Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 10/09/2015 05:12, Russ Nelson wrote:



  I don't get to see them in my own
rendering.


IMO *This* is the operative point in his argument. He wants to tag for 
the renderer (himself).


Dave F.

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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] Abandoned Rails

[Richard]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 01:18:46AM -0700, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 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. 

absolutely support that one. The current practice where bus-routes are often
tied to particular lanes or road links is just useless waste of our resources.
Perhaps those relations should be relations between bus stops?

Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 01:41:20AM -0700, Richard Fairhurst wrote:

> (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.)

class:bicycle=-3 ?

Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Richard Fairhurst writes:
 > I suspect I'm more attuned to finding these traces than you
 > are.

I call it "raildar" or "ferroequinology". It's when you look down that
tree line and say "Hey, that's an old railroad", then you go to OSM
(possibly using OSMAnd), find that spot, and yep ... old railroad.

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

Yeah, Condie Street, hehe. I drove down it and then said "um, that's
barely a track, and certainly not highway=residential."

I asked Tom Hynes about all those identically-sized rectangles. He
imported them from his 911 dataset, wherein the vendor tagged every
building that wasn't directly digitized with that rectangle. He knows
it's not perfect, but his plan is to import whatever corrections
people make in OSM back into his database.

Speaking of Kingston, NY, the mayor who decided to shut down the
tourist railroad by parking a dump truck on the tracks (a felony in
the US) lost the Democratic primary, so he won't be mayor after
November. #WINNING

 > (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.)

On behalf of the entire state of New York, I apologize for allowing
that road to be marked as a bicycle route. I should probably make that
my next project -- make sure that all the bicycle routes are in OSM
and are tagged properly for quality. I *have* bicycled on NY-32 and
yeah, it's not a shining example.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 3:45 AM, moltonel 3x Combo 
wrote:

> Lots of former railway land is now privately owned, sometimes even
> before the rails get removed. So the fact that there was an abandoned
> (dismantled ?) railroad in his backyard didn't, on its own, mean that
> he didn't own the place.
>

In some case the ROW is an easement, meaning the railroad gained the right
to cross
private land.  Many roads and a huge fraction of utility lines are
easements, not fee ownership.

The easement may or may not expire when the railroad stops running.

In the USA the process of "railbanking" keeps the easement active, on the
notion that the contiguous land may needed in the future or far future for
restoration of rail or other transport services.  Thus the active railroad,
or active trail, may in fact be on private land.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 01:54:20 -0400
Russ Nelson  wrote:

> Why do you persist? You can't win, because you're wrong.

Please, stop treating it as some zero-sum game. I am not trying to
"win".

I am trying to ensure that editing of OSM will not be made
harder by presence of ways representing completely destroyed objects
or ridiculous relations containing features approximately following
track of former, no longer existing objects.

Editing OSM is already complicated, there is no good reason to make it
even harder by adding confusing features editable only by experts.

Currently it is done on really limited scale and still may be stopped.

OSM is map of the current state of the world - not map
of the world how it was yesterday, 10 years ago or five thousands ago.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2015 at 09:01:53AM +0200, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 01:54:20 -0400
> Russ Nelson  wrote:
> 
> > Why do you persist? You can't win, because you're wrong.
> 
> Please, stop treating it as some zero-sum game. I am not trying to
> "win".
> 
> I am trying to ensure that editing of OSM will not be made
> harder by presence of ways representing completely destroyed objects
> or ridiculous relations containing features approximately following
> track of former, no longer existing objects.

never had a problem editing around abandoned railways, they don't cause
even a tiny fraction of the problems that are caused by landuse 
multipolygons.

Do you have some special problem on your mind?

Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

TL;DR: argument repeat, sorry.

On 09/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
>> OSM is map of the current state of the world - not map
>> of the world how it was yesterday, 10 years ago or five thousands ago.
>
> Nobody is advocating to map the past, what is discussed is mapping those
> elements of the past which somehow have lasted or have had a strong impact
> that is still observable today.

Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
or has had a strong impact that is still observable today". Whenever I
looked at some examples posted by Russ, these kind of sections weren't
far.

When stuff have been contructed over the former railroad like this,
there's no need for a local survey to see that nothing is left. IMHO,
at most a section of Albert Street could have railway=abandoned as an
additional tag. I have my doubts about the sections under the forest
too, but that requires a survey to assert.

So there is at least one contributor who "is advocating to map the
past". I have a feeling Russ is an exception in this respect (Lester's
view are close but more nuanced), but he is so passionate that this
thread keeps resurecting.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 09:33:45 +0200
Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:

> 
> 
> sent from a phone
> 
> > Am 09.09.2015 um 09:01 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny
> > :
> > 
> > Currently it is done on really limited scale and still may be
> > stopped.
> 
> 
> I doubt this has the potential to become a big scale "problem"
> because there aren't sufficient sources and traces to reconstruct the
> world as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago (not to forget
> that there were much fewer people in these times, and much fewer
> alteration of the world in general).
> 
> FWIW, there have been several mentions of historic objects naming
> "hundreds" or thousands of years in this context of former railways
> on the lists. Actually the first railway was built in 1830, that is
> not even 200 years ago, and this is also more or less the period
> where you can get detailed spatial information (good maps) from.
> Please stop FUD about people completely mapping the past into OSM and
> obfuscating the present thereby.

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?

Given that some are happily mapping in detail individual bicycle
parkings or individual trees (I encountered forests and parks where
mapping of every single tree is in progress) etc - it is almost certain
that sooner or later somebody will decide to import for example
buildings that were documented to exist in the past.


> > 
> > OSM is map of the current state of the world - not map
> > of the world how it was yesterday, 10 years ago or five thousands
> > ago.
> 
> 
> Nobody is advocating to map the past, what is discussed is mapping
> those elements of the past which somehow have lasted or have had a
> strong impact that is still observable today. You say these objects
> would make mapping more difficult and confusing but the opposite is
> true: it makes mapping more sensible when the relevant context is
> present (including traces of the past).

For some "strong impact that is still observable today" is set so low
that extreme amount of completely dismantled structures will pass it.

Maybe people interested in mapping completely gone features may propose
what they consider as minimum threshold so we would be able to make
this discussion more useful?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09/09/2015 12:44 PM, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> it is almost certain
> that sooner or later somebody will decide to import for example
> buildings that were documented to exist in the past.

Fortunately the self-healing powers of OSM will step in at that point
and revert the import. Just because the project grows larger doesn't
mean we have to tolerate bullshit.

Taking a small step back from the discussion, even the avid proponents
of mapping un-railways claim that (at least to their expert eye) the
railway is still very much visible.

This thread might look like we're fighting over SOMETHING BIG but in
fact we all(*) agree that stuff that is visible can go into OSM and
stuff that is long built-over will not; the disagreement is only about
stuff that has ceased to exist but hasn't (yet?) been overbuilt or
otherwise obliterated. The total number of such things is relatively
small. I can continue to state that abandoned railways should not be in
OSM(**) and Russ Nelson can continue to claim otherwise but that is
really a minor skirmish that won't bring the project to a halt.

Bye
Frederik

(*) everyone else is with OpenHistoricalMap
(**) abandoned railways, of course, should not be in OSM

-- 
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2015 at 01:14:28PM +0200, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
> TL;DR: argument repeat, sorry.
> 
> On 09/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
> >> OSM is map of the current state of the world - not map
> >> of the world how it was yesterday, 10 years ago or five thousands ago.
> >
> > Nobody is advocating to map the past, what is discussed is mapping those
> > elements of the past which somehow have lasted or have had a strong impact
> > that is still observable today.
> 
> Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
> most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
> or has had a strong impact that is still observable today". Whenever I
> looked at some examples posted by Russ, these kind of sections weren't
> far.

Not much is visible from the satelite but this is true for many other 
objects.

Richard


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2015-09-09 16:43 GMT+02:00 Martin Koppenhoefer :

> > Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
> > most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
> > or has had a strong impact that is still observable today".
>
>
> how could I tell without going there?
>



interestingly Google Maps displays parcel boundaries in that area. Have a
look...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Albert+St,+Kingston,+NY+12401/@41.9125927,-74.0154805,17.54z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x89dd0f93267eeead:0xaec8bc9c0194fb45

Cheers,
Martin
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Am 09.09.2015 um 13:14 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo :
> 
> Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
> most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
> or has had a strong impact that is still observable today".


how could I tell without going there?

Cheers 
Martin 

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Mateusz Konieczny writes:
 > 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?

This is a strawman argument. Nobody is proposing this. You're just
borrowing trouble from the future. Don't do that. The present has
enough trouble already. Like not having enough people mapping in the
US, which is my point here. We have a set of people who are interested
in maps and mapping, AND YOU GUYS ARE THRUSTING THEM AWAY.

Let me tell you a little story. The USGS has been mapping the US for
well over a hundred years now. Very precisely mapping it, including
railroads. Some people who wanted to find these old railroads realized
this, and started digitizing the maps so that everyone can have
them. That set of maps is still available at
http://docs.unh.edu/nhtopos/nhtopos.htm even though the USGS has begun
its own digitization program.

Thank you railfans, not "get lost" railfans.

Another railfan took those scans (which are four scans per map sheet),
combined them into a single map sheet, geo-rectified them,
color-corrected them, and marked the collar so it may be removed, and
published them.

Thank you railfans, not "get lost" railfans.

Another railfan took those maps, stripped off the collars, pasted them
into MSMaps-style 200x200 pixel UTM tiles, and published them at
http://rutlandtrail.org/mapview.cgi under the "Historical" style.

Thank you railfans, not "get lost" railfans.

Am I being unreasonable to suggest that we should welcome railfans to
OSM, and tolerate their wild and crazy desire to map every part of an
old railroad, even the dismantled portions? Particularly when (in
another thread) there is a discussion of how to recruit specialized
groups like the 4-H into OSM?

You guys are saying "get lost" because OSM rejects (some of) the data
railfans want to contribute.

-- 
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Crynwr supports open source software
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Frederik Ramm writes:
 > The total number of such things is relatively small. I can continue
 > to state that abandoned railways should not be in OSM(**) and Russ
 > Nelson can continue to claim otherwise but that is really a minor
 > skirmish that won't bring the project to a halt.

Kinda-sorta. You're from Germany, where you can't throw a stone
without hitting a mapper. New York State is about a third the size of
Germany, and has maybe two dozen active mappers (Simple check: look
for landuse.)

Can you see how I am feeling lonely and desperate for company? Even if
we have to tolerate that company putting their feet up on the table
and  mapping abandoned railroads?

-- 
--my blog is athttp://blog.russnelson.com
Crynwr supports open source software
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Mateusz Konieczny writes:
 > On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 01:54:20 -0400
 > Russ Nelson  wrote:
 > 
 > > Why do you persist? You can't win, because you're wrong.
 > 
 > Please, stop treating it as some zero-sum game. I am not trying to
 > "win".

You're arguing with me, and you don't expect to win the argument?? Why
would you bother? In particular, it *is* a zero-sum game. If you get
to delete abandoned railways, I don't get to see them in my own
rendering or in OpenRailwayMap.

