21, Steve Coast wrote:

(snipped)

What we’ve tried so far:

* SOTM getting bigger every year
* We tried paid ambassadors at CloudMade, running mapping parties with some 
success but the timeframe was very long to see people turn in to editors.
* We've tried making the web editor nicer multiple times (potlatch, mapzen, iD 
etc) and that doesn’t lead to meaningful growth in editors.
* Mapping parties appear to have some traction, but take a long time
* Getting schools involved appears to work briefly, then everyone goes home or 
to the next class
* Competitions to map areas (google also tried this for mapmaker)


From a UK perspective, what _definitely_ increases the short-term 
signup rate is any sort of national press coverage.  Re social meetups, 
I don't know whether any of other the local groups can report 
differently, but in the East Midlands of England although we get a few 
OSM-curious people coming along I don't think we've seen any new "heavy 
mappers" coming into the project that way; people just stumble across 
the project somehow and sometimes stick around.


The rough analysis I did ages ago (in Italy I think) didn't suggest that 
local "welcome messages" had an effect on retention (over the couple of 
months that I looked at the data).  It didn't look at mapping quality 
though; maybe there was an effect there.


I suspect that "trying to be nice to newbies" has an effect (though I've 
no idea how you'd measure that independently of other variables) and I 
also suspect that "making the web editor nicer" has an effect too, but 
that can't really be measured independently either.


So I'd suggest just "get lots of press where the OpenStreetMap name is 
used" and "be really helpful to the new mappers who show up, no matter 
how many unwritten rules they break with their first edits"*.


Cheers,

Andy

* It's worth mentioning that most "comments to new mappers" _are_ really 
polite and helpful (see http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions ).


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Re: [Talk-GB] User dataone: "splitting into 2 way to tag restriction "

[Andy Townsend]

(let's try that again with an actual message)

I did have a bit of a conversation on some of the earliest of their changesets, 
but didn't really get a sense of why the roads were being split. You could 
argue that splitting a piece out "prior to surveying what the height 
restriction actually is" is ok, but i'd be worried that the "surveying" bit 
wouldn't actually happen. In one of the changeset discussions it was suggested 
to me that I could verify a height restriction by looking at GSV; naturally I 
mentioned that this would be an inappropriate source for OSM (and to be fair, 
when I last looked a few days ago I was unable to see any GSV-sourced heights.
 ‎
I'm away for a few days dodging raindrops in Wales so won't be able to deal 
with it directly, but as ever the best way of bringing it to the DWG's 
attention is the usual ‎d...@osmfoundation.org email address.

Cheers,
Andy (SomeoneElse)
‎

  Original Message  
From: Philip Barnes
Sent: Monday, 5 October 2015 12:37
Cc: talk-gb@openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] User dataone: "splitting into 2 way to tag restriction "

Message either SomeoneElse or zool in #talk-gb.

Phil (trigpoint)

On Mon Oct 5 12:31:09 2015 GMT+0100, Dave F. wrote:
> Dataone is at it again. He's not replied to my post.
> 
> As each edit is an individual changeset & therefore laborious to revert, 
> I think a temporary stop should be placed on him (both?) just until 
> their attentions are grabbed. Is there anyone on this forum able to it 
> or should I post in the talk forum?
> 
> Dave F.
> 
> On 05/10/2015 11:21, Tom Hukins wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 10:19:47AM +0100, David Fisher wrote:
> >> Just had the same thing happen near me (Croydon) but by a different
> >> user (Zain Ahmad Hashmi, e.g.
> >> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34443141).
> > I've left a comment on this changeset. Hopefully this will help us
> > understand what's going on.
> >
> > Tom
> >
> > ___
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> 
> 
> ---
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
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Re: [talk-au] Melbourne Airport (mapped as both node and way)

[Andy Townsend]

On 01/10/2015 05:11, Warin wrote:

-1

Here am I taking nodes and making them areas - thus removing the node.

I think mkgmap needs some improvement to get relevant areas into POI 
... if that is a problem.


I'd put money on a mkgmap 'expert' tell us that it is not a mkgmap 
problem as it can be done.




