Another point beside the usefullness for osm is the consideration between the people who want to find things and the people who maybe don't want to get found.

I believe opt-in is the only fair way to do it, but in no way practical.
So we have to fall back to some guessing like: when he's putting a sign out, he want's to get found. And I pesonally don't count door bells as signs.

Hey, I'm glad that so many of you responded to my question.

Even if the sample size is small, I would say the average opinion is: tag those names, if they are on a sign.

I don't think the phone book point is valid, as (at least here in Germany) phone books are 'opt-in' by legislation. OSM is not.

I want to especially thank drlizau for his inside view. I won't tag names that are not on a public sign anyway.

As for the lawyers and engineers: I only would map businesses that have an 'open door' policy. That's where you don't generally need an appointment but simply walk in. Like shops, doctors, pharmacys etc., but not lawyers, engineers or offices of companys. even if they have a sign.

Or what is your opinion on that? Wait, I think I'll do another diary entry for that one.

On a G5 Mac you don't have Java6.
Even SoyLatte (an altenative Java6 implementation for Mac OS <=10.4) needs an intel proccessor.

Your only chance is to ask for the last Java5 version on the JOSM mailing list.

Have you considered putting it on osm.wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download
?

Well most errors I encounter are missing turn restrictions. They are still a little bit harder to tag than just roads and intersections and, more importantly, you tend to not remember them when just mapping along a GPS trace.

@Ale_Zena_IT could you tell my the brand of your mp3 player? I've searched for one on this purpose, but found that usable voice recording was a feature which apeared at 50+ Euros first.

@amm I have a phone, yes. But all it can do is....well...phone. (Ok, it can do texts too). Definetly no java, no camera, no memory card, no bluetooth, no voice recording. But it's good to hear that JOSM handles conflicts gracefully by now.

@datalogg see my phones details above. But your last point is actually the biggest problem. Especially as I am not traveling alone. The enjoyment of holiday may be enforced if I fiddle too much with OSM stuff.

As I'm on Holiday, I will probably take thousands of pictures anyway. But mixing osm reference pictures with holiday photos is not a good idea. (And it will drain my camera battery quite fast.) I have to consider bringing along another small camera to do that kind of work.

I unfortunatly don't own neither a smartphone nor a PDA. So doing all the tracking, voice recording and image taking with one small device is out of option. Actually the only device which lasts for days on batterie is my GPS device. My netbook will last for some hours, but is to complicated to use while driving. I don't know if I can convince my girlfriend to take the notes/photos.

I'm using http://www.itoworld.com to track edits in my town. It comes with rss feeds and nicely colored maps of who edited what in the last few days. Maybe there is an option to get tracks as well?

My edits aren't vissible too. I suppose it's taking a while longer than usual to render tiles due to the API change. As long as your edits are visible in the history tab or in potlatch/JOSM you are fine.
Just be patient.

Doesn't work on Safari(MacOS10.4). Brings up a lot of dialog boxes stating the browser does not support textFill() (about 20 of them) which you have to click away. It completely hangs the browser in the meantime.

While this may be a browser bug, you may want to make in fail in a more pleasant way.

Btw: do you know how the 'end of editing' is handled with potlatch?

I've noticed that in the history tab my session stays open a long time after I've finished editing. As there is no 'done' or 'exit' button in potlatch I simply close the browser tab.

Maybe this is (also) a reason for the edits-of-far-away-points-cause-a-giant-bounding-box-which-clutters-the-history-of-small-aereas-bug reported in another user diary. I haven't tested that, but does an open session continue if I start potlatch in another browser window and the history thinks I'm still edditing in the first one?

> Right now the priority is on fixing the remaining bugs in the API 0.6 support rather than nice-to-haves like this though, I'm afraid.

I'm with you there. I'm happy if you may keep it in mind for some spare time in the future.

I can't help you as my knowledge of action script is zero and that of javascript just a little above.

But your comment implies a question: Do you know a way to do it WITH ie making a clicking sound? Then a next question comes up: what's bad about that clicking sound?

Enough pointless questions. But a small suggestion: until you figure out how to do it, why not just place a small note somewhere how to do it with pressing 'C'. And maybe even a little sentence about it being 'the nice way' to do it.