 > I am trying to ensure that editing of OSM will not be made
 > harder by presence of ways representing completely destroyed objects
 > or ridiculous relations containing features approximately following
 > track of former, no longer existing objects.

That's the sticky problem: the railway still exists. Part of it may be
an embankment, or a cut, or a bridge, or a straight line of trees, or
a track. Part of it may go through a field where the farmer has plowed
it away (but I can point you to fields where you can still see
cinders). Part of it may go through a housing development (but I can
show you tree lines where it went). Those latter two parts should be
tagged railway=dismantled.

 > Editing OSM is already complicated, there is no good reason to make it
 > even harder by adding confusing features editable only by experts.

Here's how to make it less hard: Don't delete things you didn't
add. (Oh, and don't edit coastlines).
Isn't that easy?

Now, it's not always true, but it's a simple rule of thumb that will
allow everyone to add their favorite thing to OSM, whether stores,
park benches, fire hydrants, trees, cliffs, etc.

Are there other problems that you fear will occur when people map all
the parts of a railway?

I'm thinking that maybe what we need is a censoring OSM API, where the
people who would be confused by dismantled railways could say "I want
the censored OSM", and then they wouldn't get any dismantled railways
in their data download.

-- 
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Am 09.09.2015 um 19:12 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo :
> 
> The line is going through multiple buildings and a wide low wall.
> That's as unambiguous as it gets.


yes, looking at google maps I noticed an offset compared to the road and to the 
railway parcel in google, I guess the position of the railway in osm is 
slightly offset.


cheers 
Martin 
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 09/09/2015, Martin Koppenhoefer  wrote:
>> Am 09.09.2015 um 13:14 schrieb moltonel 3x Combo :
>>
>> Martin, have a look at http://osm.org/go/Zc9j8qfSV-?m (near Russ's
>> most recent example) and tell me how this section "somehow has lasted
>> or has had a strong impact that is still observable today".
>
> how could I tell without going there?

I thought I had preemptively answered that :

On 09/09/2015, moltonel 3x Combo  wrote:
> When stuff have been contructed over the former railroad like this,
> there's no need for a local survey to see that nothing is left. IMHO,
> at most a section of Albert Street could have railway=abandoned as an
> additional tag. I have my doubts about the sections under the forest
> too, but that requires a survey to assert.

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.

Or are you saying that the imagery might be too old, the railway could
have been restored since ? The imagery was taken around the same time
as the first changeset, and the changeset sources either say nothing,
or bing, or osm wiki (!).

Talking about past features, tagging gauge=* on a railway=abandoned
way (which by definition does not have any tracks left) should be an
impossible combination. Tagging electrified=* is also a funny idea.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Mateusz Konieczny writes:
 > And "abandoned railway" that was not noticed by somebody in his/her
 > own back yard seems to be a good example of object that should not be
 > mapped in OSM.

Oh, and he didn't notice the railroad bridge about 90m east of his
property either. This bridge:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/240308433 Nor the right-of-way
underneath the NYS Thruway. This right-of-way (which pre-existed the
trail): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/237524740 . Nor the bridge
remains on the west side (which I didn't put into OSM, but they're
there). You can read the Wikipedia page for the railroad -- it will
tell you more than you ever wanted to know about why the railroad
right-of-way under the Thruway was destroyed. All of those should have
been clues to the homeowner. They are *certainly* verifiable evidence
of an abandoned railroad right-of-way.

Why do you persist? You can't win, because you're wrong. I know far,
far more about abandoned railroads than you do, and I can provide as
many examples of the verifiability of abandoned railroads as it will
take to convince you. Assuming that facts will actually change your
mind. Of which I am in doubt at this point.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2015 at 08:38:08PM +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 09/03/2015 02:25 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> > also there are good arguments why it shouldn't be secret who owns which
> > pieces of land
> 
> "shouldn't be secret" != "should be in OSM"

what should be in OSM where possible is pubilc/private land. This is 
in many countries relevant for path/track routing.

Parcel boundaries probably should be included at least for commercial 
use lands - it is good to know that a piece of land belongs to a company
spraying poison on their fields or to a mining company and may fly around 
your ears anytime.

Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09/03/2015 02:25 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> also there are good arguments why it shouldn't be secret who owns which
> pieces of land

"shouldn't be secret" != "should be in OSM"

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

Am 02.09.2015 um 15:25 schrieb Paul Johnson :

>> land ownership has massive privacy and data protection issues.
> 
> Depends on the region. 


+1
also there are good arguments why it shouldn't be secret who owns which pieces 
of land

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 02/09/15 11:30, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
> I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
> you know of any osm data which records property ?

So I should remove all the detail on
http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=wr12%207ep#map=17/52.04851/-1.85665
rather than adding the missing detail to the right?

And the 'Abandoned Railway' to the left is a protected route which HAS
encroachments onto it, but which is still potentially re-enstatable once
the line to Broadway becomes active again. Using the ground for a long
period does not always allow to take possession of it and rail routes
are one of those documented exceptions.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 12:36:26 +0100
Lester Caine  wrote:

> On 02/09/15 11:30, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
> > I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
> > you know of any osm data which records property ?
> 
> So I should remove all the detail on
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=wr12%207ep#map=17/52.04851/-1.85665
> rather than adding the missing detail to the right?

Can you be more specific? You linked to general location in map
rendering that is not showing legal property rights. Can you link to
specific OSM elements that you propose for removal?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Lester Caine  wrote:
> On 02/09/15 11:30, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
>> you know of any osm data which records property ?
>
> So I should remove all the detail on
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=wr12%207ep#map=17/52.04851/-1.85665
> rather than adding the missing detail to the right?

Sorry, I see residential areas, hedges, postcodes, etc, overall a well
maped area with usefull detail, but nothing mapping land property ? I
never suggested that this kind of data was out of scope for OSM,
please go ahead and map more of it. When I mentioned "land property"
I'm talking about legal ownership, parcels, cadastre, etc.

> And the 'Abandoned Railway' to the left is a protected route which HAS
> encroachments onto it, but which is still potentially re-enstatable once
> the line to Broadway becomes active again. Using the ground for a long
> period does not always allow to take possession of it and rail routes
> are one of those documented exceptions.

Sure. It looks well mapped to me. Again, I don't see how your answer
relates to the subject of mapping land ownership, there's no ownership
mapped on these osm objects.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 02/09/15 14:25, Paul Johnson wrote:
> But in most (all?) of the US, land ownership (and vehicle ownership, for
> that matter) records are open and subject to public inspection, and why
> land transfers are typically published conspicuously in the regional
> news periodical of record.

And in the UK you just buy a copy of the Electoral Register ...

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[phil]

On Wed Sep 2 14:25:52 2015 GMT+0100, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 7:23 AM,  wrote:
> 
> > We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
> > massive privacy and data protection issues.
> 
> 
> Depends on the region.  I've even heard it from county officials
> (incorrectly!) citing this regarding trying to get address centroids here
> (even though I'm not interested in who owns the land or even necessarily
> what the property lines are, just where one can expect to find an address
> along a street, and only requested the centroids; see the OKGIS archive
> from August for how that went).  But in most (all?) of the US, land
> ownership (and vehicle ownership, for that matter) records are open and
> subject to public inspection, and why land transfers are typically
> published conspicuously in the regional news perodical of record.  Which is
> why landowners get phone calls by name from roofing contractors after
> storms have gone through, and why you'll get junkmail from lawyers and body
> shops if your plate number (or sometimes even a similar one if someone
> fudged it, as I discovered when someone in Ohio who has the same plate
> number as me was apparently involved in a bad wreck) was reported in an
> accident.
>
That is scary,and the reason most home  numbers in the UK  are 
ex-directory/unlisted. It prevents cold-callers having a foot in the door.

The phonebook is a fraction of the size it was when I was a kid.

Phil (trigpoint)
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 7:23 AM,  wrote:

> We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
> massive privacy and data protection issues.


Depends on the region.  I've even heard it from county officials
(incorrectly!) citing this regarding trying to get address centroids here
(even though I'm not interested in who owns the land or even necessarily
what the property lines are, just where one can expect to find an address
along a street, and only requested the centroids; see the OKGIS archive
from August for how that went).  But in most (all?) of the US, land
ownership (and vehicle ownership, for that matter) records are open and
subject to public inspection, and why land transfers are typically
published conspicuously in the regional news perodical of record.  Which is
why landowners get phone calls by name from roofing contractors after
storms have gone through, and why you'll get junkmail from lawyers and body
shops if your plate number (or sometimes even a similar one if someone
fudged it, as I discovered when someone in Ohio who has the same plate
number as me was apparently involved in a bad wreck) was reported in an
accident.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[phil]

On Wed Sep 2 14:39:00 2015 GMT+0100, Lester Caine wrote:
> On 02/09/15 14:25, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > But in most (all?) of the US, land ownership (and vehicle ownership, for
> > that matter) records are open and subject to public inspection, and why
> > land transfers are typically published conspicuously in the regional
> > news periodical of record.
> 
> And in the UK you just buy a copy of the Electoral Register ...

The edited register,  which most people aren't on, or at least those who read 
the form aren't on.

Phil (trigpoint) 

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 02/09/2015 01:22, Russ Nelson wrote:

Bryce Nesbitt writes:
  > I've worked on "rails to trails" projects where the physical trace
  > of the railbed was subsumed by fences, lines of trees and (in once
  > case) a swimming pool.

I'll bet you're talking about the Wallkill Valley Trail north of
Rosendale! I think I know the very place you're talking about! Guy had
built his house right up to the ROW property line, and put his
swimming pool on the ROW itself.

Too bad for that guy that he didn't check OpenStreetMap first, because
there was an abandoned railroad mapped in his back yard. Now that the
trail has been built, he has a fence about 5' behind his house. I
can't imagine he's happy now.

I think Bryce's observation lays this issue to rest. No, you should
not delete railways you cannot see, because they might still exist in
the property lines, and if you haven't checked, you don't know. If
somebody added it to OSM, they probably have better reason to have
done so than you have reason to delete it, so leave it there!

Thanks for your cooperation!



Map entities that you can see on the ground. i realise there are some, 
like boundaries, but we have verifiable proof they exist.
For old railway line map the entities that remain, such embankments, 
bridges etc, but not the actual track if it's been removed or there's a 
housing estate built over it.


To repeat myself: OSM is a database of *current* entities.

Dave F.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Colin Smale]

 

I see two separate issues getting mixed up: firstly, what types of data
"belong" in OSM as a matter of principle, and secondly what quality
criteria would apply. Clearly for the second point the data needs to be
suitably licensed (if it is externally sourced) and it needs to be
verifiable so "Joe Public" without any form of privileged access can
verify its correctness. These are clearly principles which have existed
in OSM for a long time. But a statement that certain whole categories of
data do not belong in OSM *because* it sometimes might not be easily
verifiable, is going a bit far. 

