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

[Richard Fairhurst]

David Marchal wrote:
> What is the applicability of the Wiki content?

Three long-standing principles of OSM:

   1. consensus is important
   2. precedent is important
   3. patches beat "should"

The first means that you can't order the community to do things based on ten
people voting on the wiki. taginfo, major clients, and agreement on these
lists are also valid indicators of consensus, often more so.

The second means that you can't order the community to do things which break
long-established OSM good practice, even if you've voted it through on the
wiki.

The third means that you can't simply get ten votes on the wiki and require
editor or stylesheet authors to change their code or maps. A vote on the
wiki does not mean that these people have to spend hours coding something
for your new relation scheme, nor does it even mean they are obliged to
accept a patch from you if they disagree with it.

So the applicability of the wiki content is to the wiki. But it is one of
several indicators of consensus in the wider project, and it's consensus
that drives the project and tagging in particular.

Richard



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Re: [OSRM-talk] OSRM-talk Digest, Vol 37, Issue 8

[Richard Fairhurst]

Artur Bialecki wrote:

I would like to use OSRM with bus routes. Basically I only want to
extract and route against nodes and ways that belong to relation
route=bus|tram|trolleybus


OSRM doesn't currently support route relations. You can either 'paint' 
ways that are members of relations with a special tag in a 
pre-processing step (how to do this is left as an exercise to the reader 
:) but look at Osmosis), or use Emil Tin's very old fork of OSRM with 
relation support.


Richard

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] new wiki page ODbL compatibility of common licenses

[Richard Fairhurst]

dieterdreist wrote:
> Following a thread on the OSMF-talk list, I am kindly asking you to 
> review and improve a new wiki page that tries to give an overview 
> about the compatibility of common licenses with the ODbL and CT:

This is really good. Thanks, Martin.

cheers
Richard



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[OSM-talk] Proposal to close newbies@ list

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

Usage of the newb...@openstreetmap.org mailing list, set up in 2007 to 
provide help to new users, has dwindled to almost nothing. There were no 
posts in September, October, November, or December.


Generally we now have better places to provide help to new users - 
principally http://help.openstreetmap.org/ , but also national forums 
and mailing lists. There is also more OSM documentation than was once 
the case.


So that new users don't seek help in a little-used backwater, but 
instead go to a place where help is more likely to be found, I'm 
proposing (as list admin) to close the list to subscriptions and to 
posting. The list archives would be retained.


If you have a compelling reason why the list should not be closed, 
please speak up now. You'll need to volunteer to be the admin though. ;)


cheers
Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] switch2osm documentation upgrade (was: Re: Tile Server manual build 15.10 troubleshooting)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Daniel Koć wrote:
> BTW: who is the maintainer of switch2osm site? I was not able to 
> find any contact informations there.

I am, though a few other people also have admin/editing rights.

Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] switch2osm documentation upgrade

[Richard Fairhurst]

Daniel Koć wrote:
> Oh, "Find Out More" page has some contact informations, but I 
> guess "Contact" or "About us" would be easier to find. 

The page recommends that you use IRC in the first instance, and also
suggests help.osm.org for asking questions. I really do not want to get into
providing unpaid tileserver support by email, which providing an contact
address would lead to.

> 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?

If you'd like to provide a regularly-maintained Docker image and some
installation instructions, I'd be very happy to include that on the site.

I wouldn't want to replace the main content with auto-generated
instructions, however.

Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] Best way to amalgamate two relations?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Dave F. wrote:
> Is there an easy way to transfer the newer data into the
> original relation?

In P2:

- Select a way belonging to both relations, adding them if needs be
- In the \/ menu next to the new relation (Advanced panel), choose 'Select
all members'
- In the \/ menu next to the original relation, choose 'Add selection to
this relation'
- In the \/ menu next to the new relation, choose 'Delete relation'

cheers
Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] Project OSM2VectorTiles.org launched

[Richard Fairhurst]

Stefan Keller wrote:
> OSM2VectorTiles is a project simplifying installation of free 
> world maps maintained by OpenStreetMap community. 

Looks interesting - nice work!

If I may just pick you up on one statement in the thesis:

"There also exists a method[17] that circumvents using a database and
directly transform OSM data into vector tiles but this does not scale for
global vector tile coverage and does not support mixing additional data into
the vector tiles.

"[17] GitHub. Tilemaker, 2015. URL https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker.
Visited on 2015-12-14."

Whether tilemaker scales to the globe has not yet been attested. My hunch is
that it probably doesn't impose more demanding requirements than, say, OSRM,
which would mean it should be possible to create vector tiles from
planet.osm.pbf with a large memory machine or EC2 instance. I would be
interested to hear from anyone who tries it.

It does, however, very definitely support including additional data (in
shapefile form), and even allows you to perform some spatial queries using
this data. See
https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md#shapefiles
.

cheers
Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch down?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:
> Is it just me or is the OSM's built-in potlatch editor not currently
> working?

Should be fixed now. TomH identified that a Passenger upgrade caused
requests to break, though exactly why isn't yet clear...

Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] Nominatim weakness

[Richard Fairhurst]

John Goodman wrote:
> And if its searching facility is braindead

Please avoid being gratuitously offensive by describing something that lots
of volunteers have put countless hours into as "braindead".

Thank you.

Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] Involving Cyclists in OSM

[Richard Fairhurst]

Clifford Snow wrote:
> I want to make sure I cover the salient points that would interest 
> cyclists. If you know of any websites that use bike routes or 
> otherwise make use of OSM data that would really be great.

Where do I start...? :)

Cycling and OSM have long been bedfellows. In Europe generally, and the UK
in particular, cyclists were the interest group that took to OSM first. Part
of the reason for this is economic (traditional geodata providers
concentrate on cars because there's more money there) but partly also
cultural, I think - cyclists have a culture of help-yourself and direct
action, and that chimes very well with OSM. Historically cycle maps have
been pretty poor, and OSM is the first chance to fix that, worldwide.



Cycle mapping in OSM really started in earnest in 2006, when we started
mapping the National Cycle Network in the UK:
  
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=WikiProject_United_Kingdom_National_Cycle_Network=3142

and in 2007 Andy Allan released the first version of what is now
OpenCycleMap to show this:
   https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-July/016012.html

(The National Cycle Network is run by Sustrans, a UK charity, and as it
happens a bunch of UK OSMers are or have been Sustrans volunteers.)



The other significant development at this time was mkgmap, which turns OSM
data into a map you can use on a handheld (or handlebar-mounted) Garmin GPS.
I put together perhaps the first OSM Garmin bike map in 2008:
  
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Cycle_map=71511

and since then others have done amazing work building more and more complex
Garmin maps - Openfietsmap and Velomap are probably the two best known.



So, routing. Routing is particularly important to cyclists because road
systems and signage are generally designed for cars, funneling them onto
more and more major arteries - and that's the absolute opposite of what
cyclists want. If you're in London and simply follow the signs for Oxford it
will take you along motorways built for cars and closed to bikes. You know
all this.

OSM is the first worldwide routable dataset that offers the potential for
decent bike routing. Google has a go, and in many (mostly urban) areas
Google bike routing comes up with good results, but it can also take you
onto downright dangerous roads or impassable muddy tracks. If you ask Google
for a route from Land's End to John O'Groats, the iconic end-to-end
challenge in the UK (pretty much our equivalent of your Coast-to-Coast), it
suggests the infamously dangerous main highway through Cornwall:
   https://goo.gl/maps/nwrbcAxgFRm

and barely cyclable rural canal paths like this:
   http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/599319

OSM has richer data and can do better. And with the advances in routing
tools recently, particularly OSRM and Graphhopper, I think you could say
that OSM bike routing is now the best in the world.

There are lots of sites, but with no disrespect to the others who are doing
good stuff (MapMyRide, Komoot...) there are three I'd single out. Mikel has
already mentioned Strava, the favourite of road cyclists. Strava supplements
OSM mapping with their own massive tracklog database from their users'
rides, so it's not just sending you down roads that look good for cycling
algorithmically, but those where cyclists actually ride. The big proviso
with Strava is that it's a self-selecting userbase - they describe
themselves as "a global community of athletes", and if, like me, your
cycling isn't about being an "athlete" you'll find it takes you down the
routes favoured by speedsters rather than the quiet lanes you might prefer.
But it's the world's biggest bike routes site and they're doing a lot of
really interesting stuff with OSM.

CycleStreets (http://www.cyclestreets.net/), launched in 2009, was pretty
much the pioneer in OSM bike routing. It's essentially UK-only other than an
occasional outlier. It was the first site where you could ask for an A-B
route and pretty much guarantee you'd get something good back. It looks at
the full gamut of OSM tags to find a route, and is entirely custom-written
code. It was spun out of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign and really makes the
best of all their cycling knowledge.

And at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, there's cycle.travel
(http://cycle.travel/map), which I built. cycle.travel aims to give routes
as good as an OSM specialist like CycleStreets, but with the speed and
ease-of-use of Google's routeplanner - which means fully draggable routes, a
custom map showing relevant bike stuff, and ridiculous amounts of
preprocessing to get the OSM data just right.

It started UK-only, then Western Europe, and now does the US and Canada too.
The US routing is actually the most complex of the three, in its efforts to
keep you off busy roads but also to avoid the TIGER residential trap - the
last thing you want is to be routed along a "quiet rural residential road"
that actually turns 

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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Dave F. wrote:
> I've always read the brackets to mean 'leading to' or 'via' not as being 
> shared. From the Highway Code: "Motorways shown in brackets can 
> also be reached along the route indicated." 

Yes, exactly. Because they're just numbers, not routes, the brackets simply
mean "if you want the bit of the A11 that goes to Norwich, it's this way",
not that the road is both A14 and A11.

Interestingly[1], looking on G**gle Str**t V**w, even the few erroneous
examples of signposting "A123 / A456" without brackets appear to have been
replaced now. I knew of one, at Monmouth, and (thanks to a SABRE thread)
there appears to be one at Caerphilly too. The Kendal example sometimes
cited has been replaced.

Richard

[1] well, FSVO "interestingly"



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

[Richard Fairhurst]

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? 

99.99% consistently, and that might actually be understating it. Anything
that is missing the brackets can be considered a signage error (I can only
think of one instance) and not worth constructing an entire data model
around.

Dave and Derick are right in that any one road in the UK can only have one
ref, other than the unsignposted European E routes of course.

More fundamentally, these are "route relations". Road numbers in the UK,
unlike the US, do not represent "routes". They are just road numbers. There
are plenty of numbers in the UK where no-one would use that route to drive
from one end to another, or even to a halfway point, following the number
all the way. In many cases, such as the A47 between Birmingham and
Leicester, the concept of a route has long been lost.

Historically there is a designated route concept in the UK in the sense that
some countries have them, but it doesn't map to road numbers, has largely
fallen from use, and is neither signposted nor verifiable:
http://www.watsonlv.net/pdf/trunk_roads.pdf

These route relations are pointless armchairing and make the map harder to
edit for newbies to no benefit. If the user doesn't respond to changeset
comments I would agree with deleting them.

Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] Community Conference

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ian Dees wrote:
> As someone currently planning a more community-focused SOTM US, I'd 
> be interested in hearing what sort of changes you would propose to 
> the existing SOTM structure.

It's a great question to ask; and I realise this may sound a little
contrarian, but I actually find myself enjoying SOTM-US more than SOTM.

SOTM-US is full of people shipping things, and "shipping things" is the OSM
spirit. Whether they're corporate or not doesn't really bother me.

SOTM tends to have a greater proportion of academia and unviable hobbyist
projects, which arouses the 2007 militant OSMer in me: "yes, this is all
very clever, but what are you actually _doing_ with it?".

That isn't to denigrate the organisational effort of the SOTM crew, who
conjure miracles out of nothing; nor to say SOTM-US is perfect. (_Way_ too
much Node.JS at SOTM-US. ;) ) And SOTM-EU in Karlsruhe was neither SOTM-US
nor SOTM, but was perhaps the finest OSM conference I've attended. But I
would really caution against contrasting "corporate" and "community".

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSRM-talk] public transport routing

[Richard Fairhurst]

Daniel J H wrote:

If you want to implement the transit routing yourself, a solid start is
Connection Scan --- "Intriguingly Simple and Fast Transit Routing"

quite easy to implement but also has its limitations.


