Re: [OSM-talk] potlatch broken?
John McKerrell wrote: I just tried that and the imagery came up but it was in the wrong position (going by some tracing I did earlier today). If I drag the map the offset jumps about. Ah, cr*p. Bet I know why, too. Hang on... cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Ideas for OSM enhancements
Nick Whitelegg wrote: One would be to do something similar to what I already do on Freemap, namely clickable POIs: The user could click on a POI then get a window containing a link to its Wikipedia article (if applicable) and its description tag (if it has one). Generally a great idea - it helps to showcase our rich data. A minor point, but I'm very strongly opposed to favouring one website over another. If there are multiple URL-like tags for a POI (or way), we should display either all of them, or an impartial selection of them if space forbids (e.g. the first five alphabetically, with click for more). OSM has no special ties with Wikipedia: some OSMers are Wikipedians, some are decidedly Wikipedia-sceptics. In many cases, of course, the POI's official URL will be more informative than the Wikipedia content - you'll find a lot more about UK canals on Waterscape.com, a lot more about UK cycle routes on sustrans.co.uk, and so on. The second (and I think this is already on the todo page) would be to make a web interface for creating Garmin maps, where a user could select an area and then a Garmin .img map of that area would be generated. I can see two ways of doing this - implement in JSP, grab OSM data through the API and link to existing mkgmap code, or (and much more work) reimplement mkgmap in Ruby to link with the rest of the site. Heh, I've been thinking about something similar over the past four days - something to do with getting a Legend HCx for Christmas. ;) Again, let's not be too specific. There are lots of export formats that OSM users might want. Garmin users want .img; GIS people want .shp; people planning to go out walking with a nicely cropped paper map might want .pdf; cartographers want .ai; and so on. Yes, it's our old friend the export tab again. The point about reimplementing mkgmap in Ruby not being fun is well-made. So how about something like this? 1. User requests file 2. If file is already cached, deliver it 3. Otherwise send request to some file-making service or other 4. Regularly refresh a Please wait every 5 seconds until the file is ready 5. Deliver file to user, and cache it for future use at step 2 You could even couple it with a distributed architecture and call it [EMAIL PROTECTED] ;) It also means that our 8 zillion Perl scripts to convert OSM data to something-or-other don't have to be reimplemented. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Using Edit Tab on Main Site
Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany) wrote: i just tried to use the edit Tab on the main Site. I selected an area and the first thing I say was a Copyright for Yahoo, NavTeq and Teleatlas but no Copyright to Openstreetmap ... wow Like Steve says, the OSM copyright is on the left of the page, as with the entire rest of the OSM site. The Yahoo/whatever copyright is on the Yahoo/whatever layer - we can't change that, but obviously if you turn that layer off then the copyright notice goes with it. Then I selected a point which represents a city. It showed some tags name=..., city=... and a highway=... so i decided to mark the highway tag and pressed delete. Ups the complete city was gone. I then asked myself if there is a undo function... So I am looking for any Button which tells me undo ... I didn't see any. So the next thing I'm looking for is a help menu ... I seem to be blind. Like the rest of OSM, the documentation is currently on the wiki. There's also a direct link to the relevant page when you first open Potlatch. There will be built-in docs in due course, just haven't had chance to build that yet. Same goes for all-purpose undo: as it stands there is currently undo-like behaviour for way edits, but not for POI edits. As I've said a few times before on this list I figured it was more important to concentrate on ways first - it's never that difficult to reinstate one POI unless it's got thirty-seven tags. If you want to help whittle down the long to-do list, that'd be great. ;) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Recent Potlatch changes
David Dean wrote: I'm glad we can ignore it, but how do I turn it off. Every time I use Ctrl+T to open another firefox tab, the debug info comes up and I cannot use Potlatch properly without reloading the whole page. I'll commit a new version with the debug thingy disabled when I'm back at my development machine. (It shouldn't have stayed in anyway, sorry about that. Blame pre-Christmas brainfade.) Also, whilst I am in mood for constructive criticism :) is it possible to make it so the autocomplete works more like excel in that if there is only one autocomplete option valid it actually fills out the remainder of the text box but is highlighted so it can be typed over. This way you can just tab to the next field once you have entered 'hig' instead of them having to hit up arrow before leaving the field. Like Tony said, you can get this if you use Enter rather than Tab. I've chosen to do it this way so that it's still possible to tag something with hig if you really want to! cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] relations
Jo wrote: I'm adding relations for bus routes and now I'm going to start using them for cycle routes and signed walking paths. I have a few questions about them and their implementation in the editors though. I find that I'm splitting up roads a lot to indicate that a specific part of it is part of a route. Say somebody comes after me and uses Potlatch or JOSM to combine these streets again. Would this be possible? Or is it somehow prevented? Right now, the only relations support in Potlatch is that if you delete an object (be it way or node), it is also removed from any relations that it might be in. In other words, the bare minimum required not to break relations (though it may on occasion break their meaning!). Proper relations handling is something that Potlatch will need in due course but isn't a priority for me at the moment - though I think Dave Stubbs has started work on implementing it. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] My Openstreetmap talk at 24C3
Frederik Ramm wrote: It i s going to be a real book, German Language, about 300 pages, and aims to have everything the would-be mapper needs to get going, as well as an overview about the technical background of the project (i.e. data model, XML, and stuff). We assume it is going to hit the market some time in February. Sounds brilliant. starts wondering about an English translation cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] curves
(suggest follow-ups to dev only) Artem Pavlenko wrote: Perhaps, not well know fact but Mapnik can render bezier curves. The reason it is not being used is the lack of support for curves in common GEO formats. Now that really _does_ have promise for slimming down SRTM filesizes. My workflow for SRTM is GeoTIFF-DEM2TOPO-Polish format-Perl script-Illustrator-simplify to beziers... which produces nice manageable files. Clearly those particular tools wouldn't be much use for OSM, but the principle remains. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] POIs from wikipedia
Robin Paulson wrote: while i was looking up some info on wikipedia [1], i noticed that a lot of pages have a lat/lon value to describe their location; this strikes me as something we could use to increase the amount of data in OSM These are almost certainly derived from Google Maps et al, therefore unsuitable for OSM. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] POIs from wikipedia
Robin Paulson wrote: [co-ordinates on Wikipedia] On 08/01/2008, Richard Fairhurst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: These are almost certainly derived from Google Maps et al, therefore unsuitable for OSM. really, that sounds like it would contravene wikipedia's rules and google's terms of use? and is it our responsibility to pre-guess what wp editors are doing? i think taking their data at face value is acceptable Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Obtaining_geographic_coordinates It actively recommends getting co-ordinates from Google Maps, Multimap, Microsoft etc. etc. etc. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] The OSM licence: where we are, where we're going
Gregory wrote: I don't know much legally but... Oh, I don't know, you seem to have summed it up pretty nicely there. :) [...] If I'm right then compatibility isn't quite as much as an issue as the discussion has made me think. Yes, absolutely. As Abi says, Wikipedia's current policy allows any free images to be used, and if they move to CC-BY-SA that will be explicitly permitted under its Collective Work clause. So whatever happens, Wikipedia and similar projects will always be able to use OSM maps. cheers Richard (follow-ups to legal-talk, he says forlornly) ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] How to photo fold-out maps