On 2015-09-02 12:30, moltonel 3x Combo wrote: 

> On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale  wrote: 
> 
>> Are you suggesting that parcel boundaries have no place in OSM, or that
>> only verifiable sources should be used? Suppose there was a suitably
>> licensed source of such boundaries, with authoritative provenance. Would
>> you be against this being in OSM on principle? Or is it only your
>> supposition that such information cannot be sufficiently verifiable
>> which gives rise to your concern?
>> 
>> Anyway, fences, signs etc are not reliable indicators of parcel
>> boundaries (where there are land registries), unless the boundary is
>> legally described with reference to these physical artefacts.
> 
> I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
> you know of any osm data which records property ?
> 
> IMHO verifyability is a major issue here. Real-world barriers don't
> match the legal ones, borders change regularly (that's a major
> difference with admin boundaries), and even the authoritative source
> is often murky (I'm now 3-4 months into the process of figuring out
> wether I own a piece of land at the back of my garden).
> 
> On top of that, whenever you need to know about land ownership, you
> are legally obliged to refer to the authoritative source. Looking up
> the info in a crowdsourced db, even if it was completely correct,
> would most often be a waste of time.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 02 Sep 2015 11:57:19 +0200
Colin Smale  wrote:

> Are you suggesting that parcel boundaries have no place in OSM, or
> that only verifiable sources should be used? Suppose there was a
> suitably licensed source of such boundaries, with authoritative
> provenance. Would you be against this being in OSM on principle? Or
> is it only your supposition that such information cannot be
> sufficiently verifiable which gives rise to your concern? 
> 
> Anyway, fences, signs etc are not reliable indicators of parcel
> boundaries (where there are land registries), unless the boundary is
> legally described with reference to these physical artefacts. 

> only verifiable sources should be used?

Yes. And objects unverifiable on the ground should be added only after
really careful consideration.

> Are you suggesting that parcel boundaries have no place in OSM

I think that this data is too hard to maintain, unlikely to be useful
and importing it would result in editing problems due to adding massive
amount of objects unverifiable on the ground.

It would be basically mirroring official database what is pointless.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale  wrote:
> Are you suggesting that parcel boundaries have no place in OSM, or that
> only verifiable sources should be used? Suppose there was a suitably
> licensed source of such boundaries, with authoritative provenance. Would
> you be against this being in OSM on principle? Or is it only your
> supposition that such information cannot be sufficiently verifiable
> which gives rise to your concern?
>
> Anyway, fences, signs etc are not reliable indicators of parcel
> boundaries (where there are land registries), unless the boundary is
> legally described with reference to these physical artefacts.

I always understood that land property was out of scope for OSM. Do
you know of any osm data which records property ?

IMHO verifyability is a major issue here. Real-world barriers don't
match the legal ones, borders change regularly (that's a major
difference with admin boundaries), and even the authoritative source
is often murky (I'm now 3-4 months into the process of figuring out
wether I own a piece of land at the back of my garden).

On top of that, whenever you need to know about land ownership, you
are legally obliged to refer to the authoritative source. Looking up
the info in a crowdsourced db, even if it was completely correct,
would most often be a waste of time.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09/02/2015 02:22 AM, Russ Nelson wrote:
> I think Bryce's observation lays this issue to rest. No, you should
> not delete railways you cannot see, because they might still exist in
> the property lines,

Mapping property lines in OSM isn't something I think makes sense. There
are reasons why we don't map land parcels.

The strength of OSM lies in verifiability, just like (one of) the
strength(s) of Open Source software is that anyone can look a the code
and check it.

Invisible property lines have to place in OSM because they cannot be
easily verified and therefore they will never come close to the
reliability that OSM has in other areas.

Unless marked by fences, signs, or other verifiable means, property
lines should not be in OSM.

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Colin Smale]

 

Are you suggesting that parcel boundaries have no place in OSM, or that
only verifiable sources should be used? Suppose there was a suitably
licensed source of such boundaries, with authoritative provenance. Would
you be against this being in OSM on principle? Or is it only your
supposition that such information cannot be sufficiently verifiable
which gives rise to your concern? 

Anyway, fences, signs etc are not reliable indicators of parcel
boundaries (where there are land registries), unless the boundary is
legally described with reference to these physical artefacts. 

On 2015-09-02 11:36, Frederik Ramm wrote: 

> Hi,
> 
> On 09/02/2015 02:22 AM, Russ Nelson wrote: 
> 
>> I think Bryce's observation lays this issue to rest. No, you should
>> not delete railways you cannot see, because they might still exist in
>> the property lines,
> 
> Mapping property lines in OSM isn't something I think makes sense. There
> are reasons why we don't map land parcels.
> 
> The strength of OSM lies in verifiability, just like (one of) the
> strength(s) of Open Source software is that anyone can look a the code
> and check it.
> 
> Invisible property lines have to place in OSM because they cannot be
> easily verified and therefore they will never come close to the
> reliability that OSM has in other areas.
> 
> Unless marked by fences, signs, or other verifiable means, property
> lines should not be in OSM.
> 
> Bye
> Frederik
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> Too bad for that guy that he didn't check OpenStreetMap first, because
> there was an abandoned railroad mapped in his back yard.

Lots of former railway land is now privately owned, sometimes even
before the rails get removed. So the fact that there was an abandoned
(dismantled ?) railroad in his backyard didn't, on its own, mean that
he didn't own the place.

In many countries (not sure about the USA), there's also a legal
concept of "if you build on a piece of land and nobody complains for X
years (with X being quite high), then that piece of land defacto
belongs to you". This leads to people sometimes building on land with
a unclear ownership status, chancing it and hoping for the best.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 02/09/15 12:56, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> So I should remove all the detail on
>> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=wr12%207ep#map=17/52.04851/-1.85665
>> > rather than adding the missing detail to the right?

> Sorry, I see residential areas, hedges, postcodes, etc, overall a well
> maped area with usefull detail, but nothing mapping land property ? I
> never suggested that this kind of data was out of scope for OSM,
> please go ahead and map more of it. When I mentioned "land property"
> I'm talking about legal ownership, parcels, cadastre, etc.

The boundaries mapped are property boundaries as are the field
boundaries around them. Ideally I would like to add the NLPG reference
to each but currently that is blocked by possible licensing problems. It
WOULD be nice to complete the 'hidden' data in much the same way the
postcode is added here so that searches can be done properly. Just
because a post has not been put in the ground to identify a location,
the location still exists if properly documented.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[phil]

On Wed Sep 2 13:15:42 2015 GMT+0100, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
> On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale  wrote:
> > I see two separate issues getting mixed up: firstly, what types of data
> > "belong" in OSM as a matter of principle, and secondly what quality
> > criteria would apply. Clearly for the second point the data needs to be
> > suitably licensed (if it is externally sourced) and it needs to be
> > verifiable so "Joe Public" without any form of privileged access can
> > verify its correctness. These are clearly principles which have existed
> > in OSM for a long time. But a statement that certain whole categories of
> > data do not belong in OSM *because* it sometimes might not be easily
> > verifiable, is going a bit far.
> 
> Saying that land property has no place in OSM is just a conclusion
> that comes from the observation that this kind of data generally poses
> big chalenges to verifyability and corrrectness, and that its
> usefullness in osm is limited because ownership is one thing where you
> have no choice to use the official authoritative source.
> 
> If there's somewhere in the world where those concerns are not valid,
> then go on and map properrty data there. Again, do you know of any
> property data in osm ? What's the tagging schema ?
> 
> The principle of "what data belongs in OSM" is about the propeties of
> that data, not what kind of data it is. But as it happens, a given
> kind of data usually has the same properties, so "this kind of data
> doesn't belong in OSM" is a usefull simplification.
> 
We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has massive 
privacy and data protection issues.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 02/09/15 13:23, p...@trigpoint.me.uk wrote:
>> The principle of "what data belongs in OSM" is about the propeties of
>> > that data, not what kind of data it is. But as it happens, a given
>> > kind of data usually has the same properties, so "this kind of data
>> > doesn't belong in OSM" is a usefull simplification.
>> > 
> We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has 
> massive privacy and data protection issues.

Adding actual names against a property is perhaps the question here? And
that is a step to far. Even NLPG data does not have personal data
included IN it, but simply putting an address into a phone book on the
internet will more than likely provide that data. I don't see any
problem identifying what fields belong to a particular farm or what area
belongs to a particular dwelling. That is essentially 'land use' and
part of this came about because of a blanket application of 'farmland'
to some areas of the UK but where proper verification of boundaries
throws up various problems with THAT data and now tidying that up needs
'non-visible' information in addition to the visible stuff to correct
the mistakes. I have tried simply hiding the data which works around
here, but another area nearer London is obviously using a different tag
to 'farmland' ... just not identified yet what else to ignore.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Lester Caine  wrote:
> On 02/09/15 12:56, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> Sorry, I see residential areas, hedges, postcodes, etc, overall a well
>> maped area with usefull detail, but nothing mapping land property ? I
>> never suggested that this kind of data was out of scope for OSM,
>> please go ahead and map more of it. When I mentioned "land property"
>> I'm talking about legal ownership, parcels, cadastre, etc.
>
> The boundaries mapped are property boundaries as are the field
> boundaries around them.

When I think of mapping properties I expect a multipolygon, hopefully
following many physical objects such as hedges and fences, is that
what you have in mind ?

> Ideally I would like to add the NLPG reference
> to each but currently that is blocked by possible licensing problems. It
> WOULD be nice to complete the 'hidden' data

Assuming the license issue gets resolved, how will you import it,
conflate with existing data, tag ? How will you keep it up to date
when a field or a chunk of garden changes hand between neighbours ?
Who do you expect will make use of the data ?

I'm not saying that this data doesn't belong in OSM as much as I am
saying "I won't touch that kind of data with a 10 foot pole, it's too
hard to import/maintain, it's a huge amount of data (bloat) that will
complicate editing, and anyway it won't be usable for most usecases".
Go ahead and map the fences and anything else that gives a visual clue
as to where the property ends. But the actual legal property data ?
It's not worth it.

> in much the same way the
> postcode is added here so that searches can be done properly. Just
> because a post has not been put in the ground to identify a location,
> the location still exists if properly documented.

Postcodes, like all address components, are always welcome in OSM even
though they are not always phisically visible. Addresses are a major
OSM usecase. A postcode has a much lower granularity than a parcel. It
doesn't have to be exact and authoritative, it only has to lead to the
correct location.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Colin Smale]

 

Sometimes land ownership is a matter of public record, it seems. Zoom in
and click on a plot: 

http://gis.stlouiscountymn.gov/planningflexviewers/County_Explorer/ 

Sure there are privacy considerations, but they are not the same in all
jurisdictions. And the face that some jurisdictions would have a problem
with OSM having data that other jurisdictions would frown upon, is no
reason in itself to disqualify that whole category of data from OSM. We
have similar challenges with military stuff and disputed borders as
well. We don't want to become a least common denominator with only data
that is agreed by the entire world. 