Not sure whether it's de rigeur to mention Mapzen on the mailing list of 
a Mapbox-supported project ;), but they're doing some interesting work 
with public transport routing:


https://transit.land/
https://mapzen.com/blog/valhalla-intro

It's some way off primetime yet, I think, but really cool to see people 
working in this space. And of course there's always OpenTripPlanner - 
http://www.opentripplanner.org/


cheers
Richard


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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Christoph Hormann wrote:
> And if on http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/1300 i read:
>
> "Please draw one large area outline around groups of buildings 
> and tag them landuse=residential"
>
> that is in violation of one of the core principles of OSM, namely 
> to map reality, what's on the ground.

The core principle you're looking for is that OSM is iterative. We iterate
towards completion. Start simple, become detailed.

Back in the day, we used big swathes of landuse= to mark residential areas,
and abutters= to indicate shops beside roads. You and I are fortunate enough
to live in OSM-rich countries where all the important stuff has now been
mapped and people can concentrate on unimportant fripperies like building
outlines and addresses. By definition, HOT activities aren't in such
countries.

It's absolutely reasonable to start with approximations and replace them
over time - that's what we were doing in the UK when the map was at a
similar state of development to these places. Call it a Minimum Viable Map.

Let's have a bit less judgement, and a bit more helping newbie mappers (and
their organisers, who may not have as long-standing an OSM background as
you) to do things well.

Richard




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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Blake Girardot wrote:
> As to the original issue Ramm raised:

Frederik's first name is Frederik. It's not that uncommon. :) Please can we
avoid this becoming _really_ unnecessarily confrontational by calling people
by their surnames in a sort of English public school style ("go it,
molesworth, show them wot yore made of").

Richard




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Re: [Talk-us] Proposal: Sunset ref=* on ways in, favor of relations

[Richard Fairhurst]

Richard Welty wrote:
> the key thing, i think, is that mappers have little motivation to 
> work on route relations if they don't actually get used by 
> anything.

Don't forget that the issue is not an endemic issue with route relations,
it's just an osm2pgsql issue.

osm2pgsql is the most popular tool for loading data into a database for
raster rendering. But it's not the only one; that's not the only use case
for OSM data; and who knows whether osm2pgsql will remain pivotal as vector
rendering supersedes raster rendering. I use Interstate route relations as a
small part of cycle.travel's routing algorithm, for example. "Anything" is a
big word!

Richard




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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Lester Caine wrote:
> while switch2osm may well produce a working system for
> some ... I have to also support current paying traffic on the 
> hardware and that prevents running too many different 
> competing web services.

You can run a tileserver for the UK on a £10/month virtual machine. If your
paying traffic can't support £10/month across all your clients, and instead
you have to rely on a third-party server operated by a non-profit
organisation, then there's something wrong with your business model.

Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] Release openstreetmap-carto v2.36.0

[Richard Fairhurst]

Matthijs Melissen wrote:
> Today, v2.36.0 of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet has 
> been released and rolled out to the openstreetmap.org 
> servers. It might still take a couple of days before all tiles 
> show the new rendering.

Congratulations to all involved - real dedication to the cause despite the
slings and arrows. Thank you.

Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] License files

[Richard Fairhurst]

Malcolm Herring wrote:
> The copyright page on the Wiki seems to only refer to tiles

The canonical copyright pages for OSM are
  http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
  http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License

not whatever Xxzme might have mauled on wiki.osm.org.

Richard




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[Talk-GB] One for the London mappers

[Richard Fairhurst]

Slightly surprised this hasn't appeared on OSM yet...!

Richard

 Original Message 
Subject: TfL Press Release - First section of Mayor’s North-South Cycle
Superhighway opens ‎
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2015 09:52:39 +
From: TfL Press Office 
To: undisclosed-recipients:;



TfLPressRelease

PN-308

20 October 2015

First section of Mayor’s North-South Cycle Superhighway opens ‎

·Two-way 800m section north from Elephant & Castle to Blackfriars Road
via St George’s Road has opened‎

·Latest milestone in the creation of safer cycle superhighway networks

·Traffic already returning to similar levels seen before the work began ‎

The first section of a safe, segregated cycle route that will ultimately
run from Elephant & Castle to Kings Cross has opened – six months after
the Mayor helped dig out the first piece of tarmac.

Transport for London (TfL) has completed the two-way 800m section, from
Elephant & Castle to the Peabody estate on Blackfriars Road, and
engineers continue to work at pace to complete the new route. The new
North-South section will intersect with the new Quietway 1 from Waterloo
to Greenwich at Webber Street, as well as the existing Cycle
Superhighway 7 at Princess Street.

‎It’s the latest milestone in the creation of the Mayor and TfL’s cycle
networks, and as new routes are completed and other major improvements
are finished, the traffic impact across London will start to reduce.

Already, congestion levels along St George’s Road have greatly eased
since work finished. At certain times, especially outside the peak
hours, traffic is reducing back to similar levels seen before the work
began, but with the added benefits of better cycle facilities and
pedestrian crossings.

‎Mayor of London, Boris Johnson MP, said: “This is another key moment in
the evolution of cycling in our great city. We promised world-class
facilities and that's exactly what's being delivered on the ground. We
appreciate there's disruption going on as this network of routes takes
shape alongside other major development work in London, but TfL is
pulling out all the stops to minimise delays. The opening of this
section of superhighway is an important part of our mission to get more
Londoners cycling safely, offering a fantastic new segregated route for
thousands of people making a trip from north to south.”

In the new year, cyclists will be able to travel from Elephant and
Castle to Blackfriars Bridge along the new North-South route, with
Blackfriars Road transformed from a car-dominated street into a new
urban boulevard with almost 20,000 square feet of new space for
pedestrians and a two-way segregated cycle track.

‎The link across Blackfriars Bridge will open to cyclists by spring 2016,
connecting it with the East-West Cycle Superhighway and Farringdon. The
North-South route will be co-branded Cycle Superhighway 6, bringing it
into the wider Cycle Superhighway network.

‎Leon Daniels, TfL’s Managing Director of Surface Transport, said: “It’s
incredible that in just six months we have managed to transform these
roads into a truly continental cycling landscape. A cyclist travels
along the North-South corridor every two seconds in the peak, and the
new protected route will provide a direct, safer journey for thousands
of new and experienced cyclists. We will continue building these routes,
both here and more widely across London, thanking local residents and
businesses for their patience as we do so.”

The East-West and North-South routes were consulted on in autumn 2014,
receiving over 21,000 responses. More than 84 per cent of people backed
the plans and hundreds of businesses joined a campaign to show their
support. Independent opinion polling also showed overwhelming public
backing for the new routes.

‎

In addition to the North-South route, since March 2015, work has been
progressing with the East-West route from Tower Hill to Westbourne
Terrace. Two other segregated superhighways are also under construction:
the upgrade of Cycle Superhighway 2 from Aldgate to Bow and the new
Cycle Superhighway 5 from Oval to Pimlico, which will open next month.
All these routes will be built by summer 2016 alongside other
transformative junction improvements at Elephant & Castle, Stockwell and
Oval.

Councillor Darren Merrill, Cabinet Member for public realm and
environment at Southwark Council, said: “The new North-South Cycle
Superhighway complements the council’s existing plans to improve cycling
facilities in the borough. We’re determined to see cycling levels
increase amongst people of all backgrounds, abilities and ages. The
Superhighway works especially well with our plans for a new Quieter
route, the Southwark Spine, which offers a direct and easy to navigate
route from the Elephant and Castle to Dulwich in the south of the
borough. We look forward to rolling this out once we’ve consulted fully
with residents.”

‎

Ian Mehrtens, Chief Operating Officer at London 

Re: [Talk-us] Increasing the number of US Mappers

[Richard Fairhurst]

Paul Norman wrote:
> The problem is that if you make a discussion group too small, it 
> doesn't have enough activity to sustain interest in it.
> 
> Larger regions might work, but even a statewide group abandons 
> the might meet for a geobeer idea where it takes 6 hours to drive 
> across the state.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas.

Groups on osm.org.

Mailing lists only appeal to a certain subset of people. They look geeky,
they require yet another login/subscription, and we all get too much email
anyway. They're good for engaging the kind of people who like mailing lists,
but these days that doesn't include a lot of tech-savvy people.

The idea behind having groups on osm.org is to encourage self-organising
communities, whether by region or topic. You don't have the hassle of
finding out who the OSM lists administrator is, emailing them, convincing
other people to join, etc. etc. You just go to osm.org and start a group. If
it doesn't work because the area is too small/too big, no problem, you try
another one.

Users can join groups, and then when they post diary entries, can optionally
tag them as belonging to the Oxfordshire group or the cycle-mapping group or
whatever - and there you go, that's a discussion facility. Groups have
bounding boxes which enables the site to suggest that people might want to
join the group in the area they edit (maybe even on sign-up). So it's not a
big change, but it makes much better use of the existing social
functionality on osm.org (diary, home location, etc.) than we're already
doing.

We got some way with implementing it but the effort stalled; I got stuck
trying to figure out how pagination works on osm.org! But I would love to
see coding resume on it and will happily take part if it's not just me
working solo.

http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/diary
http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/groups/4
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/297

cheers
Richard




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Re: [Talk-us] Increasing the number of US Mappers

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 15/10/2015 14:28, Bryan Housel wrote:

Agree with everything you said about *why* groups are important,
except that: now that it's 2015, Facebook groups is really a better
place for this.


Yeah... but no.

Every time this comes up, someone suggests "use my favoured platform". 
Which might be Facebook, or it might be Google Groups, or Meetup, or 
whatever.


Which is tempting, except these platforms have incredibly uneven 
penetration both demographically and geographically. Chatting to three 
friends in the pub last night (all older than me, none geeky, one even 
of American birth) I was interested to find I was the only one on 
Facebook, and even then I'm a pretty reluctant user.[1] The other three 
had made a conscious decision to stay away.


You can _get_ people to OSM via Facebook; it's one of many good channels 
for that. And you can use it to organise within a particular 
demographic, particularly young and urban.


But it's not an answer to "how do we make mapping fun and 'sticky'?", 
whereas groups on OSM can be. You can integrate OSM groups into the 
discovery process - sign up, have groups suggested to you, get invites 
from people who've seen your mapping - which you can't easily do with a 
third-party solution, especially given the Facebook real name/OSM 
username mismatch.


cheers
Richard

[1] Anecdata alert: if you extrapolate that 25% across the 3,000 
population of Charlbury, it looks pretty sickly compared to the 2,400 
registered users of the Charlbury website.


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Re: [Talk-us] Extra wide shoulders / travel lanes in NJ

[Richard Fairhurst]

Elliott Plack wrote:
> I am now leaning towards the shoulder tag, and perhaps 
> recommending that the routing tools consider that.

I'd be genuinely delighted to add shoulder support to cycle.travel when
there's more than a trace number of shoulder tags present in the OSM
database - missing shoulder information is the second biggest bike routing
issue in the US IMO (after bogus TIGER highway=residential, of course). But
as Paul says, please don't misuse cycleway tags for this.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Richard Fairhurst]

Alex Barth wrote:
> Fixing the license surely can't be the extent of our plan, but we need 
> to be able to have a frank conversation about how licensing is hurting 
> use cases and engagement on OSM, without second guessing 
> people's intentions and without just showing them the door to
> TomTom and HERE.

I've said this once or twice or eight gazillion times already, but I guess
once more doesn't hurt. :)

ODbL 1.0 - not exclusively an OSM licence, but one strongly informed by OSM
as the biggest producer of collaborative openly-licensed data - was largely
a product of the experiences we'd had up to then.

I, and others, had been burned by CC-BY-SA's requirement to "virally"
license non-data products when using an open data source. This was
(eventually) agreed as a pain point by those of us who shouted loudest, and
so ODbL came to apply the CC-like "collective work" theory to such uses.
That's what became a Produced Work. 

At the time, no-one was doing serious geocoding off OSM data - it wasn't
good enough. So there was no-one prepared to argue for a comparable
rationale for geocoded data. That's not to say that geocoding _shouldn't_ be
considered as a use case for an open database licence. Nor is it to say that
there was any great intent in the relicensing process to rule out geocoding
uses. We just, genuinely, hadn't thought of it... and no-one had pointed it
out to us.

It would be good to fix it _with_a_rationale_. It can't just be "we need
this to work". There has to be a cogent argument why a reciprocal open data
licence, outwith of OSM, can permit it. I'm 100% sure that case can be made,
but it can't be done by fiat. It has to be expressed as "this legalese will
further the aims of a reciprocally licensed data project" as exemplified by
OSM, because it is still the case that OSM's rights-holders - the
contributors - won't agree to anything else.

