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

2015-04-01 Thread Minh Nguyen

On 2015-03-31 23:12, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:

For background, in the USA there is an intermediate step to
abandonment.  A corridor can be "railbanked",
meaning the easements don't expire.  It's not an active railway, but
it can be returned to rail service
via an administrative procedure.  And in fact, that's happened.
Usually however these become trails,
a process that can take decades.


I'd imagine that most railbanked rights of way would be mapped with 
railway=disused (inactive tracks, possibly overgrown) or 
railway=abandoned (no tracks but an embankment, greenway, or clearing 
still present), as opposed to something like railway=razed. [1] The 
tags' definitions acknowledge physical characteristics rather than 
ownership. I don't think we need a tag about railbanking specifically, 
although a note tag may be helpful as a reminder to future mappers. The 
nice thing about railway=abandoned is that it can be combined with 
highway=cycleway once a rail trail is built on the old grade.


[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Demolished_Railway

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Re: [Talk-us] Mappy Hour - Next Monday

2015-04-01 Thread Mike Dupont
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 10:48 PM, Martijn van Exel  wrote:

> OpenHistoricalMap. Read about it here:
> http://www.openhistoricalmap.org/about but better still, come join the
> Mappy Hour next week.
>

That is great! nice to hear about that project. Good job!


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

2015-04-01 Thread Mike Dupont
Here in Kansas we have very many abandoned railways (and many pickup trucks
to replace them) that are turned into trails or paved over and still
visible. I would say if there is any sign of them left to keep the
information in some way.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:12 AM, Bryce Nesbitt  wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 12:36 AM, Frederik Ramm 
> wrote:
> > On 03/31/2015 08:04 AM, Natfoot wrote:
> >> There is so many situations where to his naked eye on the ground he may
> >> not be able to see it.  To a person like myself I can still find the
> >> signs on the earth of where the railroad once was.
> >
> > Then map the signs that *are*, but not the railroad which - as you
> > correctly say - once *was*.
> > Bye
> > Frederik
>
> For background, in the USA there is an intermediate step to
> abandonment.  A corridor can be "railbanked",
> meaning the easements don't expire.  It's not an active railway, but
> it can be returned to rail service
> via an administrative procedure.  And in fact, that's happened.
> Usually however these become trails,
> a process that can take decades.
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

2015-04-01 Thread Richard Welty
On 4/1/15 3:14 AM, Mike Dupont wrote:
> Here in Kansas we have very many abandoned railways (and many pickup
> trucks to replace them) that are turned into trails or paved over and
> still visible. I would say if there is any sign of them left to keep
> the information in some way.
>
this is a circumstance for which i think we need to talk things out.

given that OHM exists and works, the situation has evolved a
bit. i know that when i'm looking at inactive race facilities, there's
a very grey area when it comes to putting them in OHM vs OSM,
and i've not been as consistent as i should be about it, in large
part because i'm uncertain about where the dividing line really
should be, and to what extent i should take non-spatial data
into account.

richard

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

2015-04-01 Thread Russ Nelson
Mark Bradley writes:
 > Hello list.  I have been communicating with a mapper who says he has been
 > deleting abandoned railroads (the ones where the infrastructure is totally
 > removed).

Oh dear. The deletionists have migrated from Wikipedia to here. How do
we stop them? Isn't it bad enough that the main map doesn't render
abandoned railroads anymore? Now he has to be deleting them? Exactly
who are they hurting by keeping them in the database?

How about doing the *right* thing, and mark them as railway=razed or
railway=dismantled (I use the latter but I've seen the former).

 > As the premise of OSM is to only map ground-verifiable features
 > (other than certain boundaries), I didn't want to argue with him,

Oh, I'd be HAPPY to argue with him. I can point to all sorts of ways
to tell that a railroad used to go through, that most people don't
know about. Certain types of fenceposts, property lines that line up
with nothing but the railbed, back yards that are "too deep", roads
that are S-shaped for no obvious reason, houses that line up with
nothing but the railbed. I could go on and on.

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

2015-04-01 Thread Russ Nelson
Frederik Ramm writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > On 03/31/2015 08:04 AM, Natfoot wrote:
 > > There is so many situations where to his naked eye on the ground he may
 > > not be able to see it.  To a person like myself I can still find the
 > > signs on the earth of where the railroad once was.
 > 
 > Then map the signs that *are*, but not the railroad which - as you
 > correctly say - once *was*.

That doesn't make *any* sense, Frederik. The signs are only there
because the railroad was there. We are not making a map as a random
collection of fencelines, and embankments and cuts and
shadows-on-farmers-fields and trees-on-stone-walls. That's complete
nonsense. There *used* to be a railroad there and that's *why* there's
a fenceline and embankment etc.

Maps are for understanding, not collections of unrelated elements.

I don't have an awful lot of use of OpenHistoricalMap because it's a
faux-layer. OSM doesn't have layers (for better or worse), and trying
to create them by using a completely separate database is a purposeful
attempt to #FAIL. Since my goal isn't failure, but instead success,
we're going to keep dismantled railways in OSM.