Lester Caine wrote: For this map http://home.lsces.co.uk/lsces/wiki/index.php?page=British+Isles I ended up scanning each section and then tidying things up with paintshoppro. Yes, I'm taking that approach with the NPE scans at the moment - scan as is, then manually straighten. I've written a bit of Perl to do this, using the fabulous Imager library: http://search.cpan.org/src/TONYC/Imager-0.62/samples/quad_to_square.pl but I believe you can also do it with gdal should you so desire. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Deleted Place names in the Philippines
Ian Haylock wrote: How can I ruin openstreetmap ? I know I'll go to their website and just delete whatever I feel like using potlatch. Fortunately, Potlatch has undelete. :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] You know it's going to be good
and it's got a week to go, so let's see what they come up with. http://www.b3ta.com/challenge/maps/popular/ cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Deleted Place names in the Philippines
Ian Haylock wrote: All edits are logged against the user id of the uploader anyway, so that doesn't gain you anything Is this true with potatch as well ? Yes, Potlatch treats the database in just the same way that JOSM and other tools do, even though the code and user interface are very different. In one way Potlatch is actually stricter in that it won't let you edit the map unless you've set your edits to be public (i.e. publically attributed to your user name). Just curious, but what would be involved in undoing someones edits in the database ? i.e. suppose I deleted a way, then uploaded the edit to the database. Does sql delete all the data for the way in the database ? Or just mark the data as deleted ? It marks it as deleted. We store history for each way and node, just as Wikipedia does for articles. It's just that it's more complex to retrieve the history in a map than it is in a textual website. When you select undelete in Potlatch, it looks for all the deleted ways that have deleted nodes in your current map view, and presents them all to you for recovery. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Mapping canals
Gregory wrote: I think there is someone on OSM who lives on a canal boat, or does quite a bit of canal boating. I seem to remember them providing some input into discussions, but can't remember who they are. That'd be me. :) I live on a boat half the week, my day-job is editor of Waterways World magazine, and I've worked for British Waterways (their www.waterscape.com website) in the past. And I draw a lot of canal maps for the magazine! Berto d' Sera (who has a userpage on the wiki) has also expressed some interest. Gervase Markham wrote: ...a lot of good stuff, so I'll spare you the me toos. A few comments that might be helpful: - waterway=lock_gate might be great for the Manchester Ship Canal, doesn't work so well for narrowboat canals. Locks are 70ft long or less, and marking the upper and lower gates individually seems unnecessary and makes them harder to render. Locks also have names (e.g. Hatton Bottom Lock) which seems to make them better rendered with nodes. On the other hand, canals have no direction of water flow (with a couple of exceptions) but locks are directional. So one might want to indicate that by using a short directional way. (But should the way point low to high or high to low?) Or perhaps level tags either side of the lock, but that could interact badly with bridges if this persisted along the canal. (I'd expect the entire canal to have level=-1 to make creating bridges over it easier.) One might also consider ele either side, but accurate data is hard to obtain with a GPS. Is there best practice in this area? I agree that there should be the option of mapping a lock with a single node. Direction can be solved simply by making the way of the canal point downstream (though there's generally no water flow as such, the locks are generally all in the same direction either side of the summit level). The Trent Mersey Canal, for example, heads uphill west from the Trent as far as Stoke-on-Trent; it then passes under Harecastle Hill in a tunnel; and then continues downhill towards the Mersey. 73 locks in all, but just two directions. For bridges: level=-1 could cause problems with aqueducts. Suggest bridges are just level=1 as per usual and the canal, without a level tag, is therefore an assumed level=0. [some good points snipped] - It is useful to denote the rise/fall of a lock (again, universally measured in feet). There needs to be a tag for this. We could appropriate depth, but it's not actually the depth of the canal. rise is the standard term. - waterway=aqueduct should surely be applicable to ways rather than nodes? Should be both: an aqueduct can be as long as Pontcysyllte, crossing an entire river valley, or just a simple culvert-style construction over a stream. - All canals have towpaths. These paths are of varying quality, and this information is useful to walkers and cyclists. The towpath can be on either side. How should the towpath be denoted? As a separate way parallel to the canal? What tags should be used? (highway=footway,bicycle=yes)? How should quality be denoted? Towpaths are generally, but not always, permissive paths where the landowner is (for a UK canal) British Waterways. Yes, it should be a separate way. Cycling is permitted on some, but not others, so this too needs to be expressly tagged. As for quality, this is a wider need - decent tags for expressing the surface of a way and what types of bike it's suitable for. - Tunnels often have rules about who can enter and when (e.g. transit north beginning between :00 and :15; south between 30: and :45). We have hour_on and hour_off - is that enough? How should such tags be applied, given that the restrictions are different in each direction? I think there's a proposed relation on the wiki which might address this. - There are mile markers along the canal which are useful for navigation and as points of reference and interest. Just nodes, for which we need a tag, I guess. Exactly the same as the mileposts that you used to find on UK roads, that you've always found on French roads, and that are being introduced on UK motorways and some principal roads as well. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] walking routes?
Nick Whitelegg wrote: Talking of walking routes in a more general sense , i.e. not official long distance paths but a favourite route/circuit e.g. the Old Dungeon Ghyll-Pike o'Blisco-Crinkle Crags-Band-Old Dungeon Ghyll route in the Lake District (excellent last day of last year's mapping party - a rare normal summer day in the abnormal summer of 2007!) do people see a scope for these to go into OSM itself, or best kept as a separate database which Freemap currently does? TBH I would be fairly dubious about tagging any non-waymarked walks/cycle rides as routes, let alone ones of my own devising. This is interpretation which should be kept out of the largely factual OSM. If we're going to have people's personal favourite walking routes, we might as well also have the whole of BeerInTheEvening on our pub nodes, and so on. At this point Fake Ed would probably pipe up with something about the mapping provider ownz0ring all your data if he were here. ;) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Units convention (Was: Mapping canals)
Martin Trautmann wrote: Speaking about canals - do they use nautical speeds? Is the proper unit km/h, mph or knots, are these land or sea miles? Distances here are given in km, using km plates besides the canal. In the UK they use mph and miles.* Sometimes on river navigations there's maxspeed_upstream and maxspeed_downstream, too. :) cheers Richard * anoraks may pick me up on this but that's _way_ too involved to get into here ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] Opentrail - What development environments would be best for mobile compatibility?
bvh wrote: On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 12:29:33AM +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote: Well, if your definition of better includes open, then no. Sometimes when talking about OSM I say provocatively that we're so ruthlessly pragmatic that we would even switch to Oracle if someone gave us the stuff for free and it worked better than what we currently have. First, I don't think that attitude is prevalent in OSM. For example every potential data source gets scrutinized for openess nearly to Debian like levels. Sure, but it's possible to be an open geodata kind of guy without being a free software kind of guy. Just because I'm insistent about the cleanliness of our map data doesn't mean I want to give up my Mac and all the lovely closed-source software on it. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] Opentrail - What development environments would be best for mobile compatibility?
bvh wrote: Moreover, I don't think your position is internally consistent. The data is nearly useless without the programs to do something interesting with it. What good would it be for the geo data to be open if the preferred way of accessing it is closed? I think preferred is the key. OSM's a broad church and, most of the time, there is no preferred way: we don't turn people away because they choose to use closed source software, closed formats or whatever. For example, we are, by open project standards, very welcoming towards those who use Windows. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch sluggish today?