ODbL needs a 1.1. Creative Commons, working in the much better understood
field of copyrightable artistic works, is already on 4.0 - which is a
realistic recognition that the previous three versions haven't been perfect.
There's no admission of failure on the part of OSM, ODbL, OSM's users, or
anyone to admit that "this can be improved". Of course it can. Let's focus
on the achievable goal of working with Open Data Commons to do just that.

your friendly local WTFPL fundamentalist
Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] weekly 271

[Richard Fairhurst]

Manfred A. Reiter wrote:
> The weekly round-up of OSM news, issue # 271

Weekly OSM is brilliant. Thank you.

Richard




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Re: [Talk-us] Another road classification disagreement (this time with HFCS in Kansas)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Greg Troxel wrote:
> It's perfectly reasonable to have an unpaved highway=secondary in 
> rural areas, if that's one of the major roads around.

...with the proviso that it _must_ be tagged as surface=unpaved (or a more
detailed tag, such as surface=gravel or surface=dirt). Standard tagging in
developed countries is that such roads are assumed paved unless otherwise
specified.

Richard




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Re: [Talk-GB] Village, Hamlet and populations ...

[Richard Fairhurst]

Richard Symonds wrote:
> Perhaps it would be better to, instead of having a hierarchy based 
> on definitions, instead having a hierarchy based on pure population 
> size.

That's what the population= tag is for. :)

Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard Fairhurst]

Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> Now it is done with railways and may be stopped. But if 
> completely dismantled railways are not deleted from OSM 
> what would stop somebody interested in mapping completely 
> destroyed buildings, canals etc?

You're absolutely right.

We should also stop mapping bus routes. These are often not supported by
on-the-ground evidence, just by patterns of usage, and that might lead
someone to map (say) the functionally equivalent corridors most often used
by taxis or Uber vehicles. 

We should stop mapping official council boundaries. These aren't on the
ground, and they are just administrative delineations of certain services.
What would stop someone taking this and mapping pizza companies' delivery
boundaries?

We should stop adding postcodes. These usually aren't on the ground and they
are just the reference system of one private company[1] among many. Someone
might add the internal reference identifiers used by utility companies or
indeed any other company with assets to manage.

And we should stop making hypothetical points on the mailing list, because
what would stop someone interested in applying those hypothetical points to
other bits of OSM?

Richard

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail#Privatisation





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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard Fairhurst]

moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
> The line is going through multiple buildings and a wide low 
> wall. That's as unambiguous as it gets. The lack of any 
> other sign on the grass and highway areas are an additional 
> good hint. If you're mapping a railroad here, you're mapping 
> the past.

Haha. I have, actually, been to the place you cited.

Or, nearly. I cycled a couple of miles away from that example in June this
year (I took a three-day bike tour after SOTM-US) and saw that railway - I
actually explored its course for a few metres at one point. It was plenty in
evidence if you knew what you were looking for, whether or not you can see
it from the aerials.

From what I saw elsewhere on the line, I cannot say with any confidence that
there aren't distinctive traces of a former railroad there at the lat/long
you cited. There might be. There might not. I suspect I'm more attuned to
finding these traces than you are. Conversely I suspect you're more attuned
than I am to some other stuff which you enjoy mapping. But I don't go and
delete your mapping thousands of miles away just because I can't see it on
some imagery. Come on.

(And let's not get hung up about "if you're mapping a railroad".
railway=dismantled does not mean it's a usable railway now, and no-one is
claiming that. You have been in OSM long enough to know that the characters
that make up a k/v combination are just that, characters. highway=footway is
Not Actually A Highway. highway=trunk is Just Some Letters Indicating
Importance And Isn't Even A Trunk Road In The UK. And so on.)

But really... can we get a sense of perspective here?

A few metres from the URL you cited is 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/263868309

which doesn't exist, at all. No building. No sign of a building. It's
fiction. Then there's
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/263878931

which is an imported square footprint that looks nothing like the actual
building. Pan south a mile and you get
http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=17/41.88892/-74.03297

which is a textbook example of TIGER barf - a cluster of
"highway=residential"s that are neither highways nor residential and whose
geometry bears little or no relation to what's actually there.

(Also, NY State Bike Route 32 sucks rocks. The traffic is heavy and the
shoulder is either non-existent or too narrow to ride. I would love to find
a way of mapping that.)

If I were going to write 40 messages to a thread trying to make OSM better
(I'm angry enough with myself that I've been drawn into writing four), in
this area or anywhere, I would not choose deleting a few
"railway=dismantled"s as my top priority. I really wouldn't.

Please, give it a break, have a bit of respect for others' differing views,
and go and make OSM better somewhere where it matters.

Richard




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

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> But what if I have said the same thing five times already and the 
> others STILL don't see that I'm RIGHT

Please try not to bring OSMF board meeting conventions onto the talk list.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Another road classification disagreement (this time with HFCS in Kansas)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Richard Welty wrote:
> i could see having an HFCS tag which carries that value for 
> informational purposes, but it shouldn't control our own classification.

In the UK we use the designation= tag to record official classifications
which might not be reflected in the highway type - I'd commend it.

Toby Murray wrote:
> This user has also upgraded a lot of unpaved county roads in 
> eastern Kansas to secondary because of HFCS which also strikes 
> me as wrong. You can clearly see where he has done this at 
> zoom level 9 [6]. 

Ye gods. That's horrid, and breaks every single car and bicycle router in
existence. Are those changesets cleanly revertable, or do we need a manual
fixup?

Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Another road classification disagreement (this time with HFCS in Kansas)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Richie Kennedy wrote:
> As to Mr. Fairhurst’s comment regarding routing, I’ll remind you 
> it is frowned upon to tag for a routing engine. 

Given that Mr Fairhurst has been involved in OSM since month 4 in 2004, he
is quite aware of what is frowned upon and what isn't, but he thanks you for
your kind, if slightly patronising, concern.

Following international common practices is not tagging for the router, or
the renderer, or the autonomous self-guided robot or whatever. It is an
essential part of a mass collaborative project, and is the only way from
preventing OSM descending into an anarchy of local exceptions.

It is universal that, in developed countries such as the US, Canada or any
part of Western Europe, a highway=secondary is assumed paved _unless_ a
surface (or similar) tag is used.

Piling up local exceptions justified by obscure wiki pages (and, to be
honest, you can justify classifying US roads any old way given the morass of
contradictory wiki pages) makes for data that no-one can sanely use. I
probably do more post-processing of highway tags than anyone else and even I
draw the line at "if (highway=='secondary' && last_editor=='route56') {
surface=UNKNOWN; } else { surface=PAVED; }". This is a collaborative
project; it only works if we pull in the same direction.

Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] Three-months ban is over

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ilya Zverev wrote (re: Xxzme):
> For me, it's clear that the ban did not work, and nothing has changed.

Quoting Xxzme on the wiki:

"What is clear to me is that you make ~0 improments to Main namespace
"And constantly repeating yourself with magical "purpose" of Beginners'
guide which was clearly defined and not by you!
"I doubt you are the person to teach me or anyone else with your pathetic
4.5k houses per 7 years of editing Xxzme (talk) 09:32, 3 September 2015
(UTC)"

I would like to see a permanent ban for Xxzme from the project.

Richard




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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Any expert CC-BY -> ODbL negotiators?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Steve Bennett wrote [quoting DELWP]:
> My initial response is that we wouldn't want OSM to apply a more 
> restrictive license than ours

In which case they've chosen the wrong licence.

If you license your work under a permissive, attribution-only licence
(CC-BY), then you are automatically giving permission for it to be
relicensed under a share-alike, attribution-only licence (CC-BY-SA). You
can't license under CC-BY and say "no-one may incorporate this data into a
dataset with share-alike restrictions". That would defeat the point of a
permissive licence, which is roughly (attribution aside) "do what you will
with this data".

They can go ask Creative Commons if they don't believe this.

So the question should be: given that they have already allowed the work to
be relicensed under a share-alike, attribution-required licence (CC-BY-SA)
which happens to have automatic compatibility with CC-BY, will they allow
the work to be relicensed under another share-alike, attribution-required
licence (ODbL) which unfortunately doesn't have automatic compatibility?
There's no principled reason I can see for granting one but not the other.

> DELWP doesn't want to get into creating one-off variations for 
> every potential user with a preference - Google, HERE, etc.

Where "etc." means "TomTom". There are only four worldwide geodata
providers. It's hardly a slippery slope of individual permissions.

Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[Richard Fairhurst]

Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
 Therefore I will delete any object that no longer exists or never
 existed (after communication with mapper or other method to 
 verify whatever I am mistaken, with exception of highway=
 proposed).

OSM would be a better, and nicer, place if people went out and did mapping,
rather than staying at home and doing deleting.

Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard Fairhurst]

moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
 Remember that interpreting osm data is actually a lot of work. 
 Very few people have the manpower to verify what railroad=
 dismantled actually mean to decide wheter they want to use 
 or filter out that data. Most of them will just match railway=*, 
 plus perhaps some special cases for railway=rail and railway=
 subway. Now they're looking at historical data without even 
 knowing it. They are confused.

Please don't make stuff up.

cycle.travel's rendering is 1300 lines of CartoCSS, 1400 of .mml, 300 lines
of Lua preprocessing, and 350 lines of Ruby/PostGIS postprocessing.

Of this, the code required to show only operational railways is 100
characters - a rounding error. It's a detail in a 1400-character line of
.mml and it was copied directly from OSM-Bright, the base style used by
switch2osm. In other words, anyone setting up an OSM tileserver from the
canonical instructions already gets this for free.

There are plenty of issues with OSM railway tagging that make decent
rendering, routing and analysis hard. (railway=station covering both
mainline stations and preserved heritage attractions is the first that
springs to mind.) railway=dismantled is not one of them.

As to whether utterly dismantled railways belong in the OSM database, I
couldn't really care less. In terms of doctrine, they probably don't, though
let's not overstate the issue: I suspect more bytes have been spilled in
this thread than it would take to encode a dump of current
railway=dismantled in .pbf format. But Gregory, Greg and Jason have it
right. This is not about some precious notion of purity, it's about
community.

Outside the two fundamentals of openly licensed and crowdsourced, OSM is
characterised by its pragmatism. We do what works. What works is a community
of people who feel respected and empowered. And bearing in mind that we're
talking about the US here, we need all the community we can get.

Read Minh Nguyen's excellent new diary post
(http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Minh%20Nguyen/diary/35646). Even in the
super-affluent, super-educated Bay Area, OSM is barely at the stage that
Europe reached five or more years ago. It is an endless parade of outdated
street configurations, missing landmarks, test edits.

But, he notes, there is plenty of rail and bike infrastructure.

This is what characterised OSM adoption here in Britain. The enthusiasts are
the first to get it: the railfans, the cyclists. Widespread take-up comes
later, once the enthusiasts have built something good.

The last thing we want to do in the US is drive away the few enthusiasts we
currently have.

Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
 What everybody can see is a clearing or change in the surface 
 of something. That's fine to map.
 
 Inferring from that that there must have been a railway there is a 
 step too far. We are mappers, not trappers.

Ok, let's try an experiment.

Go to http://cycle.travel/map/journey/15120, click the route highlight (in
purple), and click 'Find photos'.

I spot a bridge in the characteristic Victorian railway style, a viaduct,
the remains of a signal box, a large embankment of the type used to build
railways and nothing else from that period, and A SODDING RAILWAY PLATFORM
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

Tell me again you can't infer there must have been a railway there. I dare
you. I double dare you.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Does anybody know if these PA maps are legal to use to get info from for OSM?

[Richard Fairhurst]

James Mast wrote:
 I mean, would he have to at least verify that the 
 license for those maps is compatible with OSM first

Yes, and it isn't. The licence has lots of clauses that aren't compatible
with ODbL, the Contributor Terms or indeed any open licence:

ftp://ftp.dot.state.pa.us/public/pdf/BPR_pdf_files/Documents/Cartography/COPY_RELEASE_FORM%20(01_07).pdf

That said, it might be worth someone approaching the Pennsylvania DOT to ask
for permission. But as it stands, these terms aren't at all compatible.

Richard




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Re: [Talk-GB] UK style rendering port ...

[Richard Fairhurst]

Lester Caine wrote:
 The other area that I am looking to roll back

First, I wouldn't think in terms of rolling back at all.

Cartography for a UK tileset could and should be designed from scratch. If
you really want to start with an existing tileset then use OSM Bright, not
osm-carto, but I'm not convinced that's necessary. We're much more likely to
get a coherent, UK-friendly style by thinking about it from first principles
than by adapting osm-carto with its eight-year heritage (and all the
attendant compromises).