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

2015-04-01 Thread Russ Nelson
Minh Nguyen writes:
 > On the ground, meanwhile, you'd tend to find no trespassing signs
 > on railbanked ROWs, no?

Railbanked railroads should always be tagged as railway=abandoned. The
whole point is that they *haven't* been dismantled or razed or
destroyed or whatever word you want to use for a railway that doesn't
exist anymore. Legally, it's still a railroad right-of-way whether it
has tracks or not. Even if a farmer has plowed it up, or someone has
built a house on it, it's still legally a railroad right-of-way.

Some dude in Whiteport, NY (right next to Whiteport School), thought
that the railroad behind his house had been dismantled / destroyed /
razed / whatever. He cut down the brush, and started mowing
it. Eventually he put an above-ground swimming pool on it. Poor
bastard now has a fence about five feet behind his house keeping him
off the railroad right-of-way, now part of the Wallkill Valley Trail.

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Re: [Talk-us] USA Rail: Calling all OSM railfans! (especially in California)

2015-04-01 Thread Russ Nelson
Paul Norman writes:
 > Without some kind of license giving permission, you cannot use other 
 > maps with OSM.

April Fools! Yes, you can. There are many kinds of public domain maps
whose republication needs no license. For example, in the US all maps
published before the magic date, whatever year it is we're up to
now. Maps copyrighted but not renewed. Maps published without a
copyright before 1988. Maps with insufficient creative content to be
copyrightable.

There are maps which are canonical sources of facts about the world,
such as a BNSF map naming subdivisions. No one can own a fact about
the world, because it's a fact. Just like you can't patent math. Same
idea. You can copyright a collection of facts. You can copyright the
arrangement of facts. You can copy the presentation of facts. But you
can't copyright the individual facts.

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

2015-04-01 Thread Brad Neuhauser
I understand keeping a feature in OSM if there is a remnant of the
railroad, but there are areas where everything has been replatted, regraded
and redeveloped, yet there is still a "razed" feature in OSM (for one small
example, see https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?#map=16/38.8663/-94.7943).
This seems like a good candidate for moving out of OSM to OHM.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Richard Welty 
wrote:

>  On 4/1/15 3:14 AM, Mike Dupont wrote:
>
> Here in Kansas we have very many abandoned railways (and many pickup
> trucks to replace them) that are turned into trails or paved over and still
> visible. I would say if there is any sign of them left to keep the
> information in some way.
>
>  this is a circumstance for which i think we need to talk things out.
>
> given that OHM exists and works, the situation has evolved a
> bit. i know that when i'm looking at inactive race facilities, there's
> a very grey area when it comes to putting them in OHM vs OSM,
> and i've not been as consistent as i should be about it, in large
> part because i'm uncertain about where the dividing line really
> should be, and to what extent i should take non-spatial data
> into account.
>
> richard
>
> -- rwe...@averillpark.net
>  Averill Park Networking - GIS & IT Consulting
>  OpenStreetMap - PostgreSQL - Linux
>  Java - Web Applications - Search
>
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

2015-04-01 Thread Russ Nelson
Brad Neuhauser writes:
 > I understand keeping a feature in OSM if there is a remnant of the
 > railroad, but there are areas where everything has been replatted, regraded
 > and redeveloped, yet there is still a "razed" feature in OSM (for one small
 > example, see https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?#map=16/38.8663/-94.7943).
 > This seems like a good candidate for moving out of OSM to OHM.

What problem would be solved by this action? Making "the map" more
correct? But "the map" *already* doesn't render abandoned railways,
much less razed railways. It serves to make OpenRailwayMap less
correct. That can't be a good thing. It makes the ITO subject-specific
maps less correct. That can't be a good thing.

I can understand if someone deletes a railway by hitting the wrong
key. I can understand if someone deletes a railway that is tagged
incorrectly as disused or abandoned when it should be tagged as
dismantled. I can understand if somone goes to the location of an
abandoned railway, and doesn't see the evidence that an expert
sees. But surely the person who made those mistakes will not be
unhappy if his mistake gets reverted and the tagging (if incorrect)
gets fixed.

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

2015-04-01 Thread Bryce Nesbitt
On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 2:27 AM, Minh Nguyen 
wrote:
>
> I'd imagine that most railbanked rights of way would be mapped with
> railway=disused (inactive tracks, possibly overgrown) or railway=abandoned
> (no tracks but an embankment, greenway, or clearing still present), as
> opposed to something like railway=razed. [1] The tags' definitions
> acknowledge physical characteristics rather than ownership.


Depending on the climate, a corridor can become all but invisible on an air
photo long before even the tracks are removed.
There is no firm line between OSM's definition of physical characteristics
on the ground.

I've followed hundreds of miles of such corridors, and only those still
"active" enough to be candidates for trail development,
yet faced severe challenges staying on track as it were.  These railbanked
corridors are in a legal sense still active: they're still
registered with the Surface Transportation Board, yet they can take a real
eye and skill to actually find.

Armchair deleting them because you can't find them on an air photo seems to
go too far.
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