On 2015-09-02 14:23, p...@trigpoint.me.uk wrote: 

> On Wed Sep 2 13:15:42 2015 GMT+0100, moltonel 3x Combo wrote: On 02/09/2015, 
> Colin Smale  wrote: I see two separate issues getting 
> mixed up: firstly, what types of data
> "belong" in OSM as a matter of principle, and secondly what quality
> criteria would apply. Clearly for the second point the data needs to be
> suitably licensed (if it is externally sourced) and it needs to be
> verifiable so "Joe Public" without any form of privileged access can
> verify its correctness. These are clearly principles which have existed
> in OSM for a long time. But a statement that certain whole categories of
> data do not belong in OSM *because* it sometimes might not be easily
> verifiable, is going a bit far. 
> Saying that land property has no place in OSM is just a conclusion
> that comes from the observation that this kind of data generally poses
> big chalenges to verifyability and corrrectness, and that its
> usefullness in osm is limited because ownership is one thing where you
> have no choice to use the official authoritative source.
> 
> If there's somewhere in the world where those concerns are not valid,
> then go on and map properrty data there. Again, do you know of any
> property data in osm ? What's the tagging schema ?
> 
> The principle of "what data belongs in OSM" is about the propeties of
> that data, not what kind of data it is. But as it happens, a given
> kind of data usually has the same properties, so "this kind of data
> doesn't belong in OSM" is a usefull simplification.
 We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
massive privacy and data protection issues.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, p...@trigpoint.me.uk  wrote:
> We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
> massive privacy and data protection issues.

In many countries, the geometry of land parcels is public data. Not
"this bit of land is owned by Phil Trigpoint" nor "this and that
parcel are owned by the same guy" but just how the land is
geographically divided.

I'm not saying that property data should go into OSM (:p), just that
it's probably not the privacy issue you think it is.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 02/09/15 13:43, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> Ideally I would like to add the NLPG reference
>> > to each but currently that is blocked by possible licensing problems. It
>> > WOULD be nice to complete the 'hidden' data

> Assuming the license issue gets resolved, how will you import it,
> conflate with existing data, tag ? How will you keep it up to date
> when a field or a chunk of garden changes hand between neighbours ?
> Who do you expect will make use of the data ?

My main client base is council based systems, so I HAVE the LLPG data
for each client. I just can't use it in OSM. The main problem here is
I'm using OSM to display location information so that staff can manage
things like 'change of address', and YES recording changes to the LLPG
data in order to amend the raw data which is then uploaded to NLPG.
Using OSM allows much more flexible options on the user interface than
OS does and potentially the whole country can be kept up to date simply
because the data is already being digitised and we the UK public are
paying for that!

Drawing a line around each boundary is still a problem as are areas in
general in OSM. I'm not happy with using 'relations' to draw areas, but
simply drawing a polygon for a field or property boundary is messy when
one needs to add gates, boundary style, and yes 'hidden' elements such
as open driveways. So one is essentially limited to creating a relation
for each property and then does one include the buildings within the
area in the relation? Which is why I've stopped at just drawing boundary
types so far. Actually the property boundaries on our road include the
area of grass outside the front fence, but not the path which is another
detail not yet added ...

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale  wrote:
> I see two separate issues getting mixed up: firstly, what types of data
> "belong" in OSM as a matter of principle, and secondly what quality
> criteria would apply. Clearly for the second point the data needs to be
> suitably licensed (if it is externally sourced) and it needs to be
> verifiable so "Joe Public" without any form of privileged access can
> verify its correctness. These are clearly principles which have existed
> in OSM for a long time. But a statement that certain whole categories of
> data do not belong in OSM *because* it sometimes might not be easily
> verifiable, is going a bit far.

Saying that land property has no place in OSM is just a conclusion
that comes from the observation that this kind of data generally poses
big chalenges to verifyability and corrrectness, and that its
usefullness in osm is limited because ownership is one thing where you
have no choice to use the official authoritative source.

If there's somewhere in the world where those concerns are not valid,
then go on and map properrty data there. Again, do you know of any
property data in osm ? What's the tagging schema ?

The principle of "what data belongs in OSM" is about the propeties of
that data, not what kind of data it is. But as it happens, a given
kind of data usually has the same properties, so "this kind of data
doesn't belong in OSM" is a usefull simplification.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 7:22 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:

> Too bad for that guy that he didn't check OpenStreetMap first, because
> there was an abandoned railroad mapped in his back yard. Now that the
> trail has been built, he has a fence about 5' behind his house. I
> can't imagine he's happy now.
>

Wait, what?  I understand that OSM does incorporate *some* cadastre data,
such as is the case for situations where it makes more sense to map out a
landuse=* parcel and give it the appropriate name and access tags.
However, attempting to use OSM as a substitute for using the official
cadastre from the county clerk, land office or other regional equivalent
for landuse planning regarding legal encroachment would be woefully
ill-advised.  This is something you really want to hire a licensed surveyor
to stake out your legal property lines on and not just guess.  Or you're
likely to build a swimming pool in the middle of an abandoned railroad
that's being converted into a cycleway.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 08:08:45 -0500
Paul Johnson  wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 7:22 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
> 
> > Too bad for that guy that he didn't check OpenStreetMap first,
> > because there was an abandoned railroad mapped in his back yard.
> > Now that the trail has been built, he has a fence about 5' behind
> > his house. I can't imagine he's happy now.
> >
> 
> Wait, what?  I understand that OSM does incorporate *some* cadastre
> data, such as is the case for situations where it makes more sense to
> map out a landuse=* parcel and give it the appropriate name and
> access tags. However, attempting to use OSM as a substitute for using
> the official cadastre from the county clerk, land office or other
> regional equivalent for landuse planning regarding legal encroachment
> would be woefully ill-advised.  This is something you really want to
> hire a licensed surveyor to stake out your legal property lines on
> and not just guess.  Or you're likely to build a swimming pool in the
> middle of an abandoned railroad that's being converted into a
> cycleway.

And "abandoned railway" that was not noticed by somebody in his/her
own back yard seems to be a good example of object that should not be
mapped in OSM.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 9:32 PM, Russ Nelson  wrote:
>
> Speaking of housing developments, I earlier pointed to the south end
> of Cazenovia, where a housing development has an obvious railbed to
> the north, and an obvious railbed to the south, and in people's
> backyards, a treeline where the railbed was.
>
> Should the map look like this (A)?  ___   __ 
>
> Or should it look like this (B)?___---__-
>
> Some people are arguing for A. I argue that B is a better
> representation of what is there (the underscores) because it includes
> the dismantled portions (the dashes).
>

I've worked on "rails to trails" projects where the physical trace of the
railbed was
subsumed by fences, lines of trees and (in once case) a swimming pool.

But the legal right of way still existed.  Those homeowners were using
property they did
not own tax free: encroaching.  Once the encroachments were cleared, the
railroad
was turned into a trail (connecting A to B).

Thus something existed of the railway even through the backyards:
the legal right of way, the arsenic and lead, and ultimately
the desire to reconnect the bits.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Bryce Nesbitt writes:
 > I've worked on "rails to trails" projects where the physical trace
 > of the railbed was subsumed by fences, lines of trees and (in once
 > case) a swimming pool.

I'll bet you're talking about the Wallkill Valley Trail north of
Rosendale! I think I know the very place you're talking about! Guy had
built his house right up to the ROW property line, and put his
swimming pool on the ROW itself.

Too bad for that guy that he didn't check OpenStreetMap first, because
there was an abandoned railroad mapped in his back yard. Now that the
trail has been built, he has a fence about 5' behind his house. I
can't imagine he's happy now.

I think Bryce's observation lays this issue to rest. No, you should
not delete railways you cannot see, because they might still exist in
the property lines, and if you haven't checked, you don't know. If
somebody added it to OSM, they probably have better reason to have
done so than you have reason to delete it, so leave it there!

Thanks for your cooperation!

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 29/08/15 08:50, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
 In OSM we do that by tagging the small elements properly. Deletion is
  vandalism. No smiley.

 And in case of elements no longer present correct tagging is a complete
 lack of tagging, therefore deleting is perfectly OK.

The current situation is quite simple ... one view of the data is that
only currently visible data will be displayed and to make life easy any
well documented history is now simply scrap. The fact that people are
also documenting the future developments in the database and that this
needs to be hidden until it becomes valid is no different to simply
hiding historic material.

That there are a proportion of users who would like access to the very
data that others think should be scrapped is a simple fact. So we need
two versions of the database. One with only 'physical precedence'
elements only, and a second which simply allows a view at different
points in time.

At the current time the OHM is of no use for the second database, so we
need to create another view of the main database which provides the very
data that some people think has no place in a map. We currently have a
growing catalogue of historic mapping sources, and this area is just as
useful if it an be made available via essentially the same interface as
a 'today' version of the map, and 'tomorrow' showing a hypothetical new
road and rail links is little different to 'yesterday' where we actually
have factual data already correctly documented. OHM provides a platform
to document more speculative historic material, but that needs current
material to provide a background.

Just as we can maintain our own rendering of data such as a 'UK' map,
there is nothing stopping a different view of the base data to provide
that map as long as we have a mechanism in place to maintain access to
that data for those who in many cases have created the data in the first
place! The current interface can be used in different ways to achieve
these ends, so 'delete' invalid data, but tagging an end_date should be
normal practice for objects that have evolved beyond original use.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Richard]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 08:37:55PM +0100, Lester Caine wrote:
 On 29/08/15 08:50, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
  In OSM we do that by tagging the small elements properly. Deletion is
   vandalism. No smiley.
 
  And in case of elements no longer present correct tagging is a complete
  lack of tagging, therefore deleting is perfectly OK.
 
 The current situation is quite simple ... one view of the data is that
 only currently visible data will be displayed and to make life easy any
 well documented history is now simply scrap. The fact that people are
 also documenting the future developments in the database and that this
 needs to be hidden until it becomes valid is no different to simply
 hiding historic material.
 
 That there are a proportion of users who would like access to the very
 data that others think should be scrapped is a simple fact. So we need
 two versions of the database. One with only 'physical precedence'
 elements only, and a second which simply allows a view at different
 points in time.

josm has filters. They also help if your screen is flooded with
pebblestones mapped as natural=stone.

Richard

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Fri, 28 Aug 2015 23:46:58 -0400
Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:

 Frederik Ramm writes:
   On 08/22/2015 11:07 PM, Lester Caine wrote:
What we need is a
database that already has all the data and simply identify when
some small elements of it cease to be current.
   
   In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)
 
 In OSM we do that by tagging the small elements properly. Deletion is
 vandalism. No smiley.
 

And in case of elements no longer present correct tagging is a complete
lack of tagging, therefore deleting is perfectly OK.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 29/08/2015 08:50, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:


And in case of elements no longer present correct tagging is a complete
lack of tagging, therefore deleting is perfectly OK.


+1

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 29/08/2015 05:03, Russ Nelson wrote:

Dave F. writes:
   On 23/08/2015 01:27, Balaco Baco wrote:
What we need is a
database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
small elements of it cease to be current.
In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)
I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do.
  
   Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
   you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?