maning sambale wrote: Potlatch is a bit slow today. Any info why? Unfortunately a couple of recent changes to the API have caused problems for it. I need to modify Potlatch to take account of this but didn't manage to complete the work last night, not least because the source was in the middle of a fairly major change when this happened. I'll work on it again tonight - sorry for the hassle. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Closed Ways all Opened in Luxembourg
Patrick Weber wrote: Hi Noticed something very strange just now. Looked at Luxembourg-City in Potlatch, and all closed ways (roundabouts, parking lots ... ) had been opened . By that I mean the last node had been deleted so that that there was a gap and the line wasnt closed anymore. Now this doesnt seem to have been a manual error, I found dozens of errors!! example : http://www.openstreetmap.org/? lat=49.60003lon=6.10759zoom=17layers=B0FT Go into Potlatch, and the roundabout, the parking lot, the graveyard are all not closed anymore (they obviously were before, as Mapnik render shows). Whats goind on ? Short version: An unintended side-effect of a change to the server code deployed about one minute before you sent your message. Spotted instantly and now fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience. Long version: Since the dawn of time, Potlatch has accessed the database directly using SQL statements, rather than the Rails object model that the rest of the site uses. This is principally because I understand a bit of SQL but not any Rails. (But also because, especially in the old API 0.4 days, Potlatch abstracted a lot of stuff away from the user - particularly segments - and that wasn't easily mappable to Rails objects. Well, not easily for a n00b like me.) I'm very much of the school that it doesn't matter if it's written in Fortran as long as it works. Not everyone else is, and that's fair enough, they have their own reasons and I'm not going to say who's right and who's wrong. Anyway, one of those who takes the opposite view s Steve, and again given that most of the Rails code is his he's got the right to say that. So as part of ZXV's Week of OSM, Steve rewrote some of the SQL in Rails. Now this is all great and means that Rails developers can understand the code. _But_ unfortunately it was a full four times slower than the old SQL. Hence why Potlatch has been running slowly for the last week. So today, Tom did a bit of work to improve this. Tom's improved Rails code was just over twice as fast as this, which is clearly a win (i.e. 1.9x slower than original Potlatch SQL). Unfortunately, AIUI due to peculiarities of Rails, this meant that any node would only be returned once for a way... which broke circular ways. Tom deployed this, 30 seconds later I spotted the problem, two minutes later Tom had deployed a fix... it's just bad luck that you were editing in the intervening 2 minutes. :) Anyway, more usefully, Potlatch now automatically resizes itself to your browser window. Still a couple of rough edges to iron out (particularly with the Yahoo imagery) but hope you like it! cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Flash player's own zoom tool fails with Potlatch 0.7
Rahkonen Jukka wrote: Vectors and imagery do not match any more. Only way to make them match is to close the editor and start from the beginning again and avoid using the right click zoom. This feature has worked fine until yesterday. I have found it very useful and I would like to see it coming back sometime. Unfortunately this appears to be a known bug with Flash Player when a SWF fills 100% of a div, as Potlatch now does (rather than being fixed-size). Hopefully Adobe will fix it but we're also planning to approach Yahoo and ask them if they could perhaps scale up their imagery rather than reporting no imagery available. Until then, you can realign the imagery by holding down Space and dragging it. Or I'm open to any other ideas, of course! cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] big ways in Potlatch
maning sambale wrote: Ways and nodes in potlatch seems bigger: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2199/224183_2918024784_m.jpg I'm using ubuntu Firefox 2.0.0.10 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20060601 That's usually a sign of an old Flash Player. What version are you using? cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Progressing OSM to a new data Licence regime
Ian Haylock wrote: Surely if a person releases something under PD, he/she is giving up all rights to that information, be it software, data, etc. So what's to stop OSM doing what they want with the data. For instance if the whole of the OSM database was public domain. A private company could write some mapping software that uses OSM data, And there would be nothing to stop them selling this software and data together. Or have I got this PD thing all wrong ? Brief recap: Some OSM users would be very happy with this. Others insist on a share-alike provision, as there is in the current licence. Reconciling the two is pretty much impossible, and neither side is going to convince the other. What we're discussing is adopting a better licence, not changing the whole approach in this way. There have also been suggestions that individual users could choose to formally declare their edits to be public domain, facilitating unrestricted use of their data. That is also worth discussing. Big philosophical questions about which is better probably aren't worth it. We've been there a thousand times before and we're not going to change anyone's mind. Please keep the discussion on [EMAIL PROTECTED], not talk@openstreetmap.org - thanks. :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Cycle route improvements
Andy Allan wrote: That's a bug. Fixing it will also stop people using ncn_ref=Something-awfully-long-that-isn't-a-reference-really, which suggests the invention of an ncn_name= tag. Oh, doesn't that exist yet...? /me has been merrily adding ncn_name=Lon Las Cymru and the like for a while cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Crazy ways after editing - A real argument for changeset data
Andy Robinson \(blackadder\) wrote: I can't comment on the flash-zoom functionality I can. :) As of last night the 'Zoom in' and 'Zoom out' options on the Flash right-click menu are disabled in Potlatch. Better to use an OS-level magnifier, as John McK suggested... and there'll be other zoom options in future Potlatchs. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Uploading non-GPX files
Hello all, In case anyone else finds it useful... I've knocked up a short webform that enables you to upload tracklogs to OSM in other formats than GPX. It does the conversion for you, then uploads the resulting GPX file. It might be useful if, say, you have a NaviGPS and have copied the NMEA tracklogs off the SD card. http://richard.dev.openstreetmap.org/upload.cgi Made possible by TomH fixing http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/670 in record time - thanks Tom. :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Background layers in Potlatch
Hello all, You can now choose from several background layers in Potlatch. Go to the options window (the little tick near the bottom left), and you'll see that the pop-up menu which used to offer only 'Yahoo' and 'None' now offers: - OpenAerialMap - Yahoo - Mapnik - Osmarender - Maplint OpenAerialMap is likely to be particularly useful. Not just because it's a great project in itself, but also because it uses the same low-res Landsat imagery as Yahoo - but enlarges it when you zoom in. So if you want to trace over enlarged Landsat, use this to replace the old Flash Player zoom. (If anyone else has spherical Mercator GMaps-like tilesets that might work as a background image, let me know.) Thanks to Christopher and Jon for configuring their servers (OAM/tah and tile respectively) so Potlatch can do this. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Adding maps to wikipedia articles
Martin Trautmann wrote: OJ W wrote: Just looking at an idea for adding maps to wikipedia articles... I suppose this is not possible, due to license issues!? It's certainly possible. It's a Collective Work (or whatever similar term you want to use). Plenty of Wikipedia articles are illustrated with CC-BY-SA or other non-GFDL images. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Background layers in Potlatch
Andy Allan wrote: The cycle map? Will help with filling in gaps in the routes. *doh* Of course. Why didn't I think of that? No problem at all. You'll need to add a crossdomain.xml file to the root of your tile-serving domain (i.e. http://thunderflames.org/crossdomain.xml) to permit Flash Player to fetch tiles from it. You can just copy and paste the file from http://www.openaerialmap.org/crossdomain.xml or http://tile.openstreetmap.org/crossdomain.xml (The OAM one allows tile fetches from anywhere, OSM just from clients downloaded from osm.org.) Let me know when you've done this and I'll add the layer. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Background layers in Potlatch
John McKerrell wrote: Indeed, good stuff, think I found a bug though :-( I didn't bother waiting for all of the OpenAerialMap tiles to load and switched to mapnik, that then loaded, but a few aerial tiles continued to load afterwards. Not a big deal but thought you'd like to know. Thanks - will have a look! So when does NPE support get added? ;-) When I've generated the tiles... but yes, that and OAM are the reasons behind this feature. I'm guessing I need to do the Liverpool sheet first, right? :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch Background Imagery
Patrick Weber wrote: This is confusing, and given the limited extent currently of high quality data on there, wouldnt it make much more sense to keep Yahoo as the default Imagery? Yes, that was the intention. Yahoo is still meant to be the default. It's a bug which I'm planning to fix (related to http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/684 ). cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Potlatch really hacks me off because...
I found Steve's excellent tutorial video on Potlatch really interesting - not so much because I don't know how to use Potlatch ;) , but more from a UI feedback point of view. For example, Steve was having difficulty remembering when/how you should double-click, and when you should single-click, to complete a way. Funnily enough Anna (Mrs F) was using Potlatch the other week and I noticed her having exactly the same difficulty. But Potlatch has been around for some nine months now and I don't ever recall it being brought up. So now's your chance. What little things like that annoy you, or took you a while to get used to? cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch really hacks me off because...
tim wrote: What little things like that annoy you, or took you a while to get used to? There's quite a bit of mystery meat going on, which takes time to learn. Mmmm, mystery meat... I had some of that in a curry house in Abergavenny on Sunday. Seriously, I do know, but that's kind of not what I'm looking for here. Potlatch needs a) built-in help, b) explicit buttons for some keyboard-only stuff (e.g. history/undelete). The help system will be done when I have some spare time, and the explicit buttons weren't possible before resizable Potlatch came along the other week, simply because there wasn't any space for them: they'll be along shortly. But right now I'd like to get a handle on the little annoyances. Keyboard shortcuts. Potlatch has hidden codes which do stuff. Hardly anyone has two browser windows open Ha, I'm guessing you're a Windows or Linux user... us long-time Mac users traditionally work with 29 windows open. (Bit of an exaggeration. I've just counted: I have 20 open right now: of those, two are Safari windows, one with three tabs, the other with 21.) :) I still only use potlatch for basic stuff, as learning these commands requires too much investment (want to do something, click help, tab to wiki page, look for keyboard shortcuts link, open link, search for command, forget what it was I wanted to do, tab back). Each to their own. One of the reasons I could never get used to JOSM (or, indeed, the old Java applet) is that there's all these slightly abstract toolbar icons and I can't remember what any of them do... Anyway, thanks all for the concrete suggestions, keep them coming! cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Never run out of batteries again!
Looks interesting: http://www.ikonglobal.com/ http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/03/pedal_power.php cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Using an extract from OSM in an academic paper
David Cottingham wrote: - Can I, despite the fact that the images I create that utilise OSM data are classed as derived works and hence the images should be dsitributed under the CC-SA license (correct me if I'm wrong!), still publish those images in a paper whose copyright will be owned by the publisher? It's _probably_ a collective work. So you can still publish those images, though anyone will be within their rights to photocopy just the images and distribute them. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Pint symbols: YUCK!