I'm no mkgmap expert and even I manage to do it, using the 
"--add-pois-to-areas" flag. :)


That might be enough, although I also added a bunch of catch-alls to the 
"polygons" file in case people haven't mapped these as buildings:


# Catch-alls added in case people have omitted "building="
amenity=* [0x13 resolution 24]
leisure=* [0x13 resolution 24]
man_made=* [0x13 resolution 24]
natural=* [0x13 resolution 24]
railway=* [0x13 resolution 24]
shop=* [0x13 resolution 24]
sport=* [0x13 resolution 24]
tourism=* [0x13 resolution 24]

(obviously pick what you want in there).  Likewise you may need to add 
stuff to "points" if you have something not normally mapped as a node 
that's going to appear as a "point" to mkgmap via "--add-pois-to-areas".


Cheers,

Andy


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[Talk-us] Sock-puppet accounts (was "More strangeness in Baltimore")

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/09/2015 22:59, Elliott Plack wrote:
Hans: I saw they had been blocked but it expired: 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Police%20Department%20Of%20New%20York%20City%20Of%20New%20York/blocks


On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 1:40 PM Hans De Kryger 
<hans.dekryge...@gmail.com <mailto:hans.dekryge...@gmail.com>> wrote:


Did his new account get blocked too?

On Sep 15, 2015 12:22 PM, "Elliott Plack" <elliott.pl...@gmail.com
<mailto:elliott.pl...@gmail.com>> wrote:

This changeset has the exact same extent of the earlier ones
from the BmoreHomicide user. Seems like they made a new
account. Watch that one for any additional changesets.



(earlier contents snipped)

It's always a balance between blocking for a short time (after which a 
vandal might return with the same account) and blocking a long time into 
the future (which might just cause them to create a sock-puppet account 
that would be more difficult to detect). Ultimately we just have to 
ensure that we don't get bored dealing with problems until after the 
vandal gets bored creating them.


I mention this now because someone yesterday tried to recreate the World 
Trade Center as it was pre-2001:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34271693

I reverted and blocked the user again after seeing comments on the 
changeset discussions via http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions 
.  The user in this case had already been creating fantasy / historical 
maps in the UK and elsewhere and (after trying to get them via other 
means to not do it) had been blocked previously.


It's possible that this particular user might return with a different 
user name, and detecting that they have done so will need mappers local 
to or familiar with an area to spot the problem and flag it up.


The majority of new users aren't vandals, and most "problematic 
changesets" aren't caused by vandals either, but by enthusiastic new 
users for whom something goes wrong in the editor, or well-meaning more 
experienced users trying to "search/replace the world" who don't really 
understand the nuances of the tags they're changing (actually changing 
meaning rather than just mispellings etc.), which means that any 
comments in the first instance need to "assume good faith", even when 
something went badly wrong with the edit.


One of the easiest ways to keep track of new users is probably

http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm.php?c=United%20States#2/43.6/-110.0

(zoom in on a map to see new users in the last 7 days in an area) and 
for new edits in an area an RSS feed from one of the 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance#WhoDidIt instances.


Best Regards,

Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [OSM-talk] recent changes in rendering the map make it worse

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/09/2015 11:53, joost schouppe wrote:
... I don't know how we could expect OSM-carto to reflect all our 
needs. Apart from being a tool for mappers (i.e. showing as much as 
possible), it also wants to be pretty and useful for non-mappers. 
Trying to make everyone happy might make everyone unhappy in the end.


I completely agree with that. 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md 
sums up what it's trying to do, and to be fair that does say that the 
three main aims "pull in different directions".  For comparison I 
recently had a look at the OSM map style as it was in April 2014, and 
personally I'm not convinced that progress has been made in two of the 
three areas mentioned as goals (specfically detail's less visible, the 
design _is_ clearer (as in more coherent) and it's not any easier to 
customise).