Second, let's not start with raster rendering. Let's build this as a vector
tileset from the start, with in-browser/on-device rendering.

Vectors have lighter infrastructure needs, and enable clickable POIs and
on-the-fly restyling. The UK is small enough that we could just run it
through tilemaker (https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker) without the need
for a complex stack. The two disadvantages are that the very oldest browsers
will struggle, and that (for now) minutely updates don't happen unless you
build that complex stack - but that's fine, we still have osm-carto for
instant feedback.

Let's build tomorrow's map, not yesterday's; and who knows, maybe osm-carto
might want to borrow from some of our advances in months to come!

Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] Thrapston viaduct

[Richard Fairhurst]

Dan S wrote:
 Sounds good. Mind if I ask how it is done? (i.e. rendering rules 
 for rural vs town)

Post-import, I run a couple of queries along the lines of

UPDATE planet_osm_point SET urban=true FROM built_up_areas WHERE
ST_Contains(built_up_areas.geom,way)

using a pre-existing 'built_up_areas' table which contains polygons of,
well, built-up areas. I use OS Open Data for the polygons but you could no
doubt construct them from OSM landuse if that floats your boat.

The Mapnik stylesheet queries then simply respond to that column:

#poi[type='pub'][urban=true][zoom=15],
#poi[type='pub'][urban=false][zoom=13] {
  ...rendering rules...
}

cheers
Richard




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Re: [Talk-GB] Thrapston viaduct

[Richard Fairhurst]

Andy Townsend wrote:
 OSM's standard map is currently trying to be the primary 
 feedback mechanism to mappers but also have clear 
 design (1).  I genuinely don't believe that you can do both 
 well in one map style.

I think you can, but it requires serious cartographical chops, and - ideally
- some degree of interactivity (clickable/hoverable POIs, etc.) to break out
beyond the standard two dimensions.

 Unfortunately I suspect what I'd choose works well for a 
 certain type of countryside, but less well for town centres [...]
 so I suspect that we'd soon hit the same sort of issues as 
 the standard style has

You can fairly easily adapt rendering rules for rural areas vs towns. See
for example http://cycle.travel/map?lat=51.791lon=-1.5087zoom=13 : pubs
aren't shown in towns at z13 (Witney), but are in villages (Minster Lovell,
Ducklington). At z16 they're shown in towns but not cities.

It doesn't play nicely with minutely updates, but would we need that for a
UK map? I'd have thought a daily reimport - very feasible on a UK-sized
extract - would be enough.

cheers
Richard




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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Using OSM data without modifying - are there any guidelines?

[Richard Fairhurst]

John Bergmayer wrote:
 The problem being, of course, assuming there is no 
 property right, there's only a contract, not a license. 
 Contracts are not enforceable against third parties. 

 A person who makes OSM data available without 
 conditioning it on acceptance of the same contract, 
 may indeed be in violation of *his* contract. But the 
 people who take that data aren't bound by anything. 

It's possible they may be. OSMF is based in England  Wales, and the
Contributor Terms say This Agreement shall be governed by English law
without regard to principles of conflict of law.

Under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999, a person who is not
a party to a contract (a 'third party') may in his own right enforce a term
of the contract if... the term purports to confer a benefit on him.

But this is way above my pay grade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_(Rights_of_Third_Parties)_Act_1999

Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

[Richard Fairhurst]

Jo wrote:
 even more sorry you stopped being the lead developer of iD

For the record: the mantle of lead developer of iD passed to Tom and 
John immediately after SOTM-US Portland because it was wonderfully clear 
that their JavaScript skills are pretty much on a different planet to 
mine, and I was delighted to see them take up the torch.


My reluctance to continue work on OSM editing software dates from before 
this, as you can see if you look at the commit graphs of both proto-iD 
and Potlatch 2. This is why I was so keen in summer 2013 to get iD made 
the default instead of Potlatch 2: so that the burden of maintaining the 
default editor could pass to someone else and I wouldn't have to endure 
the shit flung at the holder of that role any more.


I think you, and others, need to consider why it's only those with the 
thickest skins that are prepared to work on OSM site (and, particularly, 
online editor) development. I am not the only one to have burned out.


You have your own views. That's fine. Your view is that there is a 
problem. That is not objective truth, that is your view and it may or 
may not be informed by actual facts. Others may believe that the main 
challenge for OSM is to be welcoming enough for a million new users to 
contribute their local knowledge - not to provide more and more detailed 
methods for a diminishing number of power users to map the locations of 
angels on a pin, without ever being troubled by thoughts of how new 
users will interact with those detailed methods. That too is not 
objective truth, it is a view (it happens to be mine).


What is unacceptable is the relentless, harrying, dismissive, abusive 
manner in which you and others advance the former view over the latter. 
That is why we cannot retain developers.


Richard


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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Using OSM data without modifying - are there any guidelines?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Simon Poole wrote:
 As the name of this list says it is legal talk (aka yapping 
 without consequence) ... not get-help-from-the-OSMF. 

With my list admin hat on, I think that's a little harsh. Often, as you say,
queries can be resolved by pointing to the relevant published guidelines
and there's no reason why the community can't do this on this list - or on
help.osm.org, or wherever - rather than burdening LWG with the task of
fielding so many routine enquiries.

legal-talk@ is not a bad first port of call. It is indeed only a -talk list
but we don't necessarily need to bite people who come to talk.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk-fr] Rendu OSM avec dénivelé?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Shohreh a écrit:
 C'est mieux que rien, mais 1) un routeur qui prend en compte le dénivelé 
 avant de calculer

cycle.travel le prend en compte. :)

 2) utilise une carte topo en fond de carte

cycle.travel utilise une carte topo (ex.:
http://cycle.travel/map?lat=46.6166lon=7.1714zoom=14)

Richard




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Re: [Talk-us] cycle.travel US bike routing, and unreviewed rural TIGER

[Richard Fairhurst]

Harald Kliems wrote:
 Until then you could consider a user setting to avoid/not avoid
 unpaved roads.

Unfortunately contraction hierarchies - the routing algorithm used by OSRM -
don't really allow user settings. For each distinct routing profile, you
need to regenerate the routing graph, which takes (many) hours and requires
(many) GB of RAM both to route and to host.

cycle.travel penalises surface types variably: surface=mud gets a big
penalty, surface=gravel not so much.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] cycle.travel US bike routing, and unreviewed rural TIGER

[Richard Fairhurst]

Just as a postscript to this discussion I thought I'd cite an example area.
If you look here, in Georgia:

   http://cycle.travel/map?lat=31.9023lon=-84.0398zoom=14

you'll see that most of the roads are unreviewed TIGER residentials. Of
those, these are adjacent to each other:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/9359782 - good tarmac, should be
highway=tertiary
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/9359913 - unpaved road;
highway=unclassified, surface=unpaved
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/9359784 - probably tertiary, but lousy
geometry at the S
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/9359783 - whoops, where did the
connectivity go?

All of this is trivially fixable but right now there's no way of using them
for routing or sensible cartography. Do dive in - the cycle.travel rendering
makes it obvious which bits need fixing, and you learn to identify the roads
which are likely to be paved through roads and therefore targets to fix.
It's quite good fun. :)

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] cycle.travel US bike routing, and unreviewed rural TIGER

[Richard Fairhurst]

SteveA wrote:
 Richard (Fairhurst), if cycle.travel/map's router logic is not 
 paying attention to surface= tags, perhaps it should, as 
 doing so truly can improve selected routes

It very much does - it'll look at surface=, and failing that tracktype= or
smoothness=, as one of the principal criteria for how cyclable is this?.
I've suffered on too many bumpy dirt paths in my time to let that one past!

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] cycle.travel US bike routing, and unreviewed rural TIGER

[Richard Fairhurst]

Harald Kliems wrote:
 Very nice, Richard! One quick comment: I might not be the only 
 who doesn't always change the tiger:reviewed tag when fixing 
 TIGER-imported roads. I don't know if that's technically feasible, 
 but maybe it would be better to check if a way has been modified 
 since import, independent of the tiger:reviewed tag. 

Absolutely. I did consider this and it's very feasible - osm2pgsql can tell
you the user who last modified a way, and if it's DaveHansenTiger or
woodpeck-fixbot, you can presume it's unmodified.

Unfortunately, there are way too many false positives. Partly this is
consequential damage (in particular, ways which have been split) but also
bulk edits - for example, in several of states, people have assigned (say)
maxspeed=35mph to all ways matching certain criteria, including dirt tracks
tagged as highway=residential. This means the last editor is no guarantee
that a residential is actually a usable paved road.

After a few experiments (and I've been working on this all year, pretty
much) I concluded that the tiger:reviewed tag is the only way of doing it.
I'd restate that I'm only using this on rural residentials - anything
unclassified or higher, or in an urban area, is assumed ok. Personally I
have F6 assigned as a shortcut key in P2 for highway=unclassified for ease
of quick retagging. :)

cheers
Richard





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[Talk-us] cycle.travel US bike routing, and unreviewed rural TIGER

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

At State of the Map US last weekend I was really pleased to unveil 
bicycle routing for the US (and Canada) at my site, cycle.travel.


The planner, at http://cycle.travel/map , will plan a bike route for you 
between any two points - whether in the same city or on opposite sides 
of the continent. It's all based on OSM data but also takes account of 
elevation and other factors.


I dogfooded it with a three-day ride around New York state after 
SOTM-US, and it found me some lovely quiet roads in and around the 
Catskills. I hope it'll be equally useful for the other two-wheelers 
amongst us. There's still a lot I want to add (as detailed at 
http://cycle.travel/news/new_cycle_travel_directions_for_the_us_and_canada) 
but I hope you enjoy it.


Plug aside, there's a couple of things might be relevant to US mappers.


First of all, I'm aiming high with this - the aim isn't just to make the 
best OSM-powered bike router of the US, but the best bike router full 
stop for commuters, leisure cyclists and tourers. (I leave the 
athletes to Strava!)


Here in Britain, experience over the years has been that good bike 
routing and good bike cartography - historically via CycleStreets and 
OpenCycleMap - are a really effective way of driving contributions to 
OSM. So if you know cyclists who aren't yet contributing to OSM, maybe 
throw this at them - and if it doesn't find the route they'd recommend, 
maybe there's some unmapped infrastructure they could be persuaded to add!



Second, the routing and cartography both heavily distrust unreviewed TIGER.

In other words, it won't route over a rural road tagged as
highway=residential
tiger:reviewed=no

Any road with tiger:reviewed removed or altered, any road in urban 
areas, and any road with highway=unclassified or greater is assumed to 
be a usable paved road. (There are a few additional bits of logic but 
that's the general principle.)


Unreviewed rural residentials are shown on the map (high zoom levels) as 
a faint grey dashed line, explained in the key as Unsurveyed road.


I've been finding this a really useful way of locating unreviewed TIGER 
and fixing it... it's actually quite addictive. :) Looking for roads 
which cross rivers, or with long sweeping curves, is an easy way of 
identifying quick wins. My modus operandi is to retag 2+-lane roads with 
painted centrelines as tertiary, smaller paved roads as unclassified, 
and just to take the tiger:reviewed tag off paved residential roads. 
Anything unpaved gets a surface tag and/or highway=track.


I can't promise minutely updates I'm afraid - the routing/map update 
process takes two full days to run so it'll be more monthly than 
minutely. But I hope you find it as useful as I do. You'll see there's a 
tiny little pen icon at the bottom right of http://cycle.travel/map 
which takes you to edit the current location in OSM.



Finally, many thanks to everyone who's tested it so far, particularly 
Steve All - your feedback was and continues to be enormously useful.


cheers
Richard

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[OSM-talk] What's your OSM story?

[Richard Fairhurst]

In just over a week's time it's State of the Map US (yay). I'm giving a 
talk which will touch on why people contribute to OSM - and how we can 
get more!


I'd love to hear your story as to what got you started.

I know there's some good Serious Research on the topic, but for now I'm 
more interested in local colour - individual stories from OSM 
contributors. Post here, drop me a line (rich...@systemed.net), or on my 
diary at http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Richard/diary/35107 .


Thanks!

cheers
Richard

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Re: [Talk-GB] too many universities in Cambridge

[Richard Fairhurst]

David Earl wrote:
 Can you put that on a different thread.

David - could you trim messages before replying? 1 line of message for 100
line of quote isn't good. Thanks.