Lauri Hahne wrote: Make it less tall and darker colours. ;) Now you're being drinks-ist. I like the current one, it looks like it might contain a real drink (cider, purely for example) rather than any of this beer rubbish. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Editing with potlatch: T-Crossing
Martin Trautmann wrote: I did not understand how to remove the footway, make xyz a real T crossing and add this D-shaped footpath properly. To join a way to another way in Potlatch, you simply hover over the other way - its nodes will highlight in blue - and click it. At present way 23092013 (z) is not connecting with 22741194 (x) or 4599113 (y). If you click the erroneous point at the end of z and press Delete/Backspace, you can then join it properly to where it should be. (Same goes for the footpath to the east of it.) But maybe this example shows how difficult it is for a beginner to identify the proper commands and manual interaction!? When I have time Potlatch will get its own built-in help. Until then there's the wiki pages which are linked from the start-up screen. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Gpx: non-public traces in JOSM/Potlatch and milliseconds in timestamps with JOSM
Tom Hughes wrote: Jukka Rahkonen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While Potlatch shows the uploaded track fine with a neat blue line, the Convert to data layer function in JOSM does not order trackpoints correctly by milliseconds. Is it supposed to do so or is it just better to make running seconds instead of milliseconds? The server only stores points to 1s resolution I believe, so Potlatch has no choice in the case where it is displaying all points in the area. When displaying a single trace it has the original XML file available so could use greater resolution if it wished. If we're just talking ordering, Potlatch, as you say, just orders by timestamp per track (ORDER BY fileid DESC, timestamp). However I'm willing to believe that MySQL might, within this constraint, return them in the order of insertion. That would mean that Potlatch would get the order right anyway. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Ideas for Potlatch
Lauri Hahne wrote: There are few quirks currently with Potlatch. I hope somebody could fix these :D Some good suggestions, thanks! 1. The auto complete is great but its behaviour is a bit non-standard. Currently only enter chooses the currently highlighted item and jumps to the next box. Usually tab does this too, and it must be dozens of times I've hit tab and then had to return to complete the tag name. Ha, I'm never sure what to do with this one. Tab is standard for people who are used to *nix shells. On Windows and OS X, IME, tab jumps from field to field. Enter/Return selects from an auto-complete menu (e.g. Safari, Excel). (The behaviour of tab in auto-complete apps is inconsistent, on OS X at least.) Potlatch is following Windows/OS X behaviour rather than *nix shell behaviour. It's important that there's a keypress for move to next field without auto-complete, so that you can type high=very as well as highway=primary. (I will for the moment ignore those who feel there should be RULES to PREVENT non-standard tags being USED.) As to whether this is Tab or Enter, I'm not greatly fussed, but it seems more logical to me that Enter should stick with its general sense of accept choice. 5. I don't know how easy this would be but I'd like to see Nasa's Landsat images besides OpenAerial's as Nasa's seem to have better colours around here. Potlatch will accept any tile source in the standard spherical Mercator (like-Google/900913) projection/tile system used by OSM and a zillion others. I don't know of anyone offering standard-issue NASA Landsat in such a form (and who'd be willing to let us leach their bandwidth), but let me know if you do! cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Ideas for Potlatch
Matt White wrote: The alternative to the above (although it would be good in its own right) would be a change to the way a t junction is made. every time I connect a way that is perpendicular to an existing stright way, it creates the joining node, but it often shifts the new node a little bit, making the previous straight road kinked. It's a right pain.Same thing often happens when I create a node in the middle of a way - the node isn't created in the same line - it gets a little offset. You're quite right. That annoys me too. (As you've probably guessed, it puts the new point at the mouse-click rather than on the exact point on the line near the mouse-click.) I don't know why I've not fixed it already... cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Ideas for Potlatch
SteveC wrote: On 27 Feb 2008, at 10:58, Richard Fairhurst wrote: Excel's not the same. Excel doesn't autocomplete at all (at least on the OS X 2001 version) unless you press the cursor keys to select from What, you don't use Numbers? Only just got iWork '08 and started playing. Pages is _lovely_. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Trouble in Rangoon
David Ebling wrote: I too am not going to spend much more time contributing to OSM unless someone comes up with a solution to this. As I said, I simply don't have the skills to do it myself, but the prospect of someone (a commercial map company getting worried for example) coming along and wiping out entire cities, countries, or even the world, makes me feel the investment of time is at risk. There's never any danger of loss of data. Any deleted ways are still there in the database. It's just, Potlatch's undelete-one-by-one feature aside, we don't have a _simple_ way of recovering them - but nonetheless it's possible. The need for area-level revert is known and understood, we just never have enough programmers to do all the funky things that need doing... cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch Esc POI issue
Dave Stubbs wrote: RichardF: the mega-patch I sent you actually fixes this. :) Thanks! Hope to deploy the mega-patch this weekend once this dratted deadline is out of the way. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Question about Licences
Blake Crosby wrote: Duplication and/or reproduction of this map for commercial use is strictly prohibited. Does this jive with OSMs licence? Ie, can I use this map as a reference? No. The non-commercial clause isn't compatible with OSM. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Shipping OSM data with a commercial application
Gary Morin wrote: Does the OSM allow me to convert and supply the data this way? I would be more than happy to make the converted MapGuide data available for pubic access. Yep. I think I should be able to pass the data on to my clients. But as soon as my clients use it for work and overly their data on it, will they have make their data available to the public?. If they did, then I can't use OSM, my clients data is commercial sensitive and they will not be able to make it publicly available. As I understand it, you're fine. Firstly, there's no obligation to publish. The licence says that the data may be distributed only under its terms. If they're _not_ actually distributing it (i.e. they're keeping it internally), the share-alike licence terms don't kick in. Secondly, if they're only overlaying the data, this is potentially a Collective Work (share-alike doesn't apply) rather than a Derivative Work (where it does). It should be noted, however, that our current licence is not (IMO) sufficiently clear about whether internal company use of a derivative work would constitute distribution. We are considering moving to a different licence which makes this, and much else, more explicit. cheers Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] import of dataset for new zealand
Frederik Ramm wrote: And it is ok for them that whatever clever technical attribution scheme you devise is immediately switched off when OSM maps are viewed through something else than osm.org (e.g. informationfreeway, cyclemap, ...) whom you cannot force to use your technical solution? Well, that's the ODBL enforceability-of-contracts discussion all over again. ;) Andy's right in that actually displaying information on the map rendering is a non-starter. However, it is reasonable, I think, for _large_ attribution-required datasets to be imported if the copyright holders are happy for attribution to be provided otherwise (probably through a link: our existing licence requires attribution anyway, so hyperlinking it isn't much effort). ODBL makes a lot of sense in this context. For these datasets, we could store attribution and bbox in a special attribution table, which would be included in the planet and therefore could be made viewable in other viewers - or they could simply link back to the corresponding view on osm.org. cheers Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OSM Article
SteveC wrote: OL is the slippy map on the front page. The rest of it is custom ruby on rails. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Component_overview is helpful. (The main editors are JOSM [Java] and Potlatch [Flash]; the main renderers are Mapnik [C++] and Osmarender [XSLT/SVG]. There are also significant MySQL and Apache extensions. Pretty much everything is OSM-specific except for Mapnik.) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] import of dataset for new zealand
Robin Paulson wrote: [adding attribution to the Mapnik layer] bear with me here, i'm not sure what you mean: what is the serious cartographic issue, and why is it a problem? It looks pug ugly! Not a lot more that I can say than that, but I'll try. It performs an interesting social function on the Osmarender layer. But a large part of the art of cartography is decluttering - conveying the maximum information with the minimum crowding. Having repeated (c) LINZ (or whatever) tags on every road effectively reduces the amount of other information you can convey, and the attractiveness of the map. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] import of dataset for new zealand