This is also a strawman argument. Stop it.
How can it be a straw man when it's a question? I genuinely didn't 
understand the previous comment so asked for clarification. This is a 
perfectly acceptable thing to do in reasoning  discussion.





Instead, I and others have said that since you can see a railway at
point A, and you can see a railway at point B, it only makes sense
to map it between those points for several reasons:
   o Chances are good that there are artifacts between point A and B
that further investigation will reveal.

Then map those artefacts, not the non-existent rail track



   o Mappable entities exist between those points which can only be
understood by including the dismantled railways (e.g. bridges, roads,
or buildings).


Rubbish. A bridge is still recognisable as a bridge without stating its 
history.



   o It's possible that cadastral data would reveal the presence of a
right-of-way, and (I think, but correct me if I'm wrong) everybody
agrees that there is way too much cadastral data to include in OSM,
and it's something that must be imported because it only exists in a
real property office's database.

Please clarify what you mean by cadastre.


I can point to examples of all of the above. Please don't doubt
me. You don't want me to have more facts on my side.




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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 29/08/2015 05:03, Russ Nelson wrote:

Also why is there a  rail route relation attached to this entity when 
you clearly can't go by train along it?


https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457#map=16/42.9193/-75.8514

Dave F.



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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

Sorry in advance, this mail just rehases arguments that I made before,
but it seemed polite to reply.


On 29/08/2015, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 moltonel 3x Combo writes:
   One can often assert that something was here even when nothing is left
   of that thing. And is nothing is left of that thing, it shouldn't be
   mapped.

 What about point A?  What about point B? The *endpoints* do indeed
 continue to exist, so nothing is left of that thing is not true
 about most dismantled railways.

That's precisely it, point A and B continue to exist, they can be
mapped as abandoned/disused. What's between A and B did not continue
to exist, and should not be mapped. We know perfectly where New York's
World Trade Center used to be but there's no tower=dismantled at that
location.

 Should the map look like this (A)?  ___   __ 

 Or should it look like this (B)?___---__-

 Some people are arguing for A. I argue that B is a better
 representation of what is there (the underscores) because it includes
 the dismantled portions (the dashes).

And unsurprisingly, I argue for A. Because it reflects the current
state of the railroad.

I do understant the appeal of being able to create a relation where
each member follow the previous one without holes. But if reality has
holes, so should the relation.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Dave F. writes:
  On 23/08/2015 16:49, Frederik Ramm wrote:
   Hi,
  
   On 08/23/2015 02:27 AM, Balaco Baco wrote:
   I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do. To have no data and to
   have the most recently obtained data are two very different things.
   Certainly you're not suggesting we map all these negatives.
  
  I think I'd rather map Dark Matter. Seems easier ;-)

As I've pointed out many times in the past and apparently must point
out again, because some people are not paying attention, nobody is
asking you to map things you don't want to map. This is an open source
project, and as such, NOBODY gets to make demands that anybody else do
something.

We can't demand that somebody write a module, or map a county.

We CAN, however, demand that somebody stop deleting modules or ways
that somebody else has added to the project.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

I don't understand why people suggest things that don't work. How do I
make a route in OSM that includes the active railways, disused
railways, washed_out railways (where you can SEE rails in the river),
cycleways, footways, bridges, hedges, cuttings, embankments, and
shadows in fields if there is not a way in every case?

Or conversely, how does OHM allow for a route that includes ways going
through a farmer's field where everything has been plowed away, the
cinders scattered, the spikes buried beyond the reach of metal
detectors, where I, even I, agree that there is nothing to be seen
there  AND ways where any damned fool can see that this used to be
a railroad because it lines up with existing tracks? (hint: like OSM,
it doesn't.)

Perhaps some day in the future, what you suggest will be practical
when the data schema has been revised to implement layers stored in
different databases. For now, no. Please stop suggesting this.
-russ

Tim Waters writes:
  I'd like to recommend OpenHistoricalMap.org (OHM) which will welcome
  all types of historical, disused and abandoned features. Please, go
  add every abandoned railway to OHM, and then together we can
  eventually get an accurate map of 1880s railway network compared to a
  1940's, compared to yesterdays world!
  
  Tim
  
  
  
  On 22/08/2015, Jason Remillard remillard.ja...@gmail.com wrote:
   Hi
  
   I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
   borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are people
   who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that work.  Lets
   respect that and strengthen the community rather than deleting it and
   doing
   the opposite.
  
   I 100% agree. The amount of data required to map abandoned railroads
   is tiny. An occasional way through a new development is not going to
   hurt anybody or impair normal mapping activity.
  
   Apparently, the people that like to map railroads think OSM is the
   best place to do this. We are not in any position to be chasing them
   off. OSM has a long, long way to go still. Above all else, it needs to
   more active mappers if we are serious about being the best map for the
   entire world. Also, It seems likely they are also mapping non
   controversial things like roads while working on the railroads.
  
   Dave F, OSM is doing just fine. It is full of contradictions,
   redundancies, disagreements, and broken rules (see the tagging list).
   It is not some kind of business database that requires normalization,
   strict schema definitions, and vigilant protection. It can't have any
   once sentence rules defining its boundaries. It is a great big blank
   sheet of paper, relax and let the railroad people draw on it a bit.
   Nobody is going to get hurt.
  
   Jason
  
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Dave F. writes:
  On 23/08/2015 01:27, Balaco Baco wrote:
   What we need is a
   database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
   small elements of it cease to be current.
   In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)
   I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do.
  
  Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one, 
  you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?

This is also a strawman argument. Stop it. You are hurting your own
case, and making my case. Do you really want to help the
railway=dismantled people? No, you do not. So abandon this line of
argument -- it is failure incarnate.

Not a single person so far has suggested that everything that used to
exist, or everything that has already been mapped but since changed,
should remain. NOT ONE PERSON.

Instead, I and others have said that since you can see a railway at
point A, and you can see a railway at point B, it only makes sense
to map it between those points for several reasons:
  o Chances are good that there are artifacts between point A and B
that further investigation will reveal.
  o Mappable entities exist between those points which can only be
understood by including the dismantled railways (e.g. bridges, roads,
or buildings).
  o It's possible that cadastral data would reveal the presence of a
right-of-way, and (I think, but correct me if I'm wrong) everybody
agrees that there is way too much cadastral data to include in OSM,
and it's something that must be imported because it only exists in a
real property office's database.

I can point to examples of all of the above. Please don't doubt
me. You don't want me to have more facts on my side.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

By the way, I want to apologize for dumping so many messages in a row
onto the list. I've not had a lot of sitting-in-front-of-the-computer
time lately because I've been spending a lot of time gathering map
data in the field:

I'm ONE rail-trail short of cycling every rail-trail in New York
State. Over a hundred of them, around 2800 miles, taking about two
months of bicycling if I spent a full 8 hours every day on the trail,
but in reality it's been an 11-year-long project.

moltonel 3x Combo writes:
  One can often assert that something was here even when nothing is left
  of that thing. And is nothing is left of that thing, it shouldn't be
  mapped.

What about point A?  What about point B? The *endpoints* do indeed
continue to exist, so nothing is left of that thing is not true
about most dismantled railways.

Speaking of housing developments, I earlier pointed to the south end
of Cazenovia, where a housing development has an obvious railbed to
the north, and an obvious railbed to the south, and in people's
backyards, a treeline where the railbed was.

Should the map look like this (A)?  ___   __ 

Or should it look like this (B)?___---__-

Some people are arguing for A. I argue that B is a better
representation of what is there (the underscores) because it includes
the dismantled portions (the dashes).

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

moltonel writes:
  Wrong data is worse than absent data.

Right. So tag dismantled railways with (oh, dare I say it?)
railway=dismantled. Correct data is better than wrong data, right?

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Frederik Ramm writes:
  The fact there is no railroad here, however, is not something that I
  would consider useful; because where would it end? I'm standing at a
  lakeshore - there's no railway here, also there's no forest here, and no
  building, and no rugby pitch, no telephone booth, and no power lines.
  Certainly you're not suggesting we map all these negatives.

IN FACT NOBODY IS SUGGESTING THIS. This is called a strawman
argument. You create a position that nobody actually holds, which is
unreasonable, and then you say This Is Unreasonable and then you use
everyone's agreement to claim that a different position is wrong.

The use of a strawman argument is evidence that you have no viable
argument against the position that people actually hold.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Russ Nelson]

Frederik Ramm writes:
  On 08/22/2015 11:07 PM, Lester Caine wrote:
   What we need is a
   database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
   small elements of it cease to be current.
  
  In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)

In OSM we do that by tagging the small elements properly. Deletion is
vandalism. No smiley.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Blake Girardot]

On 8/27/2015 11:02 AM, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:


There is no real-life trace left of
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (amongst others) but it is
currently in OSM.


To me that is mapped fine for a dismantled/abandoned railway.

There are visible signs of the railway on each end of that segment and 
if you know what you are looking at, the line of trees along the east 
side of the abandoned segment might even indicate something to an 
experienced mapper.


But more importantly, if you are mapping the visible segments to the sw 
and ne, why have gaps between them? Using the abandoned tag on that now 
less obvious segment seems like the most constructive, precise and 
useful way to map the overall former active line, much (most?) of which 
is still visible on the landscape.


Perhaps, zooming out and looking at the overall mapping context helps 
make the use of the dismantled/abandoned mapping conventions clearer 
rather than only looking at one short, 10 meter segment in isolation.


cheers
blake




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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Andy Townsend]

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


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


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


Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

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


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 4:02 AM, moltonel 3x Combo molto...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On 27/08/2015, Paul Johnson ba...@ursamundi.org wrote:
   I believe we're talking about abandoned railroad rights of way that
 still
  mark the landscape, not something that no longer has a trace.

 No :

 Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com wrote Thu Aug 20 05:12:49 UTC 2015
  Here's a perfect example of how a railway should be mapped:
 
 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.92237423246795/-75.8534094581493


Well, I stand corrected.  On that area, where the railway=dismantled
section exists, based on what I'm seeing in iD, I wouldn't map it at all.

There is no real-life trace left of
 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (amongst others) but it is
 currently in OSM.

 At we're not least not exclusively about still-visible abandoned; the
 OP hasn't given a list of guilty deletions so it's hard to judge how
 justified each deletion was.


Yeah, that's definitely chasing ghosts.  If that's what we're talking about
for railway=dismantled, then that should probably go into some other
database instead.  About the closest to something like that I would map is
like the abandoned railways seen at
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/45.50828/-122.83817, which at last
time I was on the ground, was a bit more visually apparent on the ground
than in the aerial thanks to the more solid railway ballast slowly sinking
into the surrounding silt.  No idea when the railway was abandoned, but I'm
guessing sometime during my childhood as Jenkins Road still had railroad
crossing symbols painted on it during high school, the bike lanes still had
it during the last decade and were finally completely removed last decade.
Along with an infill for the grade crossing which was tall and rough enough
that had it been intentional rather than shoddy worksmanship would have
been a traffic_calming=table.  However, it couldn't have been too recent
before I started high school (1996) as the Reeser's Fine Foods factory
across Jenkins from that abandoned wye had been there long enough to get a
rather weather-worn look and a fuel pump located in their yard was old
enough to have reel dials for the readout.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 27/08/2015, Andy Townsend ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:
 Back in
 https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-August/073669.html I
 had a look at what caused the current flurry of discussion.   Part of
 the line in question was deleted by a mapper new to OSM; it was their
 second and last OSM edit.  I find it hard to believe that this new OSM
 mapper had a thing about deleting abandoned railways. Likely they just
 didn't understand something, were confused, and it somehow got deleted.