Richard




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Re: [OSRM-talk] Use another data source than OSM

[Richard Fairhurst]

Patrick Niklaus wrote:

I think cycle.travel runs on data from Ordnance Survy. So it is
absolutely doable, but I don't think you will find any importers
(targeting OSRM) for commercial data sources as OpenSource. (most
providers require you to sign a NDA before you are allowed to even
look at the documentation...).


cycle.travel runs on OSM data, but it's augmented with supplementary 
data from Ordnance Survey and other sources. I use a little homegrown 
tool to add extra tags to the ways in the OSM .pbf:

https://github.com/systemed/tagmangle

Romain - I'd suggest you start by creating a small .osm file with an 
extract of your converted data (say, a town or county) and running OSRM 
over that. As Patrick says, there are a few gotchas with connectivity 
and tags. Once you're happy with that, you can rewrite your tool to 
create a .pbf.


cheers
Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] Please ban Xxzme in wiki

[Richard Fairhurst]

Andy Mabbett wrote:
 In the absence of blatant vandalism or base abuse, I would 
 have expected, first, a recent, clear and unequivocal warning on 
 the user's talk page

No. Please remember that the primary means of discussion and consensus in
OSM is mailing lists, even when the subject is the wiki, and even though the
mailing lists suck. There is no precedent for obtaining consensus on
community decisions via wiki talk pages.

Talk pages might be how it's done in Wikipedia, but we're not Wikipedia.

Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] Please ban Xxzme in wiki

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ilya Zverev wrote:
 Who banned Xxzme in wiki a while ago? Please do it again.

Seconded.

Richard




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Re: [Talk-GB] elsan_points

[Richard Fairhurst]

Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
 What can we assume the UK tag waterway=elsan_point means? One or more
 of:
 
  1) Walk up toilet
  2) Cassette dump for boats
  3) Cassette dump for motorhomes
  4) Pump out

Very firmly and unambiguously 2.

 I propose making the assumption the present elsan_point tag means* #3*,

Could I make the evidently-not-bleeding-obvious-enough observation that the
waterway= bit is quite a good hint that it's not meant for motorhomes.

Although, http://changingears.com/images/terra-wind-3-330.jpg

Richard




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Re: [Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
 The problem of OSM editors being confused by a strange line that 
 cuts through houses in the editor perhaps.

Which is perhaps 0.1% of the (largely rural) abandoned railroads mapped in
OSM, so largely immaterial to the discussion. And if you're confused by that
0.1%, heaven knows what you'll do when faced with the superfluity of admin
boundaries in many parts of the world. (And let's not start on proposed
highways.)

I'm fully with Russ and Greg on this one. For the few vocal deletionists who
seem to have ants in their pants about this, may I suggest that you just
learn to read 'railway=abandoned' as 'manmade=former_railway_grade', which
is entirely verifiable and consistent with OSM's approach of meaningful
broad-brush duck tagging. Thanks.

Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Boundaries and verifiability (was Re: Retagging hamlets in the US)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Greg Morgan wrote:
 2. To quote Richard Fairhurst, Seriously, OSM in the [England] s still 
 way beyond broken.  You can open it at any random location and the map 
 is just __fictional__. Here are two random examples bing;OS StreetView  
 [2] shape is approximate. Needs proper survey as mostly built after 
 current BING imagery date [3]

I have no idea, at all, what point you are trying to make, but I would
appreciate it if you didn't make it by deliberately misquoting me. Thank
you.

Richard




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Re: [OSM-talk] Routing across parks

[Richard Fairhurst]

Dave F. wrote:
 On Richard F. cycle.travel routing. How do reset  start again?

There's a Close route button at the top of the turn-by-turn directions -
click that and it'll clear the route.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] [Imports] amenity=bicycle_repair_station :::: only 18 so far

[Richard Fairhurst]

brycenesbitt wrote:
 Are there any additional comments on the issue of importing (actually
 synchronizing) 500 bicycle repair stations?
 With this import OSM would become the most comprehensive database of 
 repair station locations.

Where the location is good, it would be great to have these in OSM.

In cases where the location is a bit less firm, I still suggest you go for
it in rural areas (bike routes, small towns, etc.): the location is likely
to be good enough and it could make a real difference to someone stranded
miles from anywhere.

For cities where there are local OSM mappers and where the location is
inexact, I'd suggest that you just use notes.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] GNIS POI populations

[Richard Fairhurst]

Minh Nguyen wrote:
 I think we should consider a mechanical edit to update these tags

While you're thinking about GNIS mechanical edits, could I suggest one for
GNIS-sourced POIs with (historical) in the name?

There are several gazillion amenity=post_office, name=Fred Creek Post Office
(historical) in the database. Clearly these aren't actually post offices any
more. Ideally I guess they should be disused:amenity=post_office, or
historic:amenity, or something.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Aopenstreetmap.org+gnis+historicalgws_rd=ssl

I'd do it myself but this is about the one area where you _do_ need JOSM
rather than P2. ;)

cheers
Richard





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[Talk-us] Bike route relation issues

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

I've encountered two problematic bike route relations in the US and 
would appreciate thoughts as to the best way to deal with them.


One is the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/3161159

The other is I-5 in Oregon:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/69485

Both are tagged with type=route, route=bicycle, network=rcn.

In both cases they're not of the same character that one would usually 
expect from a long-distance RCN route. One is mostly unsurfaced and 
therefore requires a certain type of bike; the other is entirely 
Interstate and therefore requires a confident rider.


I changed the GDMBR to route=mtb (which is how it'd be tagged elsewhere 
in the world), but the original editor has since changed it back with a 
plaintive changeset comment in 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/27862412 .


The I-5 relation seems wrong to me (it's not really a bike route per se, 
it's an all-purpose route on which bikes are permitted) but I'm not too 
worried as it's easy to find its character by parsing the constituent 
ways, which are all (of course) highway=motorway.


But the GDMBR is very problematic in that many of its constituent ways 
are highway=residential, without a surface tag. Until these ways are 
fixed, the relation is very misleading and likely to break bike routing 
(which generally gives an uplift to bike route relations) for all apart 
from MTB-ers.


Ideally I believe it should be route=mtb, but the original creator seems 
hostile, perhaps for prominence on OpenCycleMap issues. (I've messaged 
him but no reply as yet.) There may, of course, perhaps be another 
commonly used tagging that I'm not aware of.


What does the community think?

cheers
Richard

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Re: [OSRM-talk] Issue with chosing a sub-optimal route

[Richard Fairhurst]

Rudolf Mayer wrote:

Ideal should be http://osrm.at/atu, which however gets a slower time
computed - and I don't really understand why...

- Both ways have the same speed limit (ro:Urban)
- The second option is shorter


The trunk road (219294960) has smoothness=very_bad set on it. This will 
cause a slower speed to be assumed.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch 2 - Is it still being developed? Tasks?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Dave F. wrote:
 I still use P2, I've tried the others a few times, but keep 
 returning. Is it still being developed? I've noticed a 'tasks' 
 button has been added.

Yes, it is, albeit sporadically. Now it's free of the pressure of being the
default editor, it's able to gain a few more unusual features now and then.
I've documented them in my user diary:
   http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Richard/diary

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] Balance of power (was: Re: How to vote to match your view)

[Richard Fairhurst]

[Apologies to talk@ readers for this follow-up to a post on osmf-talk@. 
I'm not an OSMF member and therefore can't post to osmf-talk@, but as 
I'm being spoken about over there, I'd appreciate the opportunity to 
respond.]


Steve Coast wrote:

See, there was no group that mobbed Richard out the board. The CWG
took away Twitter access from everyone without any consultation,
thinking Ivan's tweet was mine. I asked for it back, used every
channel as I outlined. Richard sadly quit feeling CWG was being
overpowered by the board but that's not what happened. The CWG took
Twitter away from the people using it without talking to anyone, then
was surprised this wasn't okay.


For the record:

Communications Working Group didn't think Ivan's tweet was yours. We 
genuinely didn't know who had sent it. (From what I remember of the 
content of the tweet, it didn't appear to be from a native English 
speaker, and at first I thought it might have been Emilie.)


At the time, CWG was aiming for a step change in our communications. In 
particular, we were aiming to follow up our very successful switch2osm 
campaign, and were in the early stages of planning a second campaign 
aimed at recruiting new mappers.


A large part of that was professionalising our message - bringing 
sharper focus to OSM's outbound communications, to consistently push the 
message that mapping was accessible, enjoyable, and made a difference. 
Basic marketing and not the sort of thing that should come as a surprise 
to anyone.


To get this focused message across, we needed to ensure that everything 
going out on our Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts was in line. In 
an ideal world we would like to have drawn up simple house style and 
messaging guidelines (again, marketing 101) for those with access.


However, our hand was forced by this badly phrased tweet, from persons 
unknown, endorsing a map which failed to attribute OSM (years later, I 
can't even remember what map it was!). Changing the Twitter password and 
asking those who wanted a message to go out to contact us, which is what 
we did, seemed the easiest and most sensible short-term measure.


Unfortunately you decided to take this as a personal affront, when no 
such affront was intended, and to campaign volubly for CWG's work to be 
overruled because of this.


There is absolutely no personal animus in this. Sure, I disagree with 
you on many things, but you're an engaging guy to chat to over a pint 
and I have no doubt we'll do so again some time. But let me make it 
clear that I did not quit because CWG was being overpowered by the 
board. I quit because it was clear that there was no likelihood of 
improving OSM through the Foundation, in any fashion, when 
well-intentioned, industrious, and skilled volunteer work could be 
overturned by emotive say-so.


I see no sign that this has changed, and that is why I have no intention 
of rejoining the Foundation.


As a postscript, I believe switch2osm was the last substantial marketing 
effort that OSMF has done. All the good publicity for OSM since then has 
been from third parties, particularly Mapbox. Progress in OSM happens 
despite the Foundation, not because of it.


Richard

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[OSM-talk] Unelected OSMF advisers

[Richard Fairhurst]

I am a little concerned that the (already overwhelming) task of fixing 
OSMF, which has been entrusted to a board of seven good people, is being 
made still harder by people in mysterious unelected roles offering their 
advice.


I know of at least two: Mike Collinson is chair of the (AIUI moribund) 
'Management Team'. Steve Coast is 'chairman emeritus' - I'm not sure 
whether Simon Poole has also been offered this title. I believe (but 
don't know) there may be others who receive copies of, and can send, 
management emails but aren't elected in any way.


Two requests:

First, for the sake of openness, it would be good to see these 
relationships documented on the OSMF website.


Second, while the new board decides on its direction, a period of 
self-imposed silence by these people would be considerate. Frederik, 
Kathleen and Paul have been newly elected to do a difficult job. Their 
work will be made all the more difficult by a cacophony of advice from 
those without a mandate.


This isn't personal - I like Mike very much, while I think it's fairly 
comprehensively documented that Steve and I don't get on - but it seems, 
to me, common decency that if you ask someone to do a job, you give them 
the time and space to do it.


Richard


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Re: [OSM-talk] Unelected OSMF advisers

[Richard Fairhurst]

Michael Collinson wrote:

For transparency, I have attended about one year of board meetings now I
think (it is minuted). I took the approach that I should simply listen
and pick up items that the MT could handle. I was however encouraged to
take a more participatory role provided that I do not take part in
voting. On board email, I answer questions that are asked and
occassionally make reports or specific requests from the Management Team
or License Working Group.  Else, the value is that I am generally aware
of issues and do not need to be briefed. I cannot make comment on board
meeting or email detail, but I do not think it breaching confidentiality
to say that Steve's participation is overwhelming passive ... he makes
his engagement through public, open channels to my knowledge.

During the approximately the past three weeks, and only then, I have
certainly been aggressive in giving advice ... and asking it.  Yes, it
is possible that I have over-stepped bounds.


I find it difficult to imagine our mild-mannered Mike Collinson being 
aggressive!


The new board members have been elected because the electorate believe 
they are the people best placed to make OSMF better; because the 
electorate likes their vision for change.


When a benevolent long-timer offers advice and briefings, there is an 
implicit invitation to the newcomers to go native - for future 
activities to tend towards business as usual. No document is neutral, 
no matter how well-intentioned; it is written within a particular 
worldview, with its own assumptions and backdrop.


But sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is exactly what's needed, without 
preconceptions about we tried that once and it didn't work, without 
we always have to think about this important matter. If the more 
long-standing board members choose to resist change, they do at least 
have a mandate. Advisers don't, and should bear their privileged 
position responsibly.


