OpenStreetMap
I mentioned in my previous post about why it’s great to meet up with other mappers. One thing that someone suggested I write a diary about is the method I found to be notified about map-worthy changes to one’s local area. It turns out that not everyone has heard of the London Gazette, its role in local law and administrative changes in the UK, and the online services it offers to help discover the changes.
So here’s the Wikipedia page for the Gazette And here’s the website
The core of the publication is the notices. The rules of the road network for residential and even some of the more major roads in an area (pretty much everything that doesn’t constitute the trunk road network) are delegated to local authorities, and the ritual incantation they have to go through to change those rules is to publish notices in the local press and in the London (or Edinburgh or Belfast) Gazette.
In the navigation bar at the top of the page is a Notices menu, which will list all the most recent notices in the UK.
There are filters on the left hand side of this page where you can search for and filter the list to the particular notice type and area you’re interested in. For my local area, for things I might want to add to OSM, I’ve found that the following customisations work best:
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restricting the list to Notice Code 1501
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filtering the location by Local Authority from the drop-down box (in my case, the London Borough of Ealing)
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Hitting the “Update results” button and then changing the sort order to “Latest”.
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