Lester Caine wrote: When you jump into some of the links provided HERE you may have no idea in the world where you are, so a banner line with 'Auckland, New Zealand' would be very useful anyway? In some circumstances. But over and above a basic attribution requirement, you should not and cannot restrict how people render/ visualise the OSM data. To do so would remove a fundamental reason for the project. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Tag proposal/approval system is too heavyweight
Ulf Lamping wrote: Frederik Ramm schrieb: Well. Before there were no vineyards on the map. And the discussion was rather dead. What do you expect me to do, start a vote or just do it in a way that works and gets vineyards on the map Well, I'd expect you to start a vote just like anyone else and NOT abuse your power position as one of the persons who knows how to change the rendering rules. Well, there's an issue. At present there are perhaps three main influences on what tags are used: what's documented, what's rendered, and what the editors present as presets. I can only speak for part of the last-named (and arguably least significant). Potlatch's preset and autocomplete tags are meant to reflect what the community wants and uses. At present they are taken almost directly from Map Features. Unfortunately Map Features may be diverging from the community. Tags are proposed and voted on by a very small subset of people. Commonly used tags have had their descriptions clarified so that they mean something significantly different from what they did originally. And we have the situation where someone (like Gerv) proposes a sensible set of tags for an area where he clearly has some subject knowledge - inland waterways - and where his proposals are being niggled and criticised unjustly by people who don't; which hardly encourages people with subject knowledge to lend their expertise. All the bureaucracy rather reminds me of Wikipedia, to be honest. Consequently I am leaning towards replacing the Map Features-derived presets in Potlatch with something produced by a tagwatch-style approach (though retaining Map Features data as an option for those who wish to use it). Is this abusing a position? No, I don't think so. It's the voting that has diverged from the community, not the other way round, and Potlatch should follow the community. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Rendering power lines: black is beauty
Sven Grüner wrote: That once again throws up the general question which purpose the (official) maps displayed at openstreetmap.org should serve. A) Should they be a neat, beautiful (street-) map flattering the eyes of people who are used to the map-design of Google? or B) Should they be a show case of what OSM is really about, the data. Showing off what cool features we've got that no other map supplier can offer. We have two layers, Mapnik and Osmarender - we can do both. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relation 412 errors
Frederik Ramm wrote: PS: is there any work being done into finally properly supporting route relations in the editors? It still randomly happens now and then that routes get broken because an editor lets a user split or join roads with relations on them. I have ideas how to handle this in JOSM but haven't done anything about them yet. For Potlatch, I think I read that there's a pending 0.8 release that works with (certain types of) relations. Yep, Potlatch 0.8 has good relations support (thanks to Dave Stubbs) and should be available as soon as TomH returns and can deploy it. It's worth pointing out that Potlatch will never _forbid_ you from joining or splitting a way because of any properties of that way. Popping up an alert saying You can't do that due to some weird data- model magic that you probably don't understand is bad UI. The design philosophy is, rather, to make it clear what you've done. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Survey: Bad Map Rendering
Frederik Ramm wrote: I'd be happy to hear from you about such areas of bad rendering, whether they are bugs in there renderer(s) or just things that are ugly for some reason. Label placement (as Steve's flagged) and generalisation (i.e. stretching the geographical truth to convey the information you want) are the two old chestnuts for automated cartography. The South Wales valleys are always a good case for generalisation: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.61lon=-3.333zoom=10layers=B0FT You have a narrow valley with (typically) one or two major roads, a railway, a river and a canal all crowded into it. How do you avoid them all ending up on top of each other at small scale? There is a vast amount of prior research on both these topics, so your student would have a lot of reading to do, but yes, the crowdsourcing approach could really add something. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Potlatch 0.8
(cc:ed to talk-gb for NPE relevance, follow-ups as appropriate) Hi all, I'm delighted to say Potlatch v0.8 is now live (thanks Tom!). == Relations support == Thanks to Dave Stubbs, Potlatch now has really good support for relations. This means you can easily create long-distance routes, holes in areas, and other as-yet-undecided uses. Relations have of course existed in OSM for several months, but I've held off adding support into Potlatch until we could get the UI right, and I think Dave's work does exactly that. Any relations that a way(/point/POI) belongs to will show up in the tags panel, with the rest of your tags. Relations are also marked on the map with an extra colour band. Clever bit: if you move your pointer over the relation, Potlatch will highlight all the other members! To edit a relation, just click on it, and you'll get a pop-up tag editing panel. To add a way/whatever to a relation, use the new link icon on the right, then select a nearby relation from the menu (or Create a new relation). And to change the way's 'role' in a relation, just type it into the little text box within the relation, on the tag panel. == Improved tag editing == In conjunction with the above, I've rewritten a lot of Potlatch's tag editing code. Changes include: - You can now use colons in keys - Tag panel resizes with the window - Very subtle scrollbar when there's too many tags to fit (possibly too subtle :) ) - Explicit 'delete' (X) button for each tag - Various bugs removed (e.g. clicking autocomplete on freeform fields) There are many changes under the hood so a few new bugs have been introduced - e.g. repeat is erratic and there are some small problems with tabbing. There'll be a 0.8a in a couple of days, but as ever, let me know of any via trac, the wiki or mail. == Out-of-copyright layer == An out-of-copyright background layer is now available. It doesn't really have any maps in it yet, though. :) Thus far there are a few New Popular Edition tiles of Anglesey and the Chester area at zoom level 14 only. I'll be adding the rest of Wales soon and then starting on England. If there's anywhere in England you have a burning need for, please add your requests to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/New_Popular_Edition . The layer is deliberately called out-of-copyright rather than New Popular Edition, because it would be good to get o-o-c maps for other areas too. If you have out-of-copyright maps, and some knowledge of Perl and projections (Frederik!), let me know and we can discuss adding them. (If any JOSM hackers want to add support for the same layer, it comprises Google-like spherical Mercator tiles at the URL http://richard.dev.openstreetmap.org/npe/[scale]/[x]/[y].jpg .) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] JOSM update / why does API return GPS points in descending order?
Frederik Ramm wrote: ... and the DESC nicely explains the observation that all arrows are in the wrong direction! I wonder why it is there. Because you want the most recent ones first? cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] JOSM update / why does API return GPS points in descending order?
Frederik Ramm wrote: Does any application *not* read all pages returned? Well, in Potlatch the download points in current area is the primary method of reading tracklogs (as - mercifully - it doesn't have any access to your local file system), so yes, it does return only the most recent n000 points to avoid utterly boggling the server/your browser. That said, it doesn't use the XML API anyway so it's a bit of a moot point. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OSMF announcement: Copyright Easter Eggs
tim wrote: Interesting. Theres a rumour going around about there being similar villages in Scotland. The problem is, though, that the namefinder is too good at spotting them. With just a few queries I've used it to identify: Fake Minaret Road Rossie the Fake Dam Lie North Service Road Joke Smitlaan Imaginary Old Road and April Fool Hill cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Need some Brentford (London) vectors!
Christian Nold wrote: What I would love is if someone could grab me about 6km diameter of OSM data as some kind of vector data format that I could work with in Illustrator. If anyone's got a OSM UK db on their machine (I don't without driving 80 miles, I'm afraid), they can generate an Illustrator file for Christian using this script: http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/utils/export/osm2ai/osm2ai.pl cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] linz dataset for nz - attribution methods summary
Robert Vollmert wrote: I may be missing something, but why would we need to introduce a read- only attribution tag if we already have it? It's the source tag of the first version of an object, in http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/objtype/id/history applauds cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] anonymous contributions still allowed ?
Pieren Pieren wrote: Potlach history just says 'anonymous'. The way was created with JOSM. I thought that such anonymous editions are not possible since Nov. 2007. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Disabling_anonymous_edits http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-October/018893.html It's only Potlatch that prohibits such edits. JOSM and the main API permit them. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Easy way to export to Illustrator?