By all means you, and Steve, and others can be on hand to offer advice 
if asked. Your newly published document is interesting - very much so - 
but it's written with the experience and from the perspective of us old 
farts. Newcomers to the board should have fresh perspectives, fresh 
ideas. Let the new board form their first thoughts free of external 
pressure.


Richard



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Re: [OSM-talk] [Talk-us] Fix a Forest - experimental tiles from US Forest Service data

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 11/11/2014 20:57, Clifford Snow wrote:

Suggestion - set the tile background to transparent so we can see
underlying image in JOSM.


I can certainly have a look at doing that. Do you/anyone know whether 
transparent tiles would still be usable in iD?


cheers
Richard


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[Talk-us] Fix a Forest - experimental tiles from US Forest Service data

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

I've created a set of tiles from US Forest Service road data for the 155 
US National Forests.


This is to help with TIGER fixup in these rural areas, where tracks, 
trails and entirely non-existent paths are often tagged with a bare 
highway=residential. The US Forest Service data is greatly superior to 
the original TIGER data and has metadata on surface type/quality, but is 
unsuitable for automatic import into OSM because it would overwrite 
mappers' existing work in these areas.


You can access the tiles at:
Potlatch 2/JOSM - http://osm.cycle.travel/forest/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png
iD - http://osm.cycle.travel/forest/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

and they're included in the editor-imagery-index list used by P2 and iD. 
The tiles are available up to z19. Use of Potlatch 2's new floating 
imagery window mode is recommended, so that you can work from both Bing 
imagery and these tiles at the same time. :)


You can also explore from the comfort of your browser:
http://osm.cycle.travel/index.html

where there's an Edit this area in OpenStreetMap link at the bottom right.

The key is:
Surface:
yellow outline = paved
grey outline = gravel
Road type:
white with black casing = paved road
dashed grey = gravel road suitable for cars
dashed brown = dirt road
dotted grey = not maintained for cars
Maintenance level:
grey dots = 4x4 only
green dots = usable by cars
black dots = moderately comfortable for cars
black frequent dots = very comfortable for cars
Points of interest:
car = roadside park
flag = Forest Service station
ski = winter recreation area
hiker = trailhead
campsite = campsite
picnic site = picnic site
(There's some degree of overlap, but this is present in the original 
USFS data.)


When remapping, I would suggest the following tags as a minimum:
highway=unclassified - paved road
	highway=unclassified, surface=unpaved/gravel/dirt - unpaved road 
suitable for cars

highway=service - road to isolated dwelling or other building
highway=track - unpaved track or road suitable for 4x4s
highway=path - narrow linear clearing, too narrow for motor vehicles
	[delete entirely] - raw TIGER data with no signs of track or path in 
either imagery or Forest Service tiles


US Forest Service data is public domain so there's no need for further 
attribution when using this data, though a source= tag is always good 
practice.


Hope these are helpful, and let me know of any further suggestions.

cheers
Richard

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Re: [Talk-us] Fix a Forest - experimental tiles from US Forest Service data

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 11/11/2014 20:57, Clifford Snow wrote:

Suggestion - set the tile background to transparent so we can see
underlying image in JOSM.


I can certainly have a look at doing that. Do you/anyone know whether 
transparent tiles would still be usable in iD?


cheers
Richard


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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Regarding community guidelines for map layers

[Richard Fairhurst]

Matt Morrow wrote:
 That is in contradiction to the Open Data License/Use Cases page.

Please don't use that page. As per the preamble:

This wiki page was used for discussion and development of the move to the
Open Database License. It is not legal advice, and is likely to be
inaccurate or incomplete. Please do not use this page as a reference for
what you can or can't do.

Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] Voting mechanical edit: UK shop names

[Richard Fairhurst]

Matthijs Melissen wrote:
 I therefore think inviting list members to vote in order to make 
 the position of the community explicit - in addition to taking 
 comments on the mailing list into account, not as a replacement 
 of it - is the safest way to proceed.

On reflection, it would be more helpful, and less controversial, if you were
to describe this process as a poll rather than a vote.

A vote is traditionally used to move to a binding decision. A poll is
seeking to gauge the level of support, often as a piece of supporting
evidence for a wider case. In this case I hope you'll agree the latter is
more appropriate.

Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] Voting mechanical edit: UK shop names

[Richard Fairhurst]

Dan S wrote:
 Also, Matthijs sent out an RFC email proposing this whole process - 
 he got lots of feedback (which he has taken into consideration), 
 but no-one objected to the voting mechanism. It's not your fault if 
 you only just noticed this happening, of course

Indeed, which I only just did. I think you misunderstand the point.

Whether or not Matthijs renames a given shop from the Co-operative food to
The Co-operative Food is of minimal interest to me. As long as the new
name tag is actually what's on the ground (and AFAICT from a distance,
several of the suggested changes originally weren't, but feedback has helped
this get better) then, yeah, whatever floats your boat. As you say, he has
been open with the whole process.

What I am very strongly opposed to is this entirely new idea that mechanical
edits can be ok-ed by a wiki vote.

The wiki voting system is trivially subvertible, as has been repeatedly
demonstrated. It really doesn't take much imagination to see how, even
though Matthijs is proceeding in good faith, this precedent could be misused
by others in the future. That is what I am seeking to avoid.

Richard





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[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap ten years on, and why it's time for a fresh slate

[Richard Fairhurst]

This one's going to be long, but it might be worth it, I hope.

I've been involved in OSM for almost ten years now. 22nd November is my 
OSM birthday:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2004-November/000111.html

Message 000111. Right now talk@ is up to 71235, never mind the other 
lists. Come to Charlbury on the 22nd, I'll buy you all a drink and find 
you somewhere to sleep. (Don't tell Anna.)


OSM has changed my life, and my outlook, in several ways. One is 
realising that a small number of thoughtful, committed citizens can 
change the world, without any hope of a fast buck - which is a noble 
idea we all have in our 20s but this was the first real-life proof, to 
me, that it really does work.


The other, perhaps more important, is: it's down to you. If you want 
change, change things. In 2005 we expressed this by demanding action, 
not words, from anyone who said 'OSM should do it like this' on the 
lists. The word 'should' was a red rag to us back then.


In time the word 'do-ocracy' was coined. But the other half of the 
do-ocracy equation has never received enough credit. It's not just that 
actions speak louder than words; it's that we trust you to carry out 
the actions. OSM doesn't have a moderation system for edits. Site 
improvements don't have to go through five board committees. It's OSM. 
You're a contributor. You've given us your time. We trust you. Do great 
things.


That, more than anything, is why OSM works. We value, and trust, our 
contributors. Every one of them. OSM is 'do great things' multiplied by 
ten thousand.


The slight wrinkle is that this only gets you 95% of the way there.

The 95% is astonishing. The 95% is mapping large parts of the world to 
ridiculous levels of detail. We are by most metrics the best available 
map of Germany, the UK, increasingly France, Russia and the urban US, 
and a hundred places I don't even know about. (I made this comment 
elsewhere. I was immediately picked up by a Belgian mapper, Marc, saying 
hey, what about us?. He was right. I didn't know. That's how far we 
have come.)


The 95% is running the most crazily lean, efficient hardware setup, 
constantly reinventing: our API went from plain-old-Ruby to Rails to 
C++, our tile servers from monolithic to distributed, our database from 
MySQL to Postgres, our UI from entirely serverside to largely 
clientside. The 95% is an ecosystem of renderers and routers and, dare I 
admit it, the sleekest desktop map data editor there is and its universe 
of amazing plugins. (It begins with J. Don't make me say the name.)


So if I talk about the 5% that do-ocracy doesn't accomplish, that's no 
slur on the OSM community. Our 5% is Wikipedia's 30% and Google's 95%. 
We do more, ourselves, better, than anyone else.


Rewind to 2012. It was pretty clear we needed a new default editor on 
osm.org. Potlatch 2 still worked, but Flash Player was already (rightly) 
on the way out, and the six-year-old Potlatch user interface - initially 
designed for moderately clued-up users working on a blank canvas back in 
2006 - was confusing for the newbies attracted by the explosion of 
public interest in OSM.


This was a 5% problem. We needed a new beginners' editor, but no-one was 
clamouring to write it. The 95% of experienced OSMers, understandably, 
wanted to work on JOSM plugins for experienced OSMers. I tentatively 
started work on a newbie-friendly JavaScript editor called iD (I'm 
terrible at naming software) but I was pretty burned out on OSM 
development at the time and only got so far.


Happily, in this case, there was a Fairy Godmother in the shape of the 
Knight Foundation and Mapbox. The Knight Foundation funded Mapbox to 
rebuild and complete iD. As part of this some incredibly skilled 
JavaScript developers and designers got to work on it. I don't think the 
outcome could have been any better, and it continues to delight me right 
now: while we're pointlessly beating seven shades out of each other in 
this thread, osmbot: [osm-website|master|John Firebaugh] Update to iD 
v1.6.1 has just flashed up on IRC.


iD is how it ought to work. iD isn't telling the 95% how to map or what 
to map. It isn't saying Mapbox want turn restrictions, therefore the 
osm.org default will be devoted to mapping turn restrictions. It's 
simply a 5% intervention, a new tool which no-one else was writing, to 
increase the 95% of do-ers, to bring us more contributors. The effort in 
building it will benefit us many times over.


But we can't always expect a Fairy Godmother to appear. We struck lucky 
in this one case. There are plenty of places where we haven't.


I can recite a few of them. We have very little mobile presence, even 
though smartphones are ideal surveying devices; a 5% intervention here 
would bring so many more people to our 95%. Diversity is almost becoming 
a hackneyed word in OSM but let's restate the truth of it; a 5% 
intervention would make sure that our 95% of do-ers grows to 

[OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] Modus operandi of the board

[Richard Fairhurst]

Simon Poole wrote:

Kathleen Danielson wrote:

That said, I would like to voice my support for Richard's
suggestion that the full board step down.

It simply is a very unrealistic option given that it would require a
mechanism that doesn't exist to force all board members to resign.


Absolutely no force required. I would hope that the existing board 
members would recognise the virtue of a fresh mandate and a clean start.


Incidentally, only three of the current board members (Simon, Frederik 
and Kate) have contributed to or shown any sign of being aware of this 
debate. Matt of course is stepping down but I hope Dermot, Henk and 
Oliver will take this chance to engage with the community they represent 
and serve.


Richard


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Re: [OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] Modus operandi of the board

[Richard Fairhurst]

[this was originally posted to osmf-talk; I'm not a member of OSMF so 
can't reply to it there. I'm also breaking my self-imposed discipline of 
not posting to the talk@ list for this, but I figure it's important]


Sarah Hoffman wrote:

while checking the candidate list for the upcoming board elections, I came
across Frederik's maifesto here:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Frederik_Ramm/2014_OSMF_Board_Elections_Manifesto

This sheds some rather bad light on how the board operates, indicating that
some of the practises border on the illigal. I understand that this is the
individual opinion of a single board member but I believe it is important
that such accusations are discussed because I don't see how the board can
operate efficiently otherwise. It is even more important in the light of
the upcoming elections. Reading this manifesto indicates that there is
little point in standing for election as there is nothing but frustration
to achieve in the board.


As a former board member, I would concur with Frederik's posting which 
tallies with my unhappy experience on the board.


It is clear, I'm afraid, that the OSMF board is broken. Plenty of people 
know this privately but it hasn't been admitted publicly. We should stop 
pretending.


There are some really smart people in this project and it's sad that 
most have chosen to involve themselves in their local organisations 
rather than OSMF (I'm thinking particularly the US and France here). I 
have no personal animus against the current board - quite the opposite, 
they're lovely people - but it's clear it isn't working. (And I take my 
share of responsibility as a one-time board member for failing to fix it.)


I would like to see:

- the whole board stand down in advance of this election;
- now and in the future, those who have already served two 
standard-length terms (i.e. six years) should refrain from re-election 
and further involvement; this is good practice in any organisation (e.g. 
the US presidency!) but especially so in a fast-moving technology project.


Richard

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Re: [Talk-us] Statistics of board candidate edits

[Richard Fairhurst]

A friendly thought from across the pond; just something to provoke thoughts,
feel free to disregard.

OSM in the US is without doubt the #1 country at organising conferences. I
was privileged enough to go to Portland and SF and they were both superb
events. (This year's SOTM-EU in Karlsruhe was, of course, the other one
making up the top 3, and I couldn't choose between them.)

The US is probably also the #1 country at encouraging corporate use of OSM -
I don't need to bring up the examples, you know them better than me. And
there are lots of other accolades in your national palmarès.

