Today I accidentally deleted a relation. Comparing an older version (a part extracted from europe.osm.bz2 with osmosis) with the current one in two JOSM windows, I was able to find the relation.

It was (timestamp is wrong):

The recreated one is #6'384

I hope this is alright.

I bought a cheap GPS on EBay. I got a Palm Vx with a Magellan GPS companion attachment for ten dollars. By PDA standards the Palm Vx is completely obsolete, but it works fine as a GPS data logger.

The accuracy is pretty good. I have no way of measuring it explicitly, but it usually matches Yahoo aerial photos and Google Earth within a few feet. That is for open skies, either from my jacket pocket while bicycle riding or on the dashboard of the car. Looking at my tracks in Google Earth, it does correctly match the parking space in which I parked the car at the shopping center. Scary.

It didn't come with any software, so I'm using cotoGPS as the track logging software and converting it to GPX with gpsbabel. It appears that all the Palm-related GPS or map commercial software companies are no longer selling the products now.

Just got back from a week of skiing in Verbier. Snow conditions weren't great so most of the time was spent on the upper slopes. My GPS (eTrex Venture) will only store 2048 points, so I had it set to record a point "least often" - I didn't take a computer with me to download the points to, so I got about 2.5 days' worth of data for the end of the week.

I've mapped the tracks I've got - lots of the upper lifts and pistes, including the black mogul run from Mont Fort (which I ended up doing in white-out conditions (!). I'll try and get tracks from one of the snowboarders in the group who was downloading the contents of his GPS every day, which should cover much more of the Verbier pistes, right down to the bottom of the Medran lift.

Sadly, Mapnik and Osma don't render pistes, although the chairlifts, gondolas and cablecars are rendered (is anyone rendering the pistes on another server? Maybe I should set one up...). I've tagged the tracks as proposed by osm.wiki/index.php/Proposed_features/Piste_Maps so drag lifts are marked as piste:lift rather than arielway.

When I first came to OSM, jeez, perhaps THREE whole weeks ago, Southport, my hometown, was pretty much an empty void on OSM. I made the obvious joke on a number of occasions.

Because OSM is a pretty much entirely awesome, it looks like someone (called Dave Edwards) has been adding bits since then (or he added them before but I ignored them because they weren't in my bit of Southport) and I got itching to start helping out over there too. But I've been too busy over here to make the pilgrimage back to the 'port to collect GPS traces - so I thought I'd have a look at the NPE maps instead.

Around my mum and dad's house (my home for 18 years) in the east of Birkdale, things haven't changed much in the last 50 years (obvious joke number 2) so it was easy to get my bearings. I got up tracing pretty quickly and could remember all the local road names off the top of my head, and could add in other things like mini-roundabouts and Post Offices etc too. I had to double-check a couple of pub names with my mum but aside from that, it was easy going.

After I mapped the immediate area around them, I started mapping in other bits I know like the back of my hand - around friends' houses, schools and pubs I went to etc. It's nowhere near comprehensive yet but I've got a lot of the bigger roads around Birkdale in now.

I'll double-check all the positioning when I go over with a GPS unit in a few weeks but at least Southport is looking a bit less empty now - and it's a start. I've also marked everything as source=npe so if some GPSer comes along before I get to check it, then they'll know to trust their positioning rather than mine.

I've done extensive reworking of "my area" of the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River on the New Hampshire - Vermont Border. What a mess! Tiger was dropped as a layer over my previously uploaded data. Think I may have sorted a lot of it out, though no doubt a good amount is left to be done, getting a neck ache from it all. I guess my wish would be for Tiger not to be reintroduced in this area anytime soon. Tried to keep what was best of both datasets. One way to keep editors happy is to not nuke "their" data. Tiger had (and has) many significant errors here. Naming is one, missing new construction, and a spectacular mis-conflation of a major roadway, all in a days fun for Tiger, seems as Tiger has updated there data possibly from O.S.M. in one instance noted. On another note I notice the online applet editor know has copyright data from Navteq and Tele Atlas. Thought they were evil incarnate, at least according to the talk digest. Guess it's only a matter of time before forking private and getting all that free editor content and making money off of it. Perhaps they could pay me to enhance O.S.M. data.

Over the past week or so I've labelled the streets on my commute and some of the parks, schools, churches and shops in my local area. I'll add more detail before marking out further so at least my local area has some detail.

Since three days, I've started mapping Mons using bike & car.
This quite interesting, because it give you a purpose when going to a one hour ride.
I hope I will be able to ginish the city in one or two weeks ....

Well, that's it. I've completed the vehicle-centric map of the Cathedral City of Armidale. No foot- or bike-paths as yet so let's just declare it to be Phase 1 completed.

osm.wiki/index.php/WikiProject_Australia#NSW.2FNorthern_Tablelands

One of the great things about mapping for OpenStreetMap is the things you find while out and about, heading down every street, path and passageway that will allow you through.

It was while surveying in an area I've been meaning to do for some time, but never quite found the motivation, just over the Hagley Road and down towards Harborne that I came across the Moor Pool estate.