Axel von Matern wrote: What I have found when searching the archives and else on Internet seem very complicated and outadet processes to do this. I found a web service that could make svg files out of gps files, but the vectors where totally segmented and therby useless. As yet there's not an easy way to do it. When TomH finishes the export tab real soon now, you'll be able to export as PDF and then import that into Illustrator. Or maybe you'll even be able to export into Illustrator if I get round to adding that bit. If you're handy with planet.osm and can get it into a database, there's a command-line utility in svn, but I'm guessing from your message that you're not. But maybe someone on the list who has the full planet could run the script for you? cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
Relations are a super-powerful tool and permit all kinds of whizziness (cycle routes, bus routes, areas with holes, dual carriageways, etc.). This much we know. On looking through the latest UK planet excerpt, though, I note a handful of cases where they're being used for simple road refs. So there are route relations which have simply been set up to convey ref=A813, etc. Could I 'umbly suggest not doing this unless there's very good reason? In the UK, road numbers are unique (apart from about three cases where local councils have cocked up, e.g. the B4027) and no road can have more than one ref. The relation doesn't give any info over and above that in the standard 'ref' tags - it just increases complexity for both editing and processing. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
David Earl wrote: In the UK, road numbers are unique (apart from about three cases where local councils have cocked up, e.g. the B4027) and no road can have more than one ref. Not true - the A11 and A14 share about 10 miles of dual carriageway around the north of Newmarket, for example. It's absolutely true. That bit's the A14. This Highways Agency document, for example, refers to the stretch of road in question as solely the A14: http://www.highways.gov.uk/roads/15200.aspx The fact that traffic following the A11 needs to use it is pretty much immaterial - traffic following the A34 from Winchester to Manchester, for example, has to use the M40 from Bicester to the M42, and no-one's suggesting that the M40 is also the A34 (if it is, I can cycle on it ;) ). No, it's the A14 leading to the A11, and will almost certainly be signposted as such - A14 (A11), or on more recent signs, on separate lines like this: A14 Bury St Edmunds 15 Felixstowe 87 (A11) Norwich 98 There are thousands of stretches of road like this across Britain, but in all cases they only have one official number (very occasional signage errors notwithstanding). The relation doesn't give any info over and above that in the standard 'ref' tags - it just increases complexity for both editing and processing. It links the pieces together, which you would have to infer otherwise from the ref. That's not to say the ref shouldn't be on the highway as well. But if you can unambiguously infer it, you shouldn't need to explicitly tag it. Having duplication also makes it too easy for discrepancies to arise - what if a newbie changes the ref in the way tag (obvious), but doesn't update the relation membership (less obvious)? cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
Frederik Ramm wrote: In the UK, road numbers are unique (apart from about three cases where local councils have cocked up, e.g. the B4027) and no road can have more than one ref. The relation doesn't give any info over and above that in the standard 'ref' tags - it just increases complexity for both editing and processing. If you simply use the ref tag to specify the road number, how would you then use the API to access all ways making up B4027? By using OSMXAPI: http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.5/way [ref=B4027] That the mainstream API doesn't do it is (if it's deemed useful) a deficiency in the API, not a reason to add duplicate data. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote: If that is the case, then the relationship is essential to convey the route of the A11 information. If the road just has 2 numbers, then it isn't - just a semi-colon in the ref would do. But bearing in mind that this section _isn't_ the A11 and to tag it as such is therefore wrong, then we map the facts on the ground - and that's signage=A14 (A11). Of course, if you want to go round tagging every single sign then good luck to you, but... Robert (Jamie) Munro (who thinks that relationships are so brilliant that long term we shouldn't tag ways at all - only relationships) Yeees... that was what I was afraid of. :| cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
Alex S. wrote: In the US, there are many highways which carry more than one official ref number across long stretches. For example, US-12 shares roadway with sections of I-5, I-82 and I-182 in Washington State, but both signs are on the side of the roadway in these sections. Sure, and in that case it makes sense to use a relation or to tag with semicolon-separated values, because that's something that can't be expressed with simple key=single value. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
Steve Hill wrote: Don't road numbers in brackets generally mean leads to rather than part of? [...] I'm not sure anyone is saying it is wrong, merely unnecessary and prone to causing confusion/errors. +1. Relations are for doing things that can't otherwise be done, or done well. But where there's something that already works well (ref tags), let's not confuse newcomers by requiring them to learn yet another thing. cheers Richard___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant
Lester Caine wrote: I harp back to *MY* original request. I thought you might. ;) That there is a mechanism created for managing hierarchical data properly. You can superimpose a structure on OSM two ways: either through forcing the data to be entered and tagged in a certain way, or through post-processing. Imposing it simply via data entry will not work for our community. It requires either strict rules on what data is entered (can't work with a user-base growing at the rate ours is), or for the editing software to provide a greater level of abstraction, and experience shows that many of our users _resent_ abstraction - they want to control exactly what's going into the database. So it has to be via post-processing - and this has the advantage that two people can derive a completely different structure from the same database. And, again, let's work on the libraries to make this as easy as possible. I agree with your later point that it would be good to have a mechanism of finding out what's in each country (and, ultimately, county/département/länd/whatever) - but rather than requiring everyone to tag with some new hierarchical equivalent of is_in, let's use the boundaries that people are already drawing to set up a painted image of the world, coastline-style, with a lookup service. Would be a great GSoC project sometime... next year! cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Naga City in OSM Re: GML to OSM
Lester Caine wrote: I repeat - WHERE are you getting that information by zooming out. Nothing says that this group of islands is the Philippines They're just right and down a bit from Hong Kong, which is where the Philippines are generally to be found. The easy way to distinguish them from, say, Anglesey is that Anglesey is just off the coast of Wales and its capital is Llangefni, not Manila. HTH. On a more serious note, I agree that it would be quite cool to have country names displayed on the smallest scale maps, but the best way to achieve this is by actually suggesting it rather than complaining that the world has let you down once again, replete with capital letters and an unhappy smiley. (Actually, that's the third best way. The second best way is to log a trac ticket. The best way of all is to post a patch. ;) ) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Naga City in OSM Re: GML to OSM
Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote: I suggest setting up a server dedicated to grabbing a planet every week, processing it for boundaries, and automatically generating the is_in tags. Server and boundary-processing is great; don't think we should automatically add is_in tags, though. If (as you, Andy and I have all now separately suggested, I think) the information can be fairly easily extracted from boundaries, there is no point in duplicating this in the database. Better just to provide a webservice that, given a lat/long, can tell you what country (/county/parish) it's in. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Naga City in OSM Re: GML to OSM
Lester Caine wrote: But that only addresses one small 'problem' and misses the bigger one of finding 'all the golf courses in England' or 'all the Islands in the Philippines'. No, not necessarily. Because the boundary data is freely available, whether in raw planet.osm form or in post-processed form, then you can use that to carry out any wild and wacky queries such as the above. See Andy's point about spatial queries. A lot of the 'tagging requests' look at a small isolated problem rather than the bigger picture. Well, maybe, but don't assume that people don't have a bigger picture just because it's not the same as yours. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Cycleway byway
Chris Hill wrote: The national Byway cycle route passes close to my home, so I'd like to add it to the map. The Wiki [1] suggests that I add to the relation 9327. How do I do this when the existing parts of the relation are far away so I cannot get the existing plus the new on either JOSM or Potlatch. Once I have one local way in the relation it should be easy to add others. As yet you can't in Potlatch, but I'm hoping to add that as a feature very soon. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] New Export Tab
Frederik Ramm wrote: Patrick Weber wrote: Just wanted to congratulate whoever was involved in the development of the Export tab. +1. I guess it was TomH's work and there's no reason not to announce such a major development on the lists (for the benefit of those who don't use the trac RSS feed). Indeed. Absolutely delighted to come back and find this had appeared - turns out we've been discussing export to PDF for two years now, which is eons in OSM terms: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2006-May/001246.html I'm looking forward to delving into the code (when Potlatch 0.8b is out of the way) and examining the possibility of adding unstyled Illustrator export. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OSM on factory Macs
Shaun McDonald wrote: Right click in flash only brings up a system menu for Adobe Flash settings and about the flash plugin. I believe that developers cannot use the right click in flash. (Please correct me if I'm wrong). Happy to oblige. :) You can customise the right-click menu from Actionscript, though it's always a menu (not any other click behaviour), and always has the Adobe prefs/about at the bottom. But Potlatch doesn't use it, other than to expressly disable Flash's Zoom In/Zoom Out functionality, which doesn't play nicely with resizable movies. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OSM on factory Macs