The one area where I could unequivocally say the US isn't yet #1 is in the
quality of the map. #1 is clearly Germany (curse those crazy Teutons); but
Britain, France, and, quite seriously, Russia are not far behind. 

Your new board's responsibility is to make OSM grow, in every way, within
the US. That means continuing to be #1 at conferences and #1 at corporate
use, but it also means improving on the #5 ranking for map quality. You do
of course have Martijn, who has forgotten more than most of us ever knew
about OSM data in the States; Alex's great work in urban areas with Mapbox;
and no doubt many more I'm not aware of. Paul's analysis is just one data
point but I hope, for anyone who thinks understanding US data quality is an
issue, it could at least be a relevant one.

Elect a great board - I'm sure you will.

cheers
Richard





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[OSM-talk] osmf-talk list

[Richard Fairhurst]

For those who (like me) are not members of OSMF there are a couple of 
interesting discussions on the osmf-talk list that you may like to 
observe. Only OSMF members can post to osmf-talk, but anyone can read.


https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2014-September/date.html

Richard

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Re: [Talk-GB] NCN279 Exeter to Okehampton: Secret Cycle Route?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Guy Collins wrote:
 NCN279 is now also part of the international Tour De Manche route, 
 a route around Northern France and Southern England. Given the 
 recent addition to the international cycle route I am surprised it 
 is still not signed better (at all!). Will have to investigate when I 
 next venture out that way.

Cycle route surveying is probably the second most fun thing about OSM after
pub surveying. :)

Someone's added the Dartmoor (cycle-)Way to the map recently. I understand
that the northern section of this is NCN 28 so have piggybacked on their
survey to add the relevant sections to the route relation.

With that in mind it does seem odd that there are apparently two separate
NCN routes running due east of Okehampton (28 and 279), briefly rejoining at
Sticklepath. But stranger things have happened...

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] NCN 279 Exeter to Okehampton (and other destructions)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Guy Collins wrote:
 The cycle route from Exeter to Okehampton, formerly NCN 28 
 seems to have been removed in this change set:
 https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/15675074

 It had the wrong route reference, it now being 279. I have added 
 it once and will not be adding it back on to the map again I'm 
 afraid. That's several hours of my life gone! There once was 
 NCN signage on various points on the route although I've not 
 noticed any recently.

That's a different route to NCN 279. NCN 279 goes north of Dartmoor, whereas
the previously-tagged NCN 28 went across it, via some old tramways IIRC.

We discussed this in a thread starting at
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2013-April/014649.html and
there was no evidence for the route over Dartmoor ever having existed other
than as a one-time proposal. It appears to have been a mistake in the DfT
data.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Greg Morgan wrote:
 It feels like the discussion is about fixing a routing problem
 when in reality you would exclude people that want to make it 
 to Cleator Arizona or other recreational destinations.  The 
 people at the Cleator Bar and Yacht Club[4] would question 
 your judgement that this a fictional place or that is not 
 a meaningful destination.

No, you misunderstand.

No-one is going to entirely delete roads/tracks that exist in reality.

The prevalent issues with backwoods TIGER are:

a) highway=residential on roads/tracks that go nowhere near a residence
b) highway=residential where no road/track exists of any sort 
c) no indication of surface type (bearing in mind that the rest of the
developed world predominantly uses highway=residential for a paved road)

How you solve these issues is your decision as the US community. If you want
to keep highway=residential for the tracks that exist and add a surface= or
tracktype= tag, you do that. Personally I would suggest that you use either
highway=track or highway=unclassified and add a surface tag, but it ain't my
country. The good thing about this discussion is that ideas are emerging
about how to solve the problem, both in tagging and in resources.

Distinguishing between gravel roads, forest tracks, suburban streets and
non-existent things - all of which might currently be mapped as
highway=residential - isn't excluding people who want to make it to
Cleator, Arizona. Quite the opposite: a more accurate, clearer map, whether
for rendering or routing, for truck drivers or car drivers or cyclists,
makes it easier for people to get to Cleator, Arizona, and a thousand other
places.

Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)

[Richard Fairhurst]

Richard Welty wrote:
 agreed. i have spent quite a lot of time in Iowa farming 
 territory where the road grid consists mostly of high 
 quality, well maintained gravel roads that are in regular, 
 heavy use by farm equipment. i generally give these 
 highway=unclassified, surface=gravel.

Great to see this issue getting some airtime.

Obviously it's entirely your choice nationally as to what tags you use, as
long as they don't diverge too wildly from the rest of the world. Having a
distinction between highway=track and highway=unclassified;surface=gravel is
certainly one possibility. It doesn't really matter as long as there's
agreement and a will to fix it.

I think the other half of the equation, however, is actually getting this
fixed across the country. At present it appears to be just a small number of
mappers doing it in their areas; the US is a big place, and at the current
rate it's not going to be fixed any time soon. Drive-by tools like
MapRoulette are generally a good solution for systemic data quality
problems, but in this case I think the problem's too big for that.

What would help here? A Tasking Manager instance with defined areas (say,
10km x 10km, or counties, or...)? Anything else?

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Abandoned railway

[Richard Fairhurst]

Russ Nelson wrote:
 I fear that the deletionism infection has jumped from Wikipedia 
 to OpenStreetMap.

...is exactly what I was going to say.

Seriously, OSM in the US, outside a few cities, is still way beyond broken.
You can open it at any random location and the map is just fictional. (I
did, just now: http://www.osm.org/edit#map=13/36.1938/-103.6446 . Half of
those roads don't exist at all, and the other half are barely roads,
certainly not residential ones as tagged.) Why would you (contentiously)
delete railway=abandoned for an actual abandoned railway trackbed when the
map has thousands, millions, of fictional or entirely mistagged roads and
tracks?

I know it's a long-standing OSM joke, but at this rate we _are_ going to
have to import some Germans to the US, because it looks like the only way
the map will ever get fixed.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-us] Abandoned railway

[Richard Fairhurst]

Mike N. wrote:
 Landing on the high plains desert in the west does not make a 
 good case that OSM in the US is broken.  Desert imagery cues 
 do not match those of conventional climates.

I really wish I could agree with you, Mike, but my experience is that ~75%
of the US landmass is like that.

I just randomly alighted on somewhere in Texas. It's the same story.
'highway=residential's that don't exist or are, at best, very faint farm
tracks at the edge of a field. The majority of the roads I click on just
aren't there.

Now looking at somewhere random in Missouri. It's better - the geometries
are reasonably well lined up with the imagery. I'd say that around
two-thirds of the roads I'm clicking on are actually roads, and perhaps just
one-third are faint tracks or just non-existent.

The US community (and, dare I mention it, the late NE2) has done really well
cleaning up the major road data. If you're going from somewhere biggish to
somewhere biggish in a car, the routing will generally be good. I can
happily get OSRM to route from town to town and it works fine.

But that's not a map, that's a sparse routing graph. If I pick a random
highway=residential anywhere in the US, I have no confidence that it'll be
drivable in an average car or cyclable on an average bike. I certainly
couldn't expect it to be a road principally for residential access, in the
way that the rest of the world uses highway=residential. And that's without
going into nice-to-haves like rivers and woodland and so on. 

I don't think people realise quite how far behind OSM is in the US (the
biggest cities aside) compared to Western Europe. I can look anywhere in the
Highlands of Scotland, or barely-inhabited Mid-Wales, and OSM will be right.
Sure, some of the rarer footpaths might be missing and the stream geometry
might be a bit skewiff, but most information will be there, and what's there
will be correct. Similarly, la France profonde has come on in leaps and
bounds over the last couple of years. I don't need to tell you about
Germany. :)

Fixing the rural US is eminently achievable, and achievable right now. A
Tasking Manager instance, for a clearly defined project, would be great. I
think you'd get the armchair mappers of the world rallying to the task. If
you wanted to widen participation, you could probably build a
MapRoulette-on-steroids that provided a fast retagging UI within the
browser, with no need to fire up an editor. Or whatever.

But we can't get to OSM's 20th birthday and still have the same problem. It
needs to be fixed sooner or later, and my sense is that, at the current rate
of progress, it will be later - probably not within the next ten years.
Let's decide to make it sooner instead.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] Tagging of British canals.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi Richard,

 I am working my way around the canals of Britain, tracing the canal banks 
 and tidying up locks etc.

Your work is really welcome and as someone with a particular interest in the
British canals I'm glad to see it taking place.

In terms of playing nice with the OSM community, rather than just using
OSM as your own personal data store, there are two points I'd like to
emphasise:

1. If you find yourself extensively changing existing work, or doing things
differently from what you've seen other mappers do, take a minute to
reflect. That work is very probably how it is for a reason (for example, the
towpaths with highway=cycleway which we corresponded about earlier). You
might not be aware of that reason, or you might be aware but disagree with
it. In either case, you should take the time to talk to the community and
find out why the consensus has formed the way it has.

2. Changeset comments. Be descriptive. Your edits are generally great but,
to be (over?) frank, your changeset comments really aren't. editing canals
and related structures isn't very helpful - it's pretty much I did some
work. Better examples would be:
   Tracing waterway outline, north Stratford Canal
   Rationalising lock tagging around Birmingham
   Adding lock names on River Thames
It's not just that it's useful per se - it also demonstrates good faith in
your interaction with other mappers. None of us are perfect on this issue,
me included, but resorting to a default comment is pretty much always a bad
idea.

In general, talking to the community is always useful. It magnifies the
effect of your work, because others can share their experience with you and
vice versa. For example, if you say I'm mapping CRT boater facilities, I'd
like to ask a few questions, others will read up on the consensus and
before long all such facilities will be mapped in the same way. If you say
I'm mapping towpaths, someone will come along and say Great! If you can
add connections at bridges to roads, that'll make them routable!. And so
on.

Don't be fooled by the siren voices of the wiki. What's in the database is
valid because it's formed by consensus. What's on the wiki too often isn't.
Any fool can invent their own scheme, write this is how you do it on the
wiki, and most of them do. Wiki users have rationalised their behaviour by
promoting a voting scheme, but as this can lead to major changes being
approved by just a handful of people, it doesn't have any particular
legitimacy.

And thanks again for helping improve canal data. :)

cheers
Richard





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Re: [Talk-GB] City names translation

[Richard Fairhurst]

Andrew Hain wrote:
 It was only put in recently and I personally find it unhelpful. Would
 anyone object to removing it?

Yes.

Richard





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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Richard Fairhurst]

Admin note: nominally I'm administrator of the legal-talk@ list. In practice
the only international OSM list to ever have been announced as moderated
is talk@, and I think locally talk-us@ may be moderated as well. Merely
administered is a much more light-touch approach and generally works well
enough. However, Mikel's posting raises an important meta issue which as
administrator I'd like to clarify:

Mikel Maron wrote:
 * How is the composition of the Legal Working Group formed?
 * Is anyone on the LWG able to sit in judgement?
 * Does the LWG itself consult with legal counsel when trying cases? Are
 there any lawyers on the LWG?
 * How is the spirit of the license determined? Is this the consensus
 opinion of the LWG? Voted opinion of the Board? Polled opinion of OSMF
 members?
 * How are the broad range of opinions regarding intention of the ODbL
 balanced within the spirit of the license?
 * The OSMF itself has repeated asked lawyers to help us reach a desired
 outcome over the years, the result of which was the ODbL. Why did the OSMF
 have a desired outcome previously, but no longer has one regarding
 Geocoding?
 * Do the OSMF officers in this discussion have a desired outcome regarding
 Geocoding, and does that prejudice their judgement when trying this
 use
 case?
 * How can we manage conflict of interest in the process of deciding on
 ODbL
 use cases?

There are 12 questions here, and they appear to be principally addressed to
the volunteers who give their time to LWG in particular and the wider OSMF.

Mailing lists are open forums. By definition, list messages (unlike private
mail) are addressed to all the members of the list, not to a small subset of
that. Demanding answers from a small number of people to 12 rather involved
questions is not the purpose of a public mailing list.

As list admin, I am not very comfortable with the notion of using this
public list as a direct communication channel to OSMF rather than a general
forum for discussion of legal/licensing issues. If such a list exists then
it's osmf-talk; I will leave the discussion of that to whoever might be
osmf-talk admin. It is not, however, the purpose of legal-talk, and as admin
I certainly didn't volunteer to run a talk to OSMF communication channel
(not least because I'm not even an OSMF member these days ;) ).


