Re: [Talk-us] OSMF US Board Elections in progress
On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.net wrote: Candidates might consider posting statements on talk-us. Providing an opportunity for candidates to say something might have been done at SOTM US but wasn't, maybe we should have (at least 9 if not all 10 of the board candidates were in attendance.) That's a good idea. My name is Serge Wroclawski. I'm a candidate running for the board of OSM US. My involvement in OpenStreetMap started about two years ago with a talk by Richard Weait. I don't have a formal background in GIS but I immediately saw the benefits to having geographic information that was free in the same way we have Free/Open Source software, a free encyclopedia, and free textbooks. In my time with OpenStreetMap, I've been fairly active. Most recently, I currently serve on the temporary board of OpenStreetMap United States. I also served on the conference planning committee for SOTM US. I'm also one of the founders of MappingDC, a local mapping group that meets in the Washington, DC region. I've been involved in the Free Software/Open Source movement since 1997, when I installed Linux on my PC in my dorm room. At that time I had no formal CS training either, so there are a lot of parallels. With OpenStreetMap, I've learned a lot in the short time I've been with OSM, I've been developing software, and also writing guides to help people use OSM more effectively, including an alternative database/XAPI server, and my current project, to help make imports and bots a little more manageable. I have great aspirations for OSM US and I hope that I'm given the privilege of being able to take part in a leadership position. - Serge ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Address Standard
It sounds to me like they should probably be seperated out, but I don't live in the area so I don't want to make the final call. Do you live in the area? It sounds like you do. If you are still not sure try asking other people in the area and see what they think. On Wed, 18 Aug 2010, Nathan Edgars II wrote: On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:40 AM, Kevin Atkinson ke...@atkinson.dhs.org wrote: On Tue, 17 Aug 2010, Alan Mintz wrote: So, the remaining questions are: - When you look at official records, like assessor's and tract maps, is it called South Westmoreland Dr? Seems like they sometimes include the prefic and sometimes not. - If someone is giving you directions, do they say Go west on West 26th Street, then south on South Westmoreland Drive.? Doubtful. You might hear it for a few of the most major roads (like Orange Avenue and Colonial Drive, which go across the county), but otherwise no prefix. You also might say East Colonial or South Orange when talking about a location, essentially as shorthand for which side of downtown it's on. But you probably wouldn't for the more minor roads, even if they do cross the zero line. - It does appear that 2500 N Westmoreland Dr and 2500 S Westmoreland Dr are separate addresses in Orlando, according to USPS (http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp). However, no prefixes are used for addresses on 26th St, despite the presence on the sign. I think you forgot the most import test: Can the Intersection of 26th Street and Westmoreland Drive only be one possible location on the map? That is, lets assume all streets extend indefinitely. Can Westmoreland Drive intersect with East 26th Street, what about 26th street intersecting with North Westmoreland Drive. In my view the intersection test should be given the most weight, it is a concrete test the distinguishes prefixes used mainly as part of the address and prefixes (and suffixes) which identify a region of the city. If there where two roughly parallel 26th Streets (or Westmoreland Drives) than the above test will fail. The numbered streets are only in an area from 18th to 45th south of downtown, so there's no chance of confusion. There are streets that loop around and intersect others twice, but prefixes won't solve that problem. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] election statement
i originally brought up statements because i intend to write something about imports, and i realized it would be easy to interpret as electioneering, so it made sense to just suggest that candidates say something and be done with it. i became involved in OSM through Russ Nelson. i have known Russ for many years as we both are long time participants in the anti-spam community. when Russ announced he was moving on to become a community ambassador for Cloudmade, i looked at the project and concluded that it was pretty cool. that was perhaps 18 months ago, and it's still pretty cool. i have a particular interest in how this community evolves to meet external and internal forces. i think that this is a very interesting time for OSM in the US, as Government organizations try to figure out how it fits, as businesses like Mapquest work out its impact on their business models, and as the individual contributors try to sort out their feelings about the the effect of these new players on the project. i found SOTM-US to be a very energizing experience and look forward to continuing to support OSM US, however the election turns out. thanks, richard ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] SOTM-US Synopsis