Frederik Ramm wrote: I am quite confused now about dragging the map. Many have said that using the mouse with JOSM on the Macs does not work very well. But then I am told you can use Ctrl rightclick simulation to do the dragging, and others again say that some applications would use the space bar a a modifier key. Why would they, if Ctrl is already built in? Ctrl-click means contextual menu. Space-drag in many applications (e.g. anything by Adobe) means drag canvas. (You can often also do this by selecting a hand tool.) The fact that most apps use right-click for the former, and JOSM uses right-click for the latter, is by the by really. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles
Karl Newman wrote: As someone else aptly put it earlier: OSM is about being machine-readable, otherwise it might as well be OpenAerialMap. Yes and no. It has to be machine-readable, true, but our USP is our active mapper userbase. So the design, accepting that it facilitates both, should be _optimised_ for ease of mapping, not for ease of parsing by machine. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Signs
Chris Hill wrote: I enjoy some of the signs I see while I'm out gathering tracks. While cycling the Pennine Cycleway last week, I saw RED SQUIRRELS DRIVE SLOWLY which is clearly a lie. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] GPS recommendations
Stephen Hope wrote: I think it's just as important to have a list of models NOT to buy. The one recommendation I'd give is: if you're expecting to be at all serious about OSM, grit your teeth and pay for a decent Garmin. I'm now using an eTrex Legend HCx (having started with a basic yellow eTrex, then moved up to a Geko 201) and the difference it makes is enormous: quality of reception, in-built OSM mapping, storage capacity, ease of use, ease of marking waypoints... it's just a beautiful unit, and I wish I'd gone straight to it rather than bothering with the Geko. It's such a shame to see people struggling with gpsbabel, drivers etc. when you can just plug a USB cable into a higher-end eTrex and download the tracks in mass storage mode. Personally I don't get on with the NaviGPS at all, finding it a fiddly, unreliable, counter-intuitive little beastie, and would happily see it consigned to ocean floor surveying duties. But if you're a happy Linux command-line hacker you may have more luck with it than me. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] GPS recommendations
Kai Krueger wrote: I would be interested to hear how you would rate that solution compared to one involving a bluetooth GPS mouse and using e.g. a cell phone to do the recording and display of OSM maps. Well, you can do anything if you connect a Bluetooth GPS mouse to a sufficiently powerful computer! So, sure, if you're prepared to put the time in to get it working, you're probably going to get more features that way (especially if you write the software yourself ;) ). I guess one of the main things I like about the eTrex is that it's a single unit that Just Works. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles
On 24 Apr 2008, at 13:23, Steve Hill wrote: But in common software, do the objects have an explicit type? In OpenStreetMap they do not - the type is determined by a bunch of arbitrary tags, for which you need background knowledge of which tags define the object type and which just define attributes (e.g. there is no unified type tag which you know will always define what the object is). Fortunately there aren't actually that many noun-type tags (i.e. object type), so you can just check against a small, predefined list. I make it highway and all the other -ways, power, man_made, leisure, amenity, shop, tourism, historic, landuse, military, natural. Anything else you can safely assume is an attribute. As it happens, for 99% of purposes, you'd have to filter by type anyway (if you're doing a small-scale highway map, you won't want shops or power lines), so it's no extra coding burden. It kind of goes back IMO to the principle of having a structure optimised for easy editing, and expecting the users of the raw data (who'll all have different needs anyway) to do some post-processing; and how it would be good to offer some standard libraries which do common post-processing tasks, so you didn't even need this small amount of background knowledge. But that's best done by someone with more l337 Perl/Ruby/Python/whatever skills than me, I'm afraid. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] namespaces
Jonathan Bennett wrote: What we also need is editing software that hides the complexity of namespaces from the user. JOSM and Potlatch both present the user with a flat list of key/value pairs, which is great for people like me who get a perverse pleasure from typing in complex strings, but not for users An optional interface that abstracts properties way from tag-typing is on the list for a future Potlatch. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] namespaces and copyright
elvin ibbotson wrote: JOSM imports waypoints with GPX tracks and I would like to see Potlatch do the same It does (and has done for a while). One user seems to be having problems with GPXs created by the bundled Garmin software, but it certainly works with those created by gpsbabel. You need to click the edit link by the track itself, not the one at the top of the screen - the waypoints aren't stored in the database, so Potlatch has no way of getting them unless you tell it to work off the actual track itself. cheers Richard___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] namespaces and copyright
elvin ibbotson wrote: OK, now we're completely off the original topic :-) Thanks for the tip, Richard. I hope I'm not the only user who didn't know that. Probably not! I'm occasionally posting Potlatch tips and news here: http://potlatchosm.wordpress.com/ (And it's aggregated in Planet OSM - http://planet- osm.shaunmcdonald.me.uk/ ) cheers Richard___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Holux M-241
Back in March I asked for user-friendly GPS datalogger recommendations, and a handful of people kindly posted their experiences. One unit that people were interested in was the Holux M-241. The main downside seemed to be that it would only record a trackpoint every 5s. I gather there's now a firmware update (1.11) that fixes this. From the comments at http://www.gpspassion.com/FORUMSEN/topic.asp? TOPIC_ID=103883whichpage=4 and http://scilib.typepad.com/techreviews/ 2008/01/holux-m-241-gps.html , it appears you can now select 1s as well as 5s. So it looks like it might be a good unit to go for. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Vandalism in Trumpington
David Earl wrote: If nothing else, Richard, can the apparent bug with the mode buttons be fixed and the text make it clearer that live data is being changed when you press start? It's not a bug as such - it's currently intentional that it defaults to edit the data - but I do agree that it would be better to have a more descriptive welcome screen that requires it to be cleared before you proceed, with (of course) a don't show this again checkbox. I don't want to do it half-cocked, so it's not a quick fix, but Potlatch development priorities are often decided by frequency of requests on the mailing lists so you've just bumped that one up a bit. (Incidentally, on the issue of vandalism and accountability, where were we with disabling anonymous edits through the main API...?) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Vandalism in Trumpington
Shaun McDonald wrote: I see this behaviour in Safari too. Also if you just go and start working on the data, it assumes start/live mode. I think this should be made modal, so that you can't accidentally choose the live mode, when play is the one that is really wanted. It would be nice to have some indication as to whether you are in live or play modes. There _is_ an indication, a bright red one, if you're in play mode. I've already said that I plan to make it modal. If you see it in Safari please provide a test case so I can reproduce it. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Vandalism in Trumpington
Frederik Ramm wrote: People use Potlatch because it is much quicker to load, learn, and use. This would not be diminished by a save button On which point we disagree, I suspect irreconcilably; and respectfully I suggest the greater cause of OSM usability would be better served by us each spending a couple of hours coding on our respective editors, rather than bashing seven bells out of each other on the mailing list. :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Vandalism in Trumpington
Ulf Lamping wrote: This all sounds you're trying to cure the pain of not using buffered editing with adding another concept that will add another layer of confusion ... Fine. I'm really not going to attempt and convince anyone here - one has to be a bit of a pig-headed UI fascist to develop stuff like this, otherwise you end up with design by committee which just doesn't work. I think it's good that we offer editors that work in different ways; that there is more than one answer to the questions of how's stuff written to the db and how do I avoid causing damage, although Potlatch doesn't adequately answer those questions yet; and that those who are arguing for a save button are trying to impose a model which doesn't suit Potlatch. You and Frederik and doubtless others disagree - as shown by the fact that you find something painful while I actively prefer it. That's fine, there's no monopoly on editors. I don't feel it's impossible to have a usable editor that doesn't work on the prepare and commit principle, and that's what I'm concentrating on building. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Fwd: Re: Bangladesh under the water]
David Groom wrote: It would be nice if it were easier to roll back peoples changes through :) Happily: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Monitoring_and_Rollback_Hack-a-thon_London is this weekend :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relaunch openstreetmap.de
Sebastian Spaeth wrote: you like it just because step 4 out of the 123 is start potlatch. admit it! ;-) Damn, rumbled... 5. Send token of appreciation to Potlatch programmer cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Wide tracks with cycle access
Andy Robinson \(blackadder\) wrote: Perhaps this is the better way to think about it. I generally don't like subjective tagging, but in this instance giving an opinion about how usable a section of way is might be better. If you simplified bike types into road, hybrid and mtb then I guess you could reasonably add say suitability_road / suitability_hybrid / suitability_mtb tags, or join them together as bicycle_suitability=road|hybrid|mtb and leave out any of the values where you consider its not suitable. Indeed - and you probably just need one value, given that an MTB can use anything a hybrid can, and a hybrid can use anything a road bike can. bicycle_minimum maybe. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] new potlatch issues
Robin Paulson wrote: richard, i see you've rolled out some changes as part of potlatch 0.8c, including huge thick ways...could you roll them back please? they're very obtrusive and obscure a lot of the yahoo imagery underneath. Heh, you can't please all the people all the time - the easier-to-click ways/nodes were a feature request from a user too. I guess it depends whether you use Yahoo or not. I've now added a preference so that you can turn them off. It's in the usual place in the options dialogue (the 'tick' at the bottom). Will post more on the new Potlatch later. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] New Potlatch