The first indication that this was not just a typical set of streets was one called 'The Circle,' inside which is the Moorpool Hall and two tennis courts. Cycling around, it became obvious this was some community in itself, just a short distance from Harborne High Street and the A4040.

According to the website of the Moorpool Residents Association:

"The estate was established in 1907 by John Nettlefold, first chairman of Birmingham Housing Committee and member of the Guest Keen Nettlefold (GKN) family. It formed part of the Garden City concept shared by the Cadbury family in Bournville, to provide low density housing centred on a community hall and with many interspersed green spaces, at a time when the majority of inner city housing was of a crowded back-to-back design.

"The five hundred houses were built between 1908 and 1911 and shared a similar design, which can still be seen. The estate today boasts two tennis clubs, a bowling green, numerous allotments and, of course, the Moorpool itself with an active fishing club. In the Moorpool Hall there is a very active and acclaimed dramatic society, a unique skittle alley dating back to 1913 and snooker tables. Many other groups and societies also meet there."

The houses were built 9 to an acre, when typical building was 40 per acre.

Unfortunately my mapping of the area was interrupted by my sister, who has lost her key and wanted me to return home and let her in. Getting home took approximately 1 hour (I saw a path through a small area of woodland I'd missed). Sorry, sis!

I'm working on editing Beaverton and surrounding area. So far it is all cleanups of existing Tiger data, comparing it to aerial photos and existing GPS tracks.

What connects them? Me. I have recently been up in Marlborough visiting family, and added more to my exclusive and growing map of the area. This time added some of Marlborough college grounds and also some tracks in Savernake Forest - a big job there - need to do it on a bike really.

A trip from Marlborough to Hereford allowed me to begin to fill in the gap between the M50 and the Hereford outskirts.

Closer to home I've spent some days cycling into the beautiful, but very hilly, Mid Devon area north and west of the Crediton to Bickleigh road, visiting Cheriton Fitzpaine, Stockleigh English and Shobrooke.

I found a tractor graveyard near Cadbury - just down the road to Cadeleigh, near Windwhistle Cross (great name - the wind was whistling when I was there!)

I can't make up my mind what the best way to map is. I started out working on my bike in blank areas I didn't know that well. I'd try to find roads that chopped the area in reasonable size chunks, then cycle a chunk at a time, load into josm, and check against yahoo that I hadn't completely missed anything.

Lately I've been trying to map the roads using the yahoo data first. I'm finding that that:

* massively reduces the time needed to get an initial idea of the road layout

* makes the process of following the roads massively more boring, and leads to me just noting road names and not riding down them if I can't see anything interesting. Which probably means I miss interesting hidden footpaths, etc.

Taking longer than needed seems silly, getting bored doing it even sillier (where other people have already done the roads from yahoo in an area I was going to map, I don't feel like cycling it at all - it's like the interesting bit's been done).

There must be some better way of combining the two than either of the above. What is it?

Added a few missing streets in anthoupoli area. Will add more as I track them

Added the streets of a small estate which is part of Elimbah township in Queensland, Australia.

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Finished off an area bounded by Bishopsgate, Middlesex Street St, Botolph Street and Houndsditch. Found a few more alleys and courts and added names to others. It's a great way to really see all of a local area.

Also added a few streets close to home in Northfields that I'd tracklogged last night. There's a lot of streets near me that have been marked but are unnamed so it is on my to-do-list to go around with a printout and fill them in.

There's a few of us picking away round the edges of Heathrow, but it looks like more using Yahoo imagery (which is a bit old for the area) than actually getting physically round the the area. Leaving quite a bit of it still blank. Which is a shame for several reasons: the Heathrow area tends to get used to illustrate articles, and that doesn't make osm look good; the Heathrow area is massively in the news over the new runway, and Sipson ought to be fully mapped before they start trying to bulldoze it - and it would be good for us if we had the best maps of the area showing people actually live there; and terminal 5 is launching soon and we don't have it yet...

But what to do about it? The geography means there isn't a single focal point for a mapping party. And some of the area isn't the most pleasant anyway - lots of fast roads and long-term planning blighted areas. Oh well, keep plodding on I guess. I may abandon my core Hounslow stuff and start doing the southern edge of Harlington and Hayes for a while.

I'm back from a road trip to Calgary and an afternoon of skiing at Lake Louise. The Garmin 305 captured a nice trace of the Saskatoon to Calgary trip that I plan to post on Routiki - http://www.routiki.com

Also managed to get some i18n work done on Routiki and added the Italian and Chinese languages.

Ich habe gerade 227 Änderungen von Ortsnamen innerhalb der Bounding Box von Thüringen hochgeladen: Präfix "Thüringen" entfernt; "x bei y" zu "x" gemacht; "Kurort" entfernt. Die Präfixe "Vogtland" habe ich mal in Ruhe gelassen, da war ich mir nicht sicher, ob das nicht doch manchmal so offiziell heisst. Das Tag "openGeoDB:auto_update" habe ich natürlich jeweils auch angepasst.