Since I would like to hear more about what goes on at some of the conferences I can't make I thought I would post some of what stuck out the most for me at this one. This is just what stuck out to me. If I miss something or am wrong about something I apologize in advance. I actually mailed this off a few days ago but it seems not to have found its way to the list so here is a second attempt. Nama Budhathoki gave a good presentation (over Skype!) on who the contributors to OSM are and why they do what they do. It had breakdowns of how much people contributed verse what their reasons for contributing were. It also had a bit on the backgrounds of OSMers such as age, gender, and traditional GIS experience. Randal Hale and Leah Keith gave a talk about using OSM as a teaching tool with high school students. Her students seemed to really take to it. It was also very good because it doesn't cost theschool any money if they already have computers. The FREE component was really important. They can just make accounts and get started. They used Mapzen because they found it to be the most user friendly. Even after the class project some of the students have continued to contribute useful data to the map. Jon Nystrom gave a talk about ArcGIS being able to work directly with OSM files. Many attendees were excited about this because many people in attendance came from a GIS background and 'grew up on' ArcGIS. People like to use the tools they know. It will probably help more professionals contribute to OSM because they won't have to learn a new tool set. David Cole gave a talk about Mapquest starting to use and examine Mapquest data. The next day David Nesbitt gave a talk on how Mapquest routing can work with OSM data in their testbed. Basically Mapquest is looking at using OSM data instead of proprietary data sources. They plan on contributing back to OSM in kind and with financial support. The routing data talked some about shortcomings in the OSM data set especially in the US. Some problems were missing turn restrictions, bad topology (missing connections or connections that don't actually exist), handling of roads to ferry terminals, and driveways tagged as residential roads. Oh, and addressability. One mentioned strength was good road classifications as their routing algorithm relies on that pretty heavily. They're using a mostly open stack except for their routing algorithm. They've released they're stylesheets under an open licence but they're still a work in progress. They have a big tile server that is for open use that can handle pretty much anything we can throw at it; if I recall correctly something like 4000 requests a second. You can check out their work at http://open.mapquest.co.uk. Really awesome stuff. I'm excited by the possibility that the maps I help make could touch that many people. Wicked cool. Lars Ahlzen gave a talk on TopOSM, an OSM based topographic map of the US. Its a really cool map optimized for looks and not speed. http://toposm.com Learon Dalby gave a talk about getting government data into OSM from the government side. He is part of (head of???) the Arkansas (AR!) GIS team. They've collected a lot of good data and have released it for free for anyone to use and he would really like to see it in OSM. The main problem is how to get it into OSM. There was a general consensus (don't quote me on that!) that there isn't really a set of well defined best practices or a good tool chain to make this happen and go smoothly at that large of a scale. Also, OSMers usually only work on areas that interest them and there aren't many OSMers in AR. Another problem was how to flag changes we make to the data set and send those flags back upstream. They wouldn't be able to take our edits directly but just knowing where changes needed to be made would be a huge help to them. I think it rocks that the whole open data movement has made it to the point where there are people in government who are not merely willing to make data available but that actually want us to use it and are willing to expend time and effort to make that happen. Carl Anderson had a similar talk the next day about using government data. He suggested that using GIS conflation and road matching tools might help ease imports some even if we have to translate to a GIS format and back. OpenJump in particular was mentioned as being a good open source tool for that purpose. He also mentioned how checking the merged data with different renderers and stylesheets was helpful because they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Ian Dees talked about using shp-2-osm to import data into OSM. We had the OSM-US annual meeting. OSM-US is incorporated, is trying to become a certified non-profit, and has approximately $250 in its vast coffers. Voting for the new board kicked off and will be open to OSM-US members for the next two weeks. Voting will be run on a survey monkey platform by outside observers