0.8c is one of those little things that mean a lot updates: - When you add a point into a way where it crosses another way, Potlatch automatically makes an intersection. - Points and ways are now bigger at high zoom levels for those people without superhuman fine motor skills. (But you can turn this off using a new preference.) - Double-clicking to end a line doesn't restart the line if you've already clicked. - Click/drag detection is much improved. And in some related news, the Gnash (GNU Flash Player) devs - in particular Sandro 'strk' Santilli - are doing really well in improving Gnash to work with Potlatch. strk has even become an OSM mapper which can't be bad. :) It's going to be interesting to see how Adobe's removal of licensing restrictions on SWF, just announced, benefits Gnash. Will post more on Potlatch in a minute. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] The future of Potlatch
[warning - long ponderous e-mail follows!] Hi all, A fairly weighty issue concerning the future of Potlatch has arisen, and I'm completely baffled as to what to do - so I thought I'd ask the community for thoughts and advice. CloudMade (Steve and Nick's VC-funded company set up to commercialise OSM data, www.cloudmade.com) wants to commission a new online Flash editor for OSM. It would, I believe, probably be written by developers from Stamen Design (www.stamen.com): some of you will remember that Stamen's Tom Carden wrote OSM's early Java editing applet, and they've also written a slippy map in Flash called Modest Maps. As you can imagine, this has taken me aback a bit. As I understand it, their main issue is a technical one. Potlatch is written in ActionScript 1, which is the same language as JavaScript, but for Flash. The latest version is ActionScript 3, which is much more like Java for Flash. The end user doesn't notice a difference, but the programming style is very different. CloudMade believes this is holding back the development of OSM: that if the editor were written in the latest version of the language, more Flash designers would come to work on it, resulting in a better editor. Steve cites OSM's move from pure Ruby to Ruby on Rails as an example of how a contemporary language encourages more people to contribute. And they're also worried that if I were run over by a bus then no-one would be able to speak ActionScript 1 and maintain Potlatch. I'm not so sure. I think people are beginning to contribute code to Potlatch; that as essentially JavaScript it's approachable enough; and that the problems of attracting developers is symptomatic of core OSM in general (as per http://trac.openstreetmap.org/log/sites/rails_port). I hope that Potlatch, as something maintained by an active community participant _for_ the community, has demonstrated a pretty rapid rate of improvement anyway. It's meant to be small and compact, of course, not a a bells-and-whistles editor like JOSM: nonetheless, in the last few months, for example: it's become the only editor yet to offer revert/history, gained very good relations support, background layers, flexible GPX import, etc. And there's a lot of stuff on the way, mostly focusing on usability - from a generic 'undo' and pop-up help panel to a new, super-user-friendly tagging panel with draggable POI icons and things like that. It's got faults, everything has, but it's come a long way in the last year. For what it's worth I think it's the best thing I've ever coded. For most purposes AS3 probably is a better language - except for the fairly major proviso there's no open-source player even in development. Indeed, if I were starting all over again I'd probably do it in AS3, and in a couple of years I may well migrate Potlatch to AS3 (or 4, or whatever) anyway. But right now it's more important to spend time improving usability for mappers, given that - like most people here - I do have a full-time job which isn't OSM (which isn't computer-related at all, in fact) and consequently time is not unlimited. So I really don't know what to do. Part of me thinks that the most important thing is that Potlatch is still available and users are offered the choice. Part of me thinks, well, if there's going to be a new Flash editor, there's no point in me doing any development on Potlatch from today forward. Part of me wants to say well, screw you and walk away. And part of me wants to take CloudMade up on its OSM Grants scheme (http://blog.cloudmade.com/) and say, ok then, I'll announce a medium-term feature freeze, take a few weeks' holiday, learn AS3 and recode it for a large amount of $$$. I'm utterly stumped and would welcome suggestions. Thanks for reading. :) cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] The future of Potlatch
Thanks for some really helpful and interesting responses. (Thanks especially to Tom C for a very valuable perspective.) -- API The API has come up a lot. I've said before and will happily restate now that I think it would be great to get Potlatch talking Rails on the serverside, rather than the SQL at present. It wouldn't affect the Potlatch user experience (which is my primary concern), but would mean more peace-of-mind for Tom H, Steve et al; its benefits could be open to other editors; and it'd remove a major stumbling block when talking about Potlatch, which would be helpful. I don't have any emotional attachment to the code there at the moment - it's simply like that because it was actually developed before OSM moved to Rails (the pre-Rails API was a lot less sophisticated than the current one and really couldn't do what Potlatch needed), and rewriting it in Rails is something I'm not really qualified to do safely without breaking lots of stuff. One can always learn, and given unlimited time I'd like to; but sadly I don't currently have the time to learn AS3, _and_ Rails, _and_ respond to people's requests for Potlatch... oh, and do the day job! So given that the serverside code works, albeit inelegantly, learning to rewrite it hasn't been my priority. I'm very happy, of course, to spend as much time as necessary talking others through how it currently works should they be kind enough to take on the task of rewriting it - I've already documented a bunch of it for Steve. I'm pretty sure that'd be more efficient than me blundering in and writing some very bad Rails code. There are really only two provisos to this and neither's a big one, I think. I do feel fairly strongly that Potlatch, as currently written, and the API should continue to talk AMF to each other rather than XML; it keeps the code compact and fast, especially given that AS1 doesn't have great XML handling. But that's just a transport format, really, just 50 or so lines of (pretty reliable and fast) code. The other one is that it would be good if the getway call, in particular, could exist in _both_ SQL and Rails forms in the code, with a switch called RICHARD_NOT_HIT_BY_BUS_YET to determine which one is called. Up until the time of the bus incident we could use the (very, very simple, read-only) single SQL call because it's between two and four times faster, and this is the one call that does have a significant performance impact on Potlatch. After I'm run over, you could switch to Rails, which means a performance hit but may be considered more maintainable. Please don't treat this as an invitation to drive a bus at me. Pretty much everything I'd want to say on this has already been expressed by TomH: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/025886.html http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/025889.html -- Frederik's uniqueness point Really can't argue with that. Going back to the Java applet days I did actually want both it and Potlatch to be available at the same time (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/ Talk:Java_Applet_Development); unfortunately this never happened. But as long as the choice is presented through a friendly UI and doesn't confuse novices, it's a good principle. On the openness (or otherwise) of Potlatch, Frederik, I think I mentioned to you in the internationalisation discussion that I'm planning to build a preset tagging system that will let people contribute their own plug-in tagging panels. Otherwise Potlatch's only impact on mapping practices has probably been to hasten the demise of segments which I suspect you agreed with! -- AS1 / AS3 Dave - I think your definition of donkey balls might be different to mine. ;) Or rather, when you've been sucking horse balls for several years then donkey balls don't seem very different. Er, I should probably rephrase that. To me (coming from a Perl script kiddie background, rather than Proper Programming In Java) AS1 is the nice approachable stuff while AS3 is scary with lots of stuff you have to write that doesn't actually do anything. I'm not holding that up as a truth, I don't doubt that AS3's objectively the better language by current norms: it's just that it's an utterly new way of doing things for me, and I can't immediately see the payback for me in spending a long while learning it, then rewriting all 7,000 lines of code. AS3 doesn't yet _do_ much that AS1 doesn't: some clever typography stuff (not needed for Potlatch), faster (but Potlatch's UI is plenty fast, it's the server responses that slow the UI), and better XML handling (but as written Potlatch doesn't need that). And it doesn't make me more marketable as a programmer because I'm not a professional programmer. Now this is my problem, of course, not something anyone else needs to worry about. But it's the thing that I'm still most unsure
Re: [OSM-talk] Background-only on potlatch?
OJ W wrote: Is there a way to turn off map data on potlatch, for when you want to zoom-out and look at something on the satellite photos, but don't want to trouble OSM with downloading an entire town's data that you're not planning to use? There's a request I've not heard before! Not easily. I suppose the easiest way right now would be to save edit.html, potlatch.swf and any required JS/CSS to your hard drive, and open that. If you don't have an OSM install running, it will try to connect to your local database and fail, thereby just leaving you with the imagery. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] zoom yahoo data in potlatch?
Christopher Schmidt wrote: Richard is likely limited by the Yahoo! Flash API: I expect that there's a fair chance that Yahoo! hasn't updated their Flash API to provide the new zoom levels that the main API added 2-3 weeks ago (Yahoo added more zoom levels worldwide at that time). (Of course, Richard will tell me if I'm wrong, I'm sure :)) It sounds likely, though I'll look into it. David - could you give a lat/long for the area? Potlatch's approach is to faithfully use the Yahoo API, to stay on the right side of the legal agreement. The only tweaking it does is that it tries to automatically hide the Yahoo layer if all the tiles are blank, because presenting a first-time mapper with a load of tiles saying Sorry, there is no data for this area is pretty confusing. That does therefore, I'm afraid, preclude zooming in beyond what Yahoo offers, but the screen magnifier suggestion is a good one. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] TIGER mapping party
SteveC wrote: I and others have been doing a lot of fixing of TIGER data all over the US. Here's a very good example with before and after shots: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Bridger/diary/1550 cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Potlatch 0.9: How to undo Move way action?
Jukka Rahkonen wrote: It seems to be (too) easy to move the whole selected way with Potlatch 0.9 by dragging from between two nodes. But what is the right way to undo the unintended move? It looks like hitting the Esc key does not cancel the move correctly, at least not for the ways which are connected to the moved way Will be fixed in 0.9a in a day or two. cheers Richard ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