If you want to make people who need paths happy, just send them to 
waymarkedtrails.org  or to opentopomap.org 
 . And if that doesn't make you happy, use 
overpass-turbo (e.g. http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/bCm) to highlight the 
features you need. And show them in a pretty map with umap (see 
http://www.mappa-mercia.org/2014/09/creating-an-always-up-to-date-map.html 
for instructions).
(Yes, the performance of umap/overpass combo isn't great, that could 
really use some improvement. And yes, it would be nice if osm.org 
 was more of a portal for all of us special needs people)


To add to that, creating "a personal map style" of a small area using 
https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-14-04/ 
whilst not for everyone, isn't that difficult these days, and it doesn't 
require huge server resources.  There are also canned options such as 
Mapbox of course if you want someone to host it for you.  It'd be nice 
if there was a way to see the tiles on osm.org without resorting to 
cludges such as 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SomeoneElse/Your_tiles_from_osm.org 
though.


Cheers

Andy (SomeoneElse)

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[Talk-GB] "historical edits" in Bristol (was "Re: Birmingham New Street station re-opens")

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/09/2015 22:36, Neil Matthews wrote:

I want to flag up a couple of "historical edits" in Bristol:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34126960
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34147883

it might be wise to check other edits from this user.

Many thanks,
Neil (ndm)

P.S. Unfortunately, the "whodidit" service isn't operating 100% -- 
this makes it harder to pick up problems.




http://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/812

Sigh.

On behalf of the Data Working Group I've already been in touch with the 
user several times (as have other mappers), to no avail it seems.  There 
was a previous block about 9 days ago and I reverted a bunch of edits 
flagged as fantasy ones then.  I'd hoped that subsequent edits were more 
likely to be valid as they were mostly confined to Weston.


I've just now reverted the two Bristol changesets mentioned in 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2015-September/017789.html 
.


At least one of the locals in Weston is I believe keeping an eye on 
things.  There are also a couple of edits in Manchester ( 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34135755 and immediately prior) 
which might need looking at.  Previous to that there have been attempts 
to "resurrect" dead theme parks such as The American Adventure near 
Heanor and Camelot near Charnock Richard (see note 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/433582 for one outstanding query 
there), and also edits to theme parks overseas (mostly since tidied by 
local mappers).


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)



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Re: [Talk-GB] useless survey?

[Andy Townsend]

First of all - thank you for "properly mapping" this bit of the country.

Wales tends to be a bit of a poor relation when it comes to 
on-the-ground mapping (like some of the other bits of the island also 
far from population centres).  For those who aren't familiar with it, 
often the mapping away from the major tourist areas such as Snowdon, Pen 
Y Fan etc. is a mix ex-NPE waterways, footpaths from GPS traces and 
other bits filled in from Bing and the recollections of holidays long 
past.  For someone to come along and survey it properly and bring things 
up to date will be a huge improvement to the quality of the map there.


It's a shame that you've met resistance doing this.  With regard to the 
two sides to the argument, I'd tend to believe the person that writes 
changeset comments over the person that doesn't :)


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

PS:  If you come back at any stage may I suggest mid-Wales?  Quite a lot 
there is still as it came from NPE: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/bta



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[Talk-us] More strangeness in Baltimore

[Andy Townsend]

Can any Baltimore locals veryify or otherwise the changes in 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/34024769 ?


It looks a similar style to the recent problematical ones there and at 
the very least that one seems to break some bus route relations.


Cheers,

Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [Talk-us] User HomocideBaltimore adding fake / fictional / old data all over Baltimore

[Andy Townsend]

On 11/09/2015 05:42, Richard Welty wrote:

try contacting him through the OSM messaging system and ask him what his
intent is.
explain (politely) that OSM is for things that exist now, and there are
alternate ways of
handling historical data (e.g. OHM).



Generally I'd suggest using changeset discussion comments in the first 
instance - they are public, and it allows more people to take part in 
the discussion at once.


Cheers,

Andy

(a couple of discussion comments have been added already I believe)


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Re: [Talk-GB] BBC4 tonight 9 pm - A Very British Map: the Ordnance Survey Story

[Andy Townsend]

On 10/09/2015 04:16, mick wrote:

On Wed, 09 Sep 2015 18:59:59 +0100
Philip Barnes  wrote:


Spotted this on the Rambler-Net list.