Sorry if thats not appropriate, I rarely use potlatch and can't really comment on its workings. I didn't know about that "C" option until now.

But I still believe that this is a missing feature in the display of the recent edits and not a fault of potlatch or its users. The information needed IS there. It just needs to be presented in a better way.

You are absolutely right! I will do so.

I hope I find a cam on ebay for a reasonable price soon. Or even better someone who could borrow me that cam for testing.

I of course still have to figure out how to mount the cam. It has to withstand the wind at more than 100km/h.

Yeah, I'm using the feature in JOSM. It comes natural if you are used to give comments on CVS or SVN commits. But most users (mostly potlatch users) don't give comments. It's not as prominent in potlatch as it is in JOSM, so most people surely just don't know.

But even with comments it would be nice to actually see on a map which ways or nodes they altered or created.

But it's even more complicated than I thought in the first place because newly created nodes and way aren't in the rendered map. So some 'recent edits' show an empty bounding box.

I know most people map by bicycle. But that's no alternative for me. I don't live exactly where I map (the city I'm living in is pretty much completely mapped), so I would need a train or drive by car some 50km to where I want to map.

To map more than one village I would need an awefull lot of time traveling between them. With my motorbike I can just go out for about an hour or two and map 2 or 3 villages.

But off course I or someone else will have to go out again on foot or with a bicycle to map all those tracks not accessible to normal traffic.

Mounting a camera on the motorbike would be a lot easier than mounting it on the helmet. You could judge the road surface and type with that. But especially in tight streets inside villages you can't see road signs or even road side objects like phone boothes or postboxes.

Handling a camera with my hands is not an option. While I can push a button now and then I need to be able to put both hands on the handlebar when needed.

I could live with a still image camera instead of a video camera, which could be a lot smaller. But I didn't find anything cheap AND small until now. Also I'm not quite happy with the prospect of drilling holes in my helmet. I need to find a way to mount it without leaving permanent marks.

My best candidate for now is the ATC ActionCam from Oregon. Maybe an old one to reduce cost. As I read the smaller cameras used in model building are not fast enough to encode fast moving pictures like when looking around from a motorbike.

A voice recorder would be cheaper, but I'm too not sure if the background noises (even with in-helmet micro) wouldn't be too bad. I'm mapping in German(y), but German names are not any better in transating spoken to written word.

Hi,

there is a proposed feature osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Dry_weather which is meant for roads. You could use that for gates too of course.

I think the userbase for this would be slightly smaller than that for OSM, because it misses the 'adventure' part that is involved with going out and do some mapping. Crowdsourcing large datasets has more to do with social engineering than anything else. You could get a problem in motivating people to join in. But don"t let that stop you! Who knows ...

Here in Germany nearly all weather stations are commercial. Some big weather services build there own net of stations and than share data (for a fee of course). Just lately (ok, some 7 years ago) a new service turned up and said it can do a better job that the old services by drastically increasing the number of stations instead of using just better simulation moddels on existing data.
(This was after old services failed to correctly forecast the massive flooding of the river Oder in 2002).

Under these circumstances it is unlikely that you will get free (like in open licensed) data here in Germany. There is to much dispute about it in the comercial weather services.

But, said again, don't let that stop you.

JOSM can do this to. Just right-click on your loaded gpx Track and choose 'Import Images' (or similar). You can import an entire folder of images and you have the oportunity to fine-tune the time offset between your GPSd and your camera.

Nice feature, and works on every platform.

Danke erstmal fuer den Vorschlag.
Die Anordnung ist leider nicht ganz so trivial. Die Wendeschleife ist auch Durchgangsstrasse, je Hin- und Rueckspur auf einer Seite des Kreises, in der Mitte sind zusaetzlich Parkplaetze.

Richtig waere wohl:
- den Kreis als 'way' zeichnen, jeweils als Einbahnstrasse
- in der Mitte eine 'area' als Parkplatz ausweisen (mit Kontakt zur Strasse)
- daneben (wo das Schild steht) einen 'node' als Haltestelle

Leidglich die explizite Ausweisung als turning_circle fehlt dann, da der tag an eine einzene node gehoert. Oder sollte das dann an alle nodes des Kreises?