Good catch, sorry I forgot about it. I agree that
http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/259134943 should not have been
deleted, and that it certainly was just a mishap that the contributor
didn't even notice. So restore the way, send a watch out message to
the newbie, and call it a day (well, do also improve the tagging of
that abandoned railway : some sections are dismantled and some have
been converted to various types of highway, etc).

But I doubt that Russ would have had such a strong reaction if it was
just for that case. I'm sure there were other willfull deletions, and
lacks of communication.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 27/08/2015, Paul Johnson ba...@ursamundi.org wrote:
  I believe we're talking about abandoned railroad rights of way that still
 mark the landscape, not something that no longer has a trace.

No :

Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com wrote Thu Aug 20 05:12:49 UTC 2015
 Here's a perfect example of how a railway should be mapped:
 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.92237423246795/-75.8534094581493

There is no real-life trace left of
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (amongst others) but it is
currently in OSM.

At we're not least not exclusively about still-visible abandoned; the
OP hasn't given a list of guilty deletions so it's hard to judge how
justified each deletion was.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Paul Johnson]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 3:32 PM, Tim Waters chippy2...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'd like to recommend OpenHistoricalMap.org (OHM) which will welcome
 all types of historical, disused and abandoned features. Please, go
 add every abandoned railway to OHM, and then together we can
 eventually get an accurate map of 1880s railway network compared to a
 1940's, compared to yesterdays world!


 I believe we're talking about abandoned railroad rights of way that still
mark the landscape, not something that no longer has a trace.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lauri Kytömaa]

(I hadn't subscribed to this list, so the reply is to a seemingly
random message and not directly related to that)

I believe much of this recent discussion is happening because
there's a ... misconception that hasn't been addressed, and
the actual tags that have been mentioned suggest readers to
believe so. I believe I've mentioned this idea in the past, but I
feel compelled to have it included in the discussion so that
the arguments on either side refer to the same concepts.

When a way no longer is an intact railway (or railbed),
we don't want to claim it is a railway but rather this was a
railway; the railwayness becomes an attribute of what is,
i.e. this row of trees and this embankment were for a railway
and part of the railbed), when previously it described
an object, i.e. this is a railway and railbed. In short, they
shouldn't use the same *key* in the tag. I therefore
propose

**
instead of changing the tag value to railway=dismantled,
it would be better if mappers changed the tag key to
was:railway=rail following the method of lifecycle
prefixes (quotation marks only for added readability)
**

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lifecycle_prefix

The prefix can be dismantled: or razed: or destroyed: or
removed: or was: or something else; I personally prefer
was: as it's applicable to a lot of other cases, and applies
to all that were something. At least that way the
information (that the real world object no longer is an object)
is stored in osm, in contrast to plain deleting which doesn't
tell anyone if it was deleted because the way was a
mapping mistake or just replaced by a better version. Even
if it's deleted later by someone who finds it impeding his
editing, it is still *possible* to extract that difference. With
a change of key, even those who blindly draw all ways with
railway=* (for example the humanitarian layer on osm.org
seems to do so) won't be drawing false features.

Reassembling straight-away-deleted railway ways and
figuring out which ways presented the last coherent state
of things requires manual work from everyone who wants
to see that information (think 30 years from now), but if the
real world removal is first tagged, the most manual part of
that work is already done, even if somebody later deletes
the ways. And it would be at least possible to
automatically watch for and store all those objects in OHM
or similar, but discard the technical deletions.

At least in urban environments the small details that tell a
railway existed can remain for centuries: unusual colonnades,
loading platforms, fasteners on the walls, curved buildings
in an otherwise square road network etc., so the line
between totally gone and identifiable isn't a clear cut line;
why would it be paramount to delete stuff just when the
iron beams were lifted, or when new asphalt was poured
there?

A possible life of a railway section in urban environment,
a simple case:
- the railway construction starts: railway=construction
- the railway is in active use: railway=rail
 (say, in this example, in the middle of the city harbour, between
warehouses which even have loading platforms at the height
of the freight carriage floors)
- the railway is no longer needed, no trains run there:
 railway=disused  (everybody sees it's a railway). (a road had
been built between the warehouses)
- the track is converted to a sidewalk (the harbour is scaling
down), but the loading platforms and the geometry remains;
the way was a railway, and can be identified as such with
expertice, and/or local knowledge and/or old sources: following
the method of lifecycle prefixes, the best tag:
 was:railway=rail

The road under my window is a bus-only road, that was a freight
rail track for decades (tracks ran in the center) before the buses
started to run there, then only occasionally used at night, then
disused for some years before the tracks were removed last
summer. They'll build, eventually, tram tracks where the driving
lanes are now, but then the road (emergency vehicles only) will
still be something that was a railway track.

A linear clearing with some scrubby young trees in a small but
healthy wood area nearby is also there because that freight track
was partially realigned a few decades ago (only the tracks were
removed, still railway=abandoned). If nothing is built there, the
line could, in some or several decades, become
indistinguishable; at that point it would be appropriate to change
to was:railway=rail.

Verifiability doesn't mean it's easily seen with the naked eye at
ground level, but that the next person can use any combination
of observations, previously mapped related data, and reliable
sources to make up their mind if the feature is or isn't (or
wasn't) correct. That way drawing multiple generations of past
buildings in cities with a long history (an example mentioned
here) wouldn't be verifiable, because even if some preindustrial
maps are suprisingly accurate, the sources don't have enough
accuracy to tell how their 

Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 25/08/2015, Blake Girardot bgirar...@gmail.com wrote:
 I am not a railway enthusiast, but I do recognize the important role
 they play in the development and landscape of the US and probably other
 countries.

 I really appreciate those who map in-use, disused and abandoned
 railways, thank you for adding important, rich and useful data to the map.

 I think part of this conversation should be reprized: Abandoned railways
 are recognizable by people who know what they are looking at, they are
 in essence there on the ground currently, just because I don't have
 the knowledge to recognize and map them, does not mean they do not exist.

For the record again, lest people think that my views are more extreme
than they are, I agree with the above.

Where I draw the line is against railway=dismantled, which by
definition don't exist anymore. Typical examples are going thru a
housing estate, a demolished (and rubble cleared) bridge, or a field
where the former railway isn't even visible in crop groth differences.
When the state goes from not obviously there to obviously not
there.

 All I understood Russ to be asking was to stop deleting and suggesting
 deletion of abandoned railways without checking with the person or
 people who know what they are doing in regards to mapping them and I
 agree that should stop.

Heavy changes to someone else's work should come with a message to
that someone else, but I'd argue that whoever deleted a railway=*
going thru a housing estate knew what they were doing.

 As mentioned above, I see no harm to mapping an abandoned railway, even
 if it is based on two end points and knowledge of the railway system.

One can often assert that something was here even when nothing is left
of that thing. And is nothing is left of that thing, it shouldn't be
mapped.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 24/08/2015, Richard Fairhurst rich...@systemed.net wrote:
 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.

Fair enough, it's easy to get a bootstrap (for the record, I was
talking about knowledge, not lines of code). The bootstrap might not
have been used or might not be available for a particular usecase, but
I get your point. Sorry for placing the principle of least surprise
bar too high.

 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.

I'm aware of that (and skewing the ratio even further as I write
this), but this is about more than just railways. Sorry for the
fearmongering, but letting one kind of nonexistent objects into OSM
opens the door to more. Countering with existing crap in the db
doesn't justify adding more crap hasn't worked well in the past.

To be honest, I too could live with a few railway=dismantled in the
db. The bigger issues are the idea of allowing some data in even when
you agree it shouldn't be there, protecting that data for political
rather than technical reasons, and the precedent this would set.

 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.

By preventing contributors to fix errors in the db (as miscommunicated
as they were, I'm sure  the deletions that started this thread were
meant as fixes) just because they come from some kind of Most Valued
Contributor, you're disempowering the community as a whole to empower
a fraction of it. I'm not going to pull statistics out of my magick
hat, but to me this looks like a net long-term loss.

 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.

I know :( I'd hate to see someone leave because of that discussion.

I'd love to see improvements in the OSM tooling and/or schemas so that
we can properly map historical features. So that dismantled railways
(amongst other no-longer-existing features) can be mapped without
hurting present-day mapping, which was initially OSM's only usecase.
So that entering that kind of data isn't a deletion-worthy error
anymore, but a normal usecase.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Blake Girardot]

On 8/21/2015 8:51 PM, Gregory Arenius wrote:

The OSM community is what OSM is even more than it is a map.  People
that are passionate about railways are a part of that community and they
do contribute a lot, especially in the US where we don't have as many
mappers.  They pour lots of time and love and passion into their
efforts.  I don't think a policy of deleting that work just because what
they're mapping isn't immediately visible on the ground is a good way of
building and strengthening our community.  In fact, as it is easy to see
in this thread, its actively doing the opposite.  And community is what
makes OSM.

I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are
people who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that
work.  Lets respect that and strengthen the community rather than
deleting it and doing the opposite.


Cheers,
Greg



I just want to add my voice to those who support the above approach.

I am not a railway enthusiast, but I do recognize the important role 
they play in the development and landscape of the US and probably other 
countries.


I really appreciate those who map in-use, disused and abandoned 
railways, thank you for adding important, rich and useful data to the map.


I think part of this conversation should be reprized: Abandoned railways 
are recognizable by people who know what they are looking at, they are 
in essence there on the ground currently, just because I don't have 
the knowledge to recognize and map them, does not mean they do not exist.


All I understood Russ to be asking was to stop deleting and suggesting 
deletion of abandoned railways without checking with the person or 
people who know what they are doing in regards to mapping them and I 
agree that should stop.


As mentioned above, I see no harm to mapping an abandoned railway, even 
if it is based on two end points and knowledge of the railway system. No 
one has to render it, but people like me who print custom maps for 
hiking / exploring / geocaching might very well choose to render it for 
our activities as they are part of the landscape even if not obvious.


I would also like to see them in OHM just help OHM along, but not 
instead of in OSM.


Regards,
Blake

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 24/08/2015 04:23, Balaco Baco wrote:

Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?

I'm saying that simply deleting the original outline, leaving nothing in
its place is different than putting the *same quality outline* for the
newer building that should be there. And while this new data does not
exist, the old one should stay there as it is. It should, at most, be
marked with a tag such as end date or demolished or anything
similar. Simply deleting it is bad.


No. If it's gone, it's gone. If there's no new structure to replace it, 
then leave the area empty. If it's becomes a construction site, tag it 
as that. If it becomes a brownfield site, tag it as that. Please base 
your editing on facts  evidence.