In case you hadn't already spotted this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06b36q3

See also:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2015/09/watch-os-on-bbc4-in-a-very
-british-map-the-ordnance-survey-story/

Phil (trigpoint)

bugger

I can't get BBC4 on my tv :{



http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06b36q3

should work for a month or so.

Cheers,

Andy



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[OSM-talk] Railways yet again (was "THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject")

[Andy Townsend]

May I respectfully suggest that before anyone sends yet another reply to 
this thread that they ask "Has this point of view been put forward 
already?".  Everyone is well aware that there is disagreement (and 
sometimes even disagreement over what to disagree over), but people are 
rarely won over from one point of view to another by simply repeating 
the same arguments over and over again.


If there's something new to add I, as an OSM list-reading punter*, would 
be glad to read it (perhaps on the tagging list if that's what it's 
about) but frankly it's all getting a bit repetitive.


Cheers,

Andy

* written entirely in the personal capacity of someone who is fed up of 
reading the same mailing list posts by several people repeating 
different sides of the same argument ad nauseam.


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Re: [Talk-GB] Rail maxspeeds being converted

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/09/15 09:18, Dave F. wrote:

Hi

A user has been converting the maxspeed tag of railway line from mph 
to kph:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/278060675/history#map=17/51.42363/-2.72120 



It appears to be a straight conversion ie 100mph = 161. Which seems a 
bit silly. I'm sure the limit wouldn't be exactly 161.


I thought that mph was valid as long as it was labelled as such.

Are the signs next to the rails still in mph?



All the ones I've seen in Notts and Derbys still are.  I can't comment 
on further afield, although I do vaguely remember seeing something on 
the news a couple of months ago saying that the train management system 
on the ECML was being changed to something* that would register in-cab 
speeds in km/h.



His edits appear to be country wide.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/308866549/history

I've sent him a message asking why he's doing it.





FWIW I did ask a previous mph -> km/h changer the same question:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/30977485

Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


* which might be 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Management_System or 
something else - not sure.



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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Andy Townsend]

On 27/08/2015 10:02, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
... the OP hasn't given a list of guilty deletions so it's hard to 
judge how justified each deletion was.


Back in 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-August/073669.html I 
had a look at what caused the current flurry of discussion.   Part of 
the line in question was deleted by a mapper new to OSM; it was their 
second and last OSM edit.  I find it hard to believe that this new OSM 
mapper had a thing about deleting abandoned railways. Likely they just 
didn't understand something, were confused, and it somehow got deleted.


If just 10% of the effort that's been put into this discussion had been 
put into welcoming new mappers and explaining things to them* we'd be in 
a far better place as a project.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

* yes, this also means explaining why amenity=Bank is not a good tag 
rather than just fixing it.  Of course if they don't reply it does 
make sense to fix obvious typos - but explain the problem in a human 
message (not just you did it wrong) first.


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Re: [Talk-GB] 10th Anniversary Rutland Mapping Party?

[Andy Townsend]

  I've done rural bits and pieces in Rutland on and off over the years* and would certainly be up for more mapping there. The tricky bit I suspect might be finding a mutually acceptable weekend before the clocks go back, though even afterwards some sort of combination of "rural stuff during the day, town/village pois at night" may work.Cheers,Andy* I had a look at Rutland in ITO's OSM Mapper and, apart from a couple of locals it's very much a case of "the usual suspects"!

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Re: [OSM-talk] The Proposed Great Colour Shift

[Andy Townsend]

On 20/08/2015 02:16, Jóhannes Birgir Jensson wrote:


According to the github discussion there is an overwhelming 
consensus [2] on moving from current rainbow colour scheme for roads 
to a red-yellow only scheme.


I don't think you'll ever get an overwhelming consensus from such a 
large committee. :)


I rendered z0-z11 locally to see what it looks like and was pleasantly 
surprised - it's much less orange than some of the previous iterations 
that there have been discussions and blog posts about, and better for 
it.  I'm not quite sure that z7 is quite there (see the difference at 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35586#comment31695 
), and obviously any change takes getting used to, but it's not markedly 
worse than what went before and does resolve the invisible trunk road 
problem, which really is a problem.