With my list admin hat off, but taking the opportunity to make a wider
etiquette point, I would gently remind people that OSM and OSMF are created
and run by volunteers; volunteers' time and motivation are finite resources;
and it is kinder to be proportionate in your demands on these volunteers. Do
question, probe, discuss, but 12 questions at once is a bit Sybil Fawlty:
Anything else, dear? I mean, would you like the hotel moved a bit to the
left?

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] cycle.travel bike routing for Western Europe

[Richard Fairhurst]

I'm pleased to report that http://cycle.travel/map now defaults to kilometres
for European routes. :)

cheers
Richard





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[OSM-talk] cycle.travel bike routing for Western Europe

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

I'm really pleased to announce that http://cycle.travel/ now has 
OSM-based cycle routing for Western Europe: France, the Netherlands, 
Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, 
Spain, Portugal, the UK and Ireland.


You can try it here:
http://cycle.travel/map

and if you log in, you can save/share your planned routes (and change 
your user preferences from miles to km ).


It's built with (patched) OSRM and a complex custom profile. It takes 
account of elevation, cycle routes, surface quality and more. All routes 
are fully draggable and you can export to GPX, TCX, and PDF. The 
cartography is specially designed for the site.


== Routing details ==

If it doesn't follow a route you'd expect it to take, this is usually 
because surface tags are missing.


For example, at http://cycle.travel/map?lat=50.0181lon=2.0333zoom=15, 
the canalside path is tagged as 'highway=path' with no surface tags. 
cycle.travel assumes that paths in rural areas have poor quality 
surfaces, so will try not to route along them. Adding a 'surface=gravel' 
to this path, which the aerial imagery suggests, will make the router 
like it. (Access tags are also good.)


== Miscellaneous notes ==

- The tileserver is a little slow - please be gentle!
- There are occasional inconsistencies in the tiles - old styles that 
haven't refreshed yet.
- You can't route between the UK and mainland Europe (there's a big lake 
in the way. Only Chris Froome is allowed to cycle through the tunnel and 
look how far it got him)

- I'm planning on weekly updates but it'll be less often at first.
- Known issue with highway=trunk, bicycle=yes getting undue prominence.
- Known issue with fahrradstrassen/fietsstraten not being prioritised.

Still lots to improve but I hope you like it - and, as ever, thanks to 
all the mappers who have contributed all the lovely data. You can post 
comments/bugs/suggestions at http://cycle.travel/forum/2 .


cheers
Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] cycle.travel bike routing for Western Europe

[Richard Fairhurst]

Maarten Deen wrote:
 It's nice and fast! But it is not really apt in finding shortest or 
 quickest routes.
 I entered my daily commute (from 51.3207,5.9888 to 51.5428,5.9827, 
 permalink does not work properly) and it comes with a (for me new) 
 route of 18.3 miles (=29.45 km) in 2:02.
 If I move the route to what I actually do, I get 17.9 miles and 1:59.
 And there are no paths or tracks in either route.

The route it chooses has an off-road cycleway for more of the route (all the
way to Eijkenhofweg) and then highway=unclassified (Steegse Peelweg),
whereas the 17.9-mile route has more highway=tertiary (Loorban and
Veulenseweg). In general cycle.travel prefers a balanced route using
traffic-free and quiet roads, rather than just trying to find the shortest
or quickest route along busier roads.

Of course, it would be good if we tagged average motor traffic levels on
roads. :)

 and if you log in, you can save/share your planned routes (and change
 your user preferences from miles to km ).
 Do you really have to create an account just for that? Miles is a very UK 
 and US thing, it is not used anywhere on mainland europe. Can't you just 
 use km when you plan a route on mainland europe or set a cookie?

Oh absolutely, I just haven't had time to do that yet. 

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] cycle.travel bike routing for Western Europe

[Richard Fairhurst]

Maarten Deen wrote:
 So, can't I just ask shortest or quickest road? As you say, the 
 router has no idea about traffic levels. I mean, if a router can't 
 give me either shortest or quickest, then I always think I get 
 some random route that is not optimal in any aspect.

Nope, it doesn't and won't do that I'm afraid. If you want the shortest,
quickest route, which presupposes that you're happy cycling along busy main
roads, this isn't the router for you. cycle.travel is designed for people
who want a more leisurely and enjoyable ride.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] cycle.travel bike routing for Western Europe

[Richard Fairhurst]

colliar wrote:
 1. How are separate drawn cycleways next to roads handled ?

It prefers cycleways to roads, so it'll usually route via the cycleways
(assuming they're properly connected).

 2. Neither traffic_light/crossing nor shape turns are evaluated.

There's a routing penalty for traffic lights. Not sure what you mean by
shape turns - can you explain?

 3. I would like to show you some examples but I did not find 
 any link/shortlink feature. Are gpx tracks any help ?

You can log into the site and save routes that way - that's probably the
best way!

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-talk] cycle.travel bike routing for Western Europe

[Richard Fairhurst]

sabas88 wrote:
 it looks really nice!

Thanks! :)

 One quick note, it's possible to have routes (also) in metric units?

Yep, definitely. I'm working on making it the default for Europe but, for
now, you can log in and set your user profile to prefer kilometres.

cheers
Richard





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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Richard Fairhurst]

[I'm going to break my rule of not posting to the mailing lists for this,
because it's an interesting query and important for OSM. Since I started
writing this, Robert has made an excellent posting which covers much of the
same ground and comes to related conclusions, but from a slightly different
angle]

Alex Barth wrote:
 I just updated the Wiki with a proposed community guideline
 on geocoding.

 In a nutshell: geocoding with OSM data yields Produced Work, 
 share alike does not apply to Produced Work, other ODbL 
 stipulations such as attribution do apply. The goal is to 
 remove all uncertainties around geocoding

This is an interesting approach and one that I think has potential, but
perhaps in a different form from that proposed.

I find it difficult to square geocoding results always being a Produced Work
with the text of the ODbL. In the medium term, we want complete address data
in major urban areas (those of highest commercial demand). This suggests
address data on every building object in the city.

Geocoding street addresses against such a dataset (the 90% case) is
essentially a clever lookup function: it is extracting raw OSM data (lat/lon
pairs) from the database via a query, and then not doing any significant
transformative work on the lat/lon pairs. That is ODbL's definition of a
Derivative Database, reinforced by the option in 4.6.b of an algorithm...
that make[s] up all the differences between the Database and the Derivative
Database.

As Randy has alluded, geocoders are powerful tools which put much effort
into providing reliable results. To argue that this effort results in a
Produced Work, you would have to:

- agree that a collection of lat/lon pairs (the result of geocoding) is
analogous with the creative-world examples of image, audiovisual material,
text, or sounds, and
- agree that this holds true for a significant majority of geocoding
results, particularly with reference to that data which is likely to be
extracted (i.e. San Francisco more likely to be extracted than deepest
Idaho)

To me, those statements seem like a leap beyond what OSMF and the OSM
community would be comfortable to take right now.


However, despite this, I think the Produced Work angle is potentially a
promising avenue towards removing all uncertainties around geocoding.

Instead of a blanket and potentially problematic statement that geocoding
with OSM data yields Produced Work, we should focus on the next level down.
In other words, accept that data extracted from OSM by means of address
queries remains ODbL-licensed OSM data: but then look at what is done with
this data (how it is used), and whether this might be a Produced Work or a
Collective Database.

In particular, I would throw into the mix what Matt generously called the
Fairhurst Doctrine
(https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-October/002881.html,
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-October/002911.html).
This argues that if you match ODbL data against third-party data by means of
a simple query, the table mapping ids from one to the other is not
qualitatively substantial: therefore the two datasets become a Collective
Database, in which the third-party data can be licensed any which way.

So let's try this with one of Alex's examples: the first one, in which the
store locations are being exposed to the public on a store locator map using
Bing maps.

If you reference the store addresses against OSM address data, following the
Fairhurst Doctrine, the result is a Collective Database: the address data in
OSM in one database, the store data in another, and a simple mapping between
the two (imagine it as a separate table for now). Therefore the store data
is not subject to ODbL.

There is one major question in this: whether geocoding is just a simple
query, or whether it's something big and difficult and complicated. The
latter is just another way of saying qualitatively substantial, which
would mean that the table mapping ids between the databases becomes
derivative, and the result can't be a Collective Database.

Again, this would be up to OSMF to decide in consultation with the
community. I'd personally argue that, more often than not, it's a simple
query. I don't mean any disrespect to Sarah and Brian, or Randy's geocoding
experts, or any of the other people working on geocoders. A 100% geocoder is
undoubtedly a ball of hurt. But taking the urban street example from above,
which are likely to be the majority of the queries thrown at a geocoder, it
remains at heart a predictable algorithmic translation of OSM data. Edge
cases are the hard part, and there are plenty of them, but edge cases are by
definition not substantial.

By looking at the use, and considering whether it counts as a Collective
Database or a Produced Work, we should be able to come up with clear answers
for all of the common geocoding use cases. Yes, there'll always be some
scenarios where it could go either way: that's inevitable when 

Re: [Talk-us] USBRS WikiProject seeks volunteer mappers

[Richard Fairhurst]

Martijn van Exel wrote:
 I would love to see these routes in OSM, and I think it's a shame
 that there is such an ongoing fuss about it.

May I gently offer some experience from n years of both mapping and
developing National Cycle Network routes in the UK. (As well as being an
OSMer I'm a regional group co-ordinator for Sustrans, the organisation that
looks after and develops the NCN.)

Generally in the UK we only map proposed NCN routes when
   a) we have some personal knowledge of them, and
   b) the route has a serious likelihood of being signposted in the next
couple of years

For example, I was happy to map NCN 442, our new route across the Cotswolds,
as proposed because I knew very well that it was likely to open before
long - not least because largely I identified the alignment and bid for the
funding for it! And indeed it's now signposted and open:
http://www.sustrans.org.uk/news/prime-minister-opens-new-section-national-cycle-network

However, there are other proposed routes in the local area where there is no
particular action underway at present to find funding or to fix issues
identified with the route. For example, NCN 536 is a proposed route from
Banbury (part of my patch) to Northampton, but: no funding has been
identified, some physical works will be required before it can open, and the
flow isn't currently deemed a priority. It's very unlikely indeed to open
in the next two years, and consequently it isn't mapped on OSM.

On occasion, mapping a proposed route can be actively dangerous and
misleading. Sometimes a proposed NCN route will follow a busy road or rough
terrain, or cross private land; fixing this will be one of the to-dos
before the route can be opened. Showing it on a map, even as a dotted line,
can encourage cyclists to venture into unsuitable conditions. (Yes, in
theory caveat emptor, but I have encountered people who have been misled
by such proposed routes showing on a map.)



Obviously you'll make your own decisions, but I'd encourage you to follow
similar principles for the USBRS project. Or in summary: OSM can be a little
way ahead of reality... but not too far ahead.

cheers
Richard
(making a rare break from my not-posting-on-mailing-lists rule)





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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Guideline review: Substantial

[Richard Fairhurst]

Paul Norman wrote:
 Is there any relevant case law on substantial?

A brief reminder that there are two useful wiki pages:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Statute_law
http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Case_law

which collect links to useful papers and cases. In particular Charlotte
Waelde's paper contains a long discussion of what might be considered
substantial in a geo context post-BHB:

http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/gradeDigitalRightsIssues.pdf

Richard





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Re: [Talk-gb-westmidlands] [oxoncotswolds] Tysoe Mapping Party

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 04/04/2014 11:42, Brian Prangle wrote:

Hi everyone

Just had confirmation from Mike Sanderson of Tysoe Parish Council that
May 31st is the preferred date for their Mapping Party (refreshments
provided!) and publicity will be going out in the Parish Magazine
shortly. So book the date. Tysoe is almost impossible to get to without
a car


Not at all!

Train to Banbury, then cycle for nine miles:
http://cycle.travel/map?from=Banburyto=Tysoe

(Sounds like a good event though.)

cheers
Richard


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Re: [OSRM-talk] Beginner question: default car profile and tracktype/smoothness/surface

[Richard Fairhurst]

Michal Palenik wrote:

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 01:57:23PM -0300, Fernando Trebien wrote:

But I don't
think we can easily implement different interpretations of the tags on
a per-country basis.


in postgis/anyspatialdatabase, this would be fairly easy (except for
filling in the data by crowdsourcing).

looking at
https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-OSRM/blob/master/profiles/examples/postgis.lua
it is probably connectable.


Yes, it's very easy for a Lua profile to interpret tags differently on a 
per-country basis, or even more granular than that - for example, my 
profile at cycle.travel/map interprets tags slightly differently 
depending whether the way is in a large built-up area or in the countryside.


Richard


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