  And to justify the deletion for a
currently demolished building is silly and naive: buildings are usually
replaced much faster than maps are expected to last, and the work of
updating it twice, once for the empty space, dem. building and the
future new building outline is better done only one time.


I've read this a few times  I'm struggling to comprehend. You're saying 
I shouldn't remove a building from OSM that's already been demolished in 
the real world because... ?  that's where you lost me



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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Warin]

On 24/08/2015 7:25 PM, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:

On 24/08/2015, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc wrote:

buildings are usually
replaced much faster than maps are expected to last, and the work of
updating it twice, once for the empty space, dem. building and the
future new building outline is better done only one time.

It's nice to avoid unecessary version churn, but if a mapper keeps up
with the real-world changes there's nothing wrong with updating OSM
too. If you search the archives you'll find plenty of discussions on
mapping temporary features and how ephemeral a feature needs to be
before it loses its mapworthyness. For example a road closed during a
weekend is a clear no-map, but construction work is usually considered
mappable if it'll last a few months and there is a local mapper to
keep track of the updates.

how long a map is expected to last is a tricky question especially
for OSM. Paper maps are often updated yearly but kept for decades in
people's homes.


I have an old map passed down though the family .. 1860s .. still has features 
present today.
Some features have gone, some replaced with new structures, a few moved.

While the intention was a map ... back then there was little though given to 
how long it would last .. well worn and folded many times it has lasted well.
The scale varies, hand drawn and then printed on a printing press.
Would I map its features into OSM? No, most would not be interested, some would 
be confused by them, some would not believe some features.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 24/08/2015, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc wrote:
 buildings are usually
 replaced much faster than maps are expected to last, and the work of
 updating it twice, once for the empty space, dem. building and the
 future new building outline is better done only one time.

It's nice to avoid unecessary version churn, but if a mapper keeps up
with the real-world changes there's nothing wrong with updating OSM
too. If you search the archives you'll find plenty of discussions on
mapping temporary features and how ephemeral a feature needs to be
before it loses its mapworthyness. For example a road closed during a
weekend is a clear no-map, but construction work is usually considered
mappable if it'll last a few months and there is a local mapper to
keep track of the updates.

how long a map is expected to last is a tricky question especially
for OSM. Paper maps are often updated yearly but kept for decades in
people's homes. Google Map has TOS that mostly forbid cacheing data
yourself for later. Data on osm.org is updated minutely, but the osm
data on a satnav may never get an update at all.

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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] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 23/08/2015 01:27, Balaco Baco wrote:

What we need is a
database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
small elements of it cease to be current.

In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)

I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do.


Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one, 
you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Balaco Baco]

 Wrong data is worse than absent data.  Osm has so far only contained
 current data, so that's what 99.99% of consumers expect to find in it, so
 historical data is wrong data. That'll remain true as long as osm lacks a
 good way to store historical data that doesn't confuse the vast majority
 of users who are looking for current data.

I don't think so. Wrong data happens to Bing Maps, to Google Maps and
probably to any other map we can obtain, electronically or in a paper.
Maps have dates attached to them - or should have, most of the time. The
fact is that: if I browse around my city, looking for streets and
brindges created in the last fews years, I will see mistakes (as I did
before). But it's better to have there what existed, as it was before,
than have just an emptyness in the area. Until someone fix it
(hopefully) or at least mark it as old, potentially wrong (without
deleting until an update is made!).

In the context being discussed here, recent changes should also cause
data deletion, but that's wrong, in my opinion. Data may be *replaced*
with newer data, with everything that's needed.

If people are doing something that is fiercely against the community
idea of OpenStreetMap, that it could be deleted. But that really seem
far from the truth. So that should be preserved, and its deletion, if
decided to be made, should give a reasonable opportunity for the data
contributors to backup that data - so their work is not lost, but may be
used somewhere else.

Further, I'm not one of the users that would be confused with that. I
would find it unsual to see in a map. But being tagged and noted
somehow, should not be a problem at all. And to say the users who would
be confused with it are the majority of them, is an vague argument you
do just to give some apparent strength to your idea. And I repeat: I
would not be confused with it, I don't think the majority of users would
be.

-- 
  Balaco

P. S.: this mailing list does not add a Reply-to header to mail
messages, as I'm used to. So I initially sent the answer to just one
person. This should be changed - may it not confuse the majority of
users!?


On Sun, Aug 23, 2015, at 12:06, moltonel wrote:
 
 
 On 23 August 2015 01:27:54 GMT+01:00, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc
 wrote:
   What we need is a
   database that already has all the data and simply identify when
 some
   small elements of it cease to be current.
  
  In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)
 
 I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do. To have no data and
 to
 have the most recently obtained data are two very different things.
 
 The most recently obtained data is that the objects are no longer here.
 The 'no data' case matches no osm policy that i know, existing or
 proposed.
 
 With the first one you just end with something that isn't worth to ever
 try consulting because it may not have what you're looking for, so
 better not expend time with it.
 
 Wrong data is worse than absent data.  Osm has so far only contained
 current data, so that's what 99.99% of consumers expect to find in it, so
 historical data is wrong data. That'll remain true as long as osm lacks a
 good way to store historical data that doesn't confuse the vast majority
 of users who are looking for current data.
 
 -- 
 Vincent Dp

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 23/08/2015 16:49, Frederik Ramm wrote:

Hi,

On 08/23/2015 02:27 AM, Balaco Baco wrote:

I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do. To have no data and to
have the most recently obtained data are two very different things.

Certainly you're not suggesting we map all these negatives.


I think I'd rather map Dark Matter. Seems easier ;-)

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 08/23/2015 02:27 AM, Balaco Baco wrote:
 I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do. To have no data and to
 have the most recently obtained data are two very different things.

I think you're arguing a different case here - one that is also
interesting but about something else, and that's negative mapping.

There is indeed a difference between a road that doesn't have a name in
OSM (the name might simply not have been surveyed yet) and a road that
does not have a name in the real world.

How to signal the fact that the road doesn't have a name, is indeed
something that people think about, and it is useful information not
least because it keeps mappers from unnecessarily trying to find out the
correct name ;)

The fact there is no railroad here, however, is not something that I
would consider useful; because where would it end? I'm standing at a
lakeshore - there's no railway here, also there's no forest here, and no
building, and no rugby pitch, no telephone booth, and no power lines.
Certainly you're not suggesting we map all these negatives.

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Mike N]

On 8/23/2015 2:03 PM, Dave F. wrote:

Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?


In my case, I've begun to do just that, adding a note to alert the 'Bing 
tracers' that something has changed.  But I would eventually remove it 
after Bing is updated.   Only historic or notable buildings would go 
into OHM.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 23/08/2015 19:11, Mike N wrote:

On 8/23/2015 2:03 PM, Dave F. wrote:

Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?


In my case, I've begun to do just that, adding a note to alert the 
'Bing tracers' that something has changed.  But I would eventually 
remove it after Bing is updated.   Only historic or notable buildings 
would go into OHM.




To clarify, I'm talking about the main OSM database, not the Historic one.

I'm unsure why you think Bing is somehow the primary arbitrator of valid 
data. If it's gone in the real world delete it in OSM. OSM is a database 
of *current* entities.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Balaco Baco]

Certainly not. But that's an extreme example of what I have read here,
what I have seen in pictures and the (also extreme, unnecessary) actions
taken with it.

-- 
  Balaco



On Sun, Aug 23, 2015, at 12:49, Frederik Ramm wrote:
 Hi,
 
 On 08/23/2015 02:27 AM, Balaco Baco wrote:
  I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do. To have no data and to
  have the most recently obtained data are two very different things.
 
 I think you're arguing a different case here - one that is also
 interesting but about something else, and that's negative mapping.
 
 There is indeed a difference between a road that doesn't have a name in
 OSM (the name might simply not have been surveyed yet) and a road that
 does not have a name in the real world.
 
 How to signal the fact that the road doesn't have a name, is indeed
 something that people think about, and it is useful information not
 least because it keeps mappers from unnecessarily trying to find out the
 correct name ;)
 
 The fact there is no railroad here, however, is not something that I
 would consider useful; because where would it end? I'm standing at a
 lakeshore - there's no railway here, also there's no forest here, and no
 building, and no rugby pitch, no telephone booth, and no power lines.
 Certainly you're not suggesting we map all these negatives.
 
 Bye
 Frederik
 
 -- 
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

On 22/08/2015 00:57, Jason Remillard wrote:

Hi


I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are people
who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that work.  Lets
respect that and strengthen the community rather than deleting it and doing
the opposite.

Dave F, OSM is doing just fine. It is full of contradictions,
redundancies, disagreements, and broken rules (see the tagging list).

So what?
Already having crap in the database is not a valid reason to accept it, 
do nothing about it or add to it..



It is not some kind of business database that requires normalization,
strict schema definitions, and vigilant protection. It can't have any
once sentence rules defining its boundaries. It is a great big blank
sheet of paper, relax and let the railroad people draw on it a bit.
Nobody is going to get hurt.

Nothing more irritating than someone telling you to relax.

So, if you're allowing the 'railroad people', who else would you give 
permissions to? Where will you stop? How cluttered would the database 
have to become until you decide that you might have made a judgemental 
error?




Jason

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel]

On 23 August 2015 01:27:54 GMT+01:00, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc wrote:
  What we need is a
  database that already has all the data and simply identify when
some
  small elements of it cease to be current.
 
 In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)

I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do. To have no data and
to
have the most recently obtained data are two very different things.

The most recently obtained data is that the objects are no longer here. The 'no 
data' case matches no osm policy that i know, existing or proposed.

With the first one you just end with something that isn't worth to ever
try consulting because it may not have what you're looking for, so
better not expend time with it.

Wrong data is worse than absent data.  Osm has so far only contained current 
data, so that's what 99.99% of consumers expect to find in it, so historical 
data is wrong data. That'll remain true as long as osm lacks a good way to 
store historical data that doesn't confuse the vast majority of users who are 
looking for current data.

-- 
Vincent Dp

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel]

On 22 August 2015 22:07:20 GMT+01:00, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote:
BUT OHM has avoided importing all of the existing material. Manually
adding all that again is a pointless exercise. What we need is a
database that already has all the data

Yes (or find a way to constantly merge current data into ohm)

 and simply identify when some
small elements of it cease to be current.

Identifying is simple, but what to do with those elements is much more 
complicated. Sorry, but foo=dismantled and end_date=* have a lot of issues, 
they're not good enough.

So far we've avoided the problem by sticking to the we map the present 
principle (meaning stuff that no longer exists gets deleted). Before we can 
change that stance, we need a credible solution to the map the past usecase.
-- 
Vincent Dp

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/08/2015, Balaco Baco balacob...@imap.cc wrote:
 I don't think so. Wrong data happens to Bing Maps, to Google Maps and
 probably to any other map we can obtain, electronically or in a paper.
 Maps have dates attached to them - or should have, most of the time. The
 fact is that: if I browse around my city, looking for streets and
 brindges created in the last fews years, I will see mistakes (as I did
 before).