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


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Re: [OSM-talk] The Proposed Great Colour Shift

[Andy Townsend]

On 20/08/2015 16:25, Ben Laenen wrote:
Thing is that UK won't ever be happy with another colour scheme and 
the rest of the world won't ever be happy with a UK scheme.


... and then in the UK we can start arguing about and English style vs 
a Scottish one and then a Yorkshire one vs Surrey :)


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Paths and Footways

[Andy Townsend]

On 18/08/2015 07:43, Matthijs Melissen wrote:


On 18 Aug 2015 03:56, Andy Townsend ajt1...@gmail.com 
mailto:ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:
 There's no interest to do this in the OSM standard style because 
it is abundantly clear that any new attempts at changes that make 
rural navigation possible* in OSM-carto would be rejected based on the 
ones that already have been over the last year.


This is not true, a different rendering based on hiking routes or 
public rights of way is something we could certainly consider.




As I said previously, changes such as this aren't really relevant if 
you can't see the paths themselves at all at a zoom level you'd use for 
planning a route over them..


However, now you're saying ... a different rendering   In the 
immediately previous message you said:


So far there is little interest to do this on the OSM default render 
style which seems odd to me given how much fuss there has been on this 
list to recent changes to the footway/path style (over the last year)!


It is that was what I was replying to, explaining why there's little 
interest to do that on the OSM default render style.  Maybe that was 
just a trolling question that I shouldn't have replied to late at night 
:)  Back in 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2015-August/017680.html the 
first question I asked was Are we talking about OSM-Carto here?, 
because it was unclear what you were suggesting.



Please stop antagonizing the default rendering as if it is on a 
mission to make your life as hard as possible, it comes across very 
childish and is a counterproductive way of discussing.



I don't believe that I've ever made _that_ claim :)

 Although it hasn't been explicitly stated, the direction of travel 
of that style is clear - some people want a map style that's useful 
for navigation, others want something that looks nice; based on 
comments on the issues raised it's clear that the people maintaining 
the style are in the latter group rather than the former.


Not true either - our main criterium for the recent changes is 
readability, and that definitely includes being able to use the map 
for navigation.


Frankly, that's not what I'm reading from e.g. 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/747#issuecomment-50188728 
.


As I've said before, one map style can't do everything and a decision to 
do X will necessarily be at the expense of Y, although I'd rather it had 
been more explicitly stated rather more explicitly. Although 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md 
does say There are multiple primary purposes of the map style, which 
pull in different directions, it doesn't say what trade-offs are being 
made and why - but maybe that's not the point of that document.


However, if you're now asking about a _different_ rendering, maybe you 
need to explain a bit more about what you're proposing?  Are you 
suggesting an international style available from the osm.org layer 
switcher, something maintained by a GB group on a separate server, or 
something else?  Would there be changes to the osm.org website to allow 
tiles from it (or another style of the user's choice, such as the 
openstreetmap.de one) to be available as a layer?


Cheers,

Andy



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Re: [Talk-GB] Paths and Footways

[Andy Townsend]

On 18/08/2015 09:48, Matthijs Melissen wrote:

On 18 August 2015 at 10:20, Andy Townsend ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:

In the
immediately previous message you said:

So far there is little interest to do this on the OSM default render style
which seems odd to me given how much fuss there has been on this list to
recent changes to the footway/path style (over the last year)!

I didn't write that (or anything you address in the rest of your
message) - I am not Rob Nickerson.


My apologies - it was Rob that I was asking what are you suggesting, 
not you.  You did however say 'our main criterium for the recent changes 
is readability, and that definitely includes being able to use the map 
for navigation.'.


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-GB] Paths and Footways

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/08/2015 23:25, Rob Nickerson wrote:



So far there is little interest to do this on the OSM default render 
style which seems odd to me given how much fuss there has been on this 
list to recent changes to the footway/path style (over the last year)!


There's no interest to do this in the OSM standard style because it is 
abundantly clear that any new attempts at changes that make rural 
navigation possible* in OSM-carto would be rejected based on the ones 
that already have been over the last year.  Although it hasn't been 
explicitly stated, the direction of travel of that style is clear - some 
people want a map style that's useful for navigation, others want 
something that looks nice; based on comments on the issues raised it's 
clear that the people maintaining the style are in the latter group 
rather than the former.  This isn't a solvable problem; one map style 
can't be useful for different purposes** with conflicting requirements, 
render _everything_ in order to be a useful part of the feedback loop 
and also be a nice looking map.  The current discussion about 
rendering surface on footpaths in OSM-carto is essentially a waste of 
time if you can't see the paths themselves at all at a zoom level you'd 
use for planning a route over them.


I suspect that a number of people have just stopped using the standard 
style altogether and are now using something else instead, whether 
that's OSM's cycle map style (a number of help and IRC questions get 
asked where people just assume that everybody uses that), OsmAnd 
internal styles, cycle.travel, or whatever.  I just stick my own tiles 
in in place of the MapQuest Open ones and use those.


Cheers,

Andy


* Seriously - if you wanted a nice walk in the Peak District, could you 
really use http://a.tile.openstreetmap.org/14/8118/5322.png to plan 
where you're going?  It's simply not fit for purpose when compared to 
http://a.tile.thunderforest.com/cycle/14/8118/5322.png , 
http://tile.cycle.travel/topoclassical/14/8118/5322.png or 
http://i.imgur.com/hvCHgFW.png .


** In addition to OSM-carto we've got 2 good but different options for 
cycling, various bus options including Transport on the mail osm.org 
layer switcher, for now at least we've got Mapquest open for car route 
planning, and I'd argue that my style is a good option for 
England-and-Wales footpaths (though you'd need to render your own tiles 
to use it).  What we're missing (of the major transport types) is 
something targeted at horseriders, and probably most importantly for 
mappers a complete but ugly style to replace the long-departed OsmaRender.




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Re: [Talk-GB] Paths and Footways

[Andy Townsend]

On 17/08/2015 21:43, Rob Nickerson wrote:
...  In regards to designation=*, are we now the only country that 
makes a distinction between paths you have a legal right to walk on 
and any other path that might exist because people happen to walk over 
the land thus leaving a desire line path?


Hi Rob,

Apologies if I've grossly misunderstood here - I suspect I may have - 
but things in England and Wales* that aren't 
designation=public_footpath*** etc. aren't necessarily desire 
lines.  There are a couple of other examples of foot=yes:


1) Across Countryside and Rights of Way Act access land.  I map paths 
across here as foot=yes because you do have a right of way - it's more 
than just permissive access (the landowner can't just say no - the CROW 
act gives them a number of reasons to temporarily close the land (e.g. 
grouse shooting I believe) but it's still =yes.


2) Historic undocumented access rights, often in cities but also 
elsewhere.  This could be something that everyone uses as a footpath, 
but has never officially been listed as one.


That's not counting permissive access, such as a multi-use trail created 
by a council, or a route over which access has been negotiated with a 
landowner by e.g. Sustrans, or the desire lines you mention across land 
where it's clear access is permitted by the landowner (possibly 
indicated by a sign).


I'm not aware of another country with a similar scheme to England and 
Wales (Scotland** for example has a more Scandinavian-style system of an 
assumption of a right of access, with caveats).  This suggests to me 
that rendering designation doesn't really make a lot of sense outside of 
England and Wales.


Cheers,

Andy

* Unfortunately I don't have any first-hand knowledge about the 
situation in Northern Ireland, but this is the GB list so I presume 
we're just talking about GB anyway.


** See e.g. http://www.outdooraccess-scotland.com/The-Act-and-the-Code/Legal

*** I've only talked about foot and footpath here for simplicity.

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[OSM-talk] Trees (was: OpenStreetMap Carto v2.33.0 release)

[Andy Townsend]

‎There's lots of discussion on Openstreetmap-Carto's github about this, which 
explains what's possible with the standard style right now, but if you're not 
subject to those restrictions you can certainly render leaf_type now - I've 
been doing it for my own use for some time (I wrote a diary entry about it a 
bit back) and it certainly makes areas of trees make more sense on the map.