Yes, all maps have errors, wether it is outdated data, data that was
never right, or missing data.

 But it's better to have there what existed, as it was before,
 than have just an emptyness in the area.

How so ? Say I'm walking along an old railroad which OSM led me to
believe continued for 10km, but is impassable at various points
including a wheat field and a housing estate. Or I'm heading to the
convenience store only to find it has closed years ago. Outdated data
is wrong data, it is misleading and lowers the overall quality of the
map.

 Until someone fix it
 (hopefully) or at least mark it as old, potentially wrong (without
 deleting until an update is made!).

That's just the normal mapping workflow, nobody is arguing against
this. Nobody is proposing to delete first, improve later. We make
the best map we can, within the bounds of our knowledge and time
constraints.

 In the context being discussed here, recent changes should also cause
 data deletion, but that's wrong, in my opinion. Data may be *replaced*
 with newer data, with everything that's needed.

Same thing here, we improve the map as much as we can. But maybe you
don't have enough time right now to map everything, or meadows are so
far off in your todo list that you never bother with them. But leaving
known-outdated data in place just because you can't yet make a fully
detailed mapping of the area doen't make sense either.

 If people are doing something that is fiercely against the community
 idea of OpenStreetMap, that it could be deleted. But that really seem
 far from the truth.

There are very few rules in OSM, but one of them is that we map on the
ground and that we don't map historical features/events
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Map_what.27s_on_the_ground
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don.27t_map_historic_events_and_historic_features

Ways like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366610457 (and presumably
many other railway=dismantled) fail these checks.

 So that should be preserved, and its deletion, if
 decided to be made, should give a reasonable opportunity for the data
 contributors to backup that data - so their work is not lost, but may be
 used somewhere else.

Yes, giving a heads-up to a mapper when you edit a lot of his work is
good etiquette. As for backup, the data is versioned in the db, you
can always get the old data back.

 Further, I'm not one of the users that would be confused with that. I
 would find it unsual to see in a map. But being tagged and noted
 somehow, should not be a problem at all. And to say the users who would
 be confused with it are the majority of them, is an vague argument you
 do just to give some apparent strength to your idea. And I repeat: I
 would not be confused with it, I don't think the majority of users would
 be.

Since OSM has always had a policy of containing only current data, it
stands to reason that the majority of users only expect to find
current data in OSM (or rather that anything that isn't current
anymore needs to be fixed, and that it was current when it was added
to osm).

Wether you get confused when stumbling uppon data which violates that
rule depends on what you're doing with the data. 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.

 P. S.: this mailing list does not add a Reply-to header to mail
 messages, as I'm used to. So I initially sent the answer to just one
 person. This should be changed - may it not confuse the majority of
 users!?

It normally does, not sure what happened here.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/08/2015, Mike N nice...@att.net wrote:
 On 8/23/2015 2:03 PM, Dave F. wrote:
 Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
 you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?

 In my case, I've begun to do just that, adding a note to alert the 'Bing
 tracers' that something has changed.  But I would eventually remove it
 after Bing is updated.   Only historic or notable buildings would go
 into OHM.

That's actually something I do as well:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2554879309 but I only add a note=*
node, I certainly don't keep any building=* closed way.

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Warin]

On 24/08/2015 4:24 AM, Dave F. wrote:

On 23/08/2015 19:11, Mike N wrote:

On 8/23/2015 2:03 PM, Dave F. wrote:

Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one,
you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?


In my case, I've begun to do just that, adding a note to alert the 
'Bing tracers' that something has changed.  But I would eventually 
remove it after Bing is updated.   Only historic or notable buildings 
would go into OHM.




To clarify, I'm talking about the main OSM database, not the Historic 
one.


I'm unsure why you think Bing is somehow the primary arbitrator of 
valid data. If it's gone in the real world delete it in OSM. OSM is a 
database of *current* entities.




I think it is to stop some mapper using the 'old' bing image to 'update' 
OSM - thus removing Mikes building that is actually current.
Start and end dates on the features may help .. but both features need 
to be present to ensure that fellow mappers see the history.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Balaco Baco]

 Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one, 
 you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?

I'm saying that simply deleting the original outline, leaving nothing in
its place is different than putting the *same quality outline* for the
newer building that should be there. And while this new data does not
exist, the old one should stay there as it is. It should, at most, be
marked with a tag such as end date or demolished or anything
similar. Simply deleting it is bad. And to justify the deletion for a
currently demolished building is silly and naive: buildings are usually
replaced much faster than maps are expected to last, and the work of
updating it twice, once for the empty space, dem. building and the
future new building outline is better done only one time. Further, in
places like OSM, where contributors for the second part cannot even be
guaranteed, it should be mandatory to follow guidelines and ideas
similar to this one.

-- 
  Balaco



On Sun, Aug 23, 2015, at 15:03, Dave F. wrote:
 On 23/08/2015 01:27, Balaco Baco wrote:
  What we need is a
  database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
  small elements of it cease to be current.
  In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)
  I'm sorry. But this is just a stupid thing to do.
 
 Are you saying if a building gets demolished  replaced with a new one, 
 you wouldn't remove the original outline from OSM?
 
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 08/22/2015 11:07 PM, Lester Caine wrote:
 What we need is a
 database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
 small elements of it cease to be current.

In OSM we do that by deleting the small elements ;)

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Lester Caine]

On 22/08/15 21:32, Tim Waters wrote:
 I'd like to recommend OpenHistoricalMap.org (OHM) which will welcome
 all types of historical, disused and abandoned features. Please, go
 add every abandoned railway to OHM, and then together we can
 eventually get an accurate map of 1880s railway network compared to a
 1940's, compared to yesterdays world!

BUT OHM has avoided importing all of the existing material. Manually
adding all that again is a pointless exercise. What we need is a
database that already has all the data and simply identify when some
small elements of it cease to be current.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Tim Waters]

I'd like to recommend OpenHistoricalMap.org (OHM) which will welcome
all types of historical, disused and abandoned features. Please, go
add every abandoned railway to OHM, and then together we can
eventually get an accurate map of 1880s railway network compared to a
1940's, compared to yesterdays world!

Tim



On 22/08/2015, Jason Remillard remillard.ja...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi

 I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
 borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are people
 who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that work.  Lets
 respect that and strengthen the community rather than deleting it and
 doing
 the opposite.

 I 100% agree. The amount of data required to map abandoned railroads
 is tiny. An occasional way through a new development is not going to
 hurt anybody or impair normal mapping activity.

 Apparently, the people that like to map railroads think OSM is the
 best place to do this. We are not in any position to be chasing them
 off. OSM has a long, long way to go still. Above all else, it needs to
 more active mappers if we are serious about being the best map for the
 entire world. Also, It seems likely they are also mapping non
 controversial things like roads while working on the railroads.

 Dave F, OSM is doing just fine. It is full of contradictions,
 redundancies, disagreements, and broken rules (see the tagging list).
 It is not some kind of business database that requires normalization,
 strict schema definitions, and vigilant protection. It can't have any
 once sentence rules defining its boundaries. It is a great big blank
 sheet of paper, relax and let the railroad people draw on it a bit.
 Nobody is going to get hurt.

 Jason

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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Dave F.]

Err.. Ok. In that case we should keep all of Europe's borders within OSM 
going all the way back to the Roman empire  before.


Not such a good idea eh?

If you want to map irrelevant data just to keep users happy then you'll 
be happy with me mapping every route I've walked  ridden? I'll name 
them 'Dave's Routes'


Not such a good idea eh?

Do you keep old buildings. roads, schools etc? No. So why railways?

There was a group who wanted to add historic data in the current 
database. I live in a city which dates back to Roman times. How unusable 
would that be if just all the buildings were added?


If someone wants a historic railway map they should scrape the data into 
a separate database  overlay onto a current OSM rendering.


As an aside, personally I don't feel OSM is a community. I feel little 
comradeship to you or any other mappers. I contribute as I see it as 
better map to the alternatives.


Dave F.

On 21/08/2015 19:51, Gregory Arenius wrote:
The OSM community is what OSM is even more than it is a map.  People 
that are passionate about railways are a part of that community and 
they do contribute a lot, especially in the US where we don't have as 
many mappers.  They pour lots of time and love and passion into their 
efforts.  I don't think a policy of deleting that work just because 
what they're mapping isn't immediately visible on the ground is a good 
way of building and strengthening our community.  In fact, as it is 
easy to see in this thread, its actively doing the opposite.  And 
community is what makes OSM.


I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like 
borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are 
people who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that 
work.  Lets respect that and strengthen the community rather than 
deleting it and doing the opposite.



Cheers,
Greg


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Gregory Arenius]

The OSM community is what OSM is even more than it is a map.  People that
are passionate about railways are a part of that community and they do
contribute a lot, especially in the US where we don't have as many
mappers.  They pour lots of time and love and passion into their efforts.
I don't think a policy of deleting that work just because what they're
mapping isn't immediately visible on the ground is a good way of building
and strengthening our community.  In fact, as it is easy to see in this
thread, its actively doing the opposite.  And community is what makes OSM.

I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are people
who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that work.  Lets
respect that and strengthen the community rather than deleting it and doing
the opposite.


Cheers,
Greg
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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Greg Troxel]

Gregory Arenius greg...@arenius.com writes:

 The OSM community is what OSM is even more than it is a map.  People that
 are passionate about railways are a part of that community and they do
 contribute a lot, especially in the US where we don't have as many
 mappers.  They pour lots of time and love and passion into their efforts.
 I don't think a policy of deleting that work just because what they're
 mapping isn't immediately visible on the ground is a good way of building
 and strengthening our community.  In fact, as it is easy to see in this
 thread, its actively doing the opposite.  And community is what makes OSM.

 I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
 borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are people
 who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that work.  Lets
 respect that and strengthen the community rather than deleting it and doing
 the opposite.

Well said.   I agree that community is being harmed by the deletionist
mentality.


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Re: [OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Jason Remillard]

Hi

 I'd therefor like to propose that abandoned railways be treated like
 borders.  Even if you can't see it along a given stretch there are people
 who can and they have put a huge amount of effort into that work.  Lets
 respect that and strengthen the community rather than deleting it and doing
 the opposite.

I 100% agree. The amount of data required to map abandoned railroads
is tiny. An occasional way through a new development is not going to
hurt anybody or impair normal mapping activity.

Apparently, the people that like to map railroads think OSM is the
best place to do this. We are not in any position to be chasing them
off. OSM has a long, long way to go still. Above all else, it needs to
more active mappers if we are serious about being the best map for the
entire world. Also, It seems likely they are also mapping non
controversial things like roads while working on the railroads.

Dave F, OSM is doing just fine. It is full of contradictions,
redundancies, disagreements, and broken rules (see the tagging list).
It is not some kind of business database that requires normalization,
strict schema definitions, and vigilant protection. It can't have any
once sentence rules defining its boundaries. It is a great big blank
sheet of paper, relax and let the railroad people draw on it a bit.
Nobody is going to get hurt.

Jason

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