Cheers,
Andy (SomeoneElse)


  Original Message  
From: tony wroblewski
Sent: Saturday, 15 August 2015 12:48
To: Paul Norman
Cc: talk@openstreetmap.org; dev Openstreetmap
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Carto v2.33.0 release

The woodland change looks much better, but would it not be possible to
render broadleaved, needleleaved and mixed using different tree
images, as seen on other maps? ‎

(snip)


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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[Andy Townsend]

On 11/08/2015 06:09, Russ Nelson wrote:

Okay, this has to stop. ...


Here's what seems to have happened.  Via P1 undelete you can see:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/11896835/history

Someone's spotted that the TIGER way is iffy (via P1 it's possible to 
see that it clearly was), and they're starting to draw it in more 
accurately (in their next changeset, in fact).  Unfortunately that then 
got deleted here by someone (who's now the subject of a long-term block):


http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/131281945/history

It got re-added a year ago:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/24647010

and deleted 4 months ago:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/259134943/history

by someone who's made exactly 2 edits to OSM, so I suspect this example 
is a cockup rather than a conspiracy.  As everyone else has already 
said, a changeset discussion comment saying something appears to have 
gone wrong; can I help would surely be the way forward here?


Cheers,

Andy


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Re: [Talk-us] BurningMan 2015

[Andy Townsend]

‎(apologies if this has already been mentioned but) perhaps this is something 
that makes sense for OpenHistoricalMap?

Ask a help question along the lines of how do I add time-dependant data to 
OHM, perhaps clarifying that the ways for previous years are in OSM but are 
deleted, and I'm sure someone will pop up and explain how.

Cheers, 
Andy


  Original Message  
From: Frederik Ramm
Sent: Thursday, 30 July 2015 10:46
To: talk-us@openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] BurningMan 2015

Hi,

On 07/29/2015 07:07 PM, David Chiles wrote:
 In the past Black Rock City was included in OpenStreetMap. Is the
 generated layout something that could be added?

OpenStreetMap focuses on things that are on the ground, not things that
were or will be on the ground.

There are some exception to this, for example there are tags to map
things that are planned but don't yet exist; this is not encouraged
for widespread use but might be applicable to Burning Man.

For maximum flexibility independent of OSM's old-fashioned adherence to
physical realities, I'd suggest to set up your own instance of an OSM
server together with editor(s) and rendering tool chain, which would
enable you and anyone interested to make the most detailed Burning Man
map ever, and even retain the full data base from every year, offer
side-by-side rendering and whatnot.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33

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Re: [OSM-talk] New road style for the Default map style - the second version. And thanks for rural test locations!

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/07/2015 19:49, Lester Caine wrote:

On 23/07/15 19:34, Andy Townsend wrote:

It's actually farmland rather than farm, and therefore tagged
correctly.  If it was me I'd use a lightly colour for farmland so that
farmyards (also tagged correctly in that area) stand out a bit more
(obligatory Blue Peter** link http://imgur.com/L6l2g3z * to compare
with http://b.tile.openstreetmap.org/12/2028/1348.png ).

The legend says 'Farm', and 'Farmyard' is a distinct land use from
farmland, so they should be distinguishable, and while we don't 'tag for
the renderer' 


Oh, _that_ legend:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1268




You can argue whether or not populating most of England with
landuse=farmland is a good use of anyone's time, but you can't argue
that it's wrong :)

What is needed is proper tagging of fields rather than adding random
areas of 'farmland' where the land outside of that is also farmland
anyway. So yes I would argue that some of these areas are wrong when
they have some arbitrary boundary through the middle of farmland.



FWIW I personally tend to only add landuse when I've surveyed and added 
all the gates, stiles, gaps, hedges, walls, fences etc. - but it's an 
entirely personal choice.


Cheers,

Andy


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