Thank you very much for all your contributions and level headed comments you’ve made.

I wish you good luck on your next endeavor. And remember, you can still edit in OSM when you get resettled.

Clifford

How is this different from Pascal Neis’s Overview of OpenStreetMap Contributors aka Who’s around me?

I also have the problem of a large number of Amazon Logistics employees adding driveways and other road improvements working in my area. They could be filtered out by excluding their modified version of the iD editor. It shows up as iD 2.12.2.

Now we just need a way to send a message to a group of nearby mappers. Sigh….

@alexkemp - I can’t speak for PeanutButterRemedy but none us of believe that DWG is not doing their job. This offender is doing everything they can to avoid being blocked from OSM. While, maybe not exactly everything, if they were doing everything they could, they would fix their tagging.

Here is a edit from today. They used a tag Hours with values that can’t be simply parsed into a proper opening hours tag. They use an abbreviation for street and a spam description tag, phone number not properly formatted and no tag to describe the business. None of those in themselve is all that terrible. If it was a new user I would help them fix it. But this group just ignores our comments. Which in this case is ironic because they asked for a review of the edit.

I watch every new edit in the State of Washington. I’ve given up wasting my time trying to fix their edits. I’ve reached out to the management of the company with no response. I’ve contact their customers to no avail. I’ve tweeted unfavorable comments on their Twitter account. Nothing gets their attention.

I applaud PeanutButterRemedy for stepping up to fix this nationwide. Maybe once this SEO firm realizes that they are paying for something of no value, they’ll finally contact us for help or at least stop adding spam to OSM.

One last thing. Many of their customers are businesses that are run out of their home. The SEO places the node on the home which to me implies that I can walk up to the house and ring the door bell. I doubt most of their home business customers would want that.

Best, Clifford

@Rovastar - I have to disagree with your action. I’m guessing you don’t live in the US and see these edits all the time. I’ve fixed a few but lately I’ve given up - too much work. The SEO contractor obviously doesn’t care about OSM. They just want to get $$ for spamming as many sites as they can.

Let me add that they don’t follow the Directed Edits policy - Not even close. If they did they would answer messages and changeset comments. They don’t. And so they aren’t block by DWG because they create a new account every time.

Also let me add, since you don’t appear to be from the US, don’t appear to be on our mailing list, yet you revert edits in a distant country, I find your actions unacceptable.

Please do the right thing and un-revert your edit.

Recently I’ve done a lot of pedestrian mapping in Mount Vernon and Burlington WA. Having even short segments of driveway, if they contained curb/kerb info would be valuable. A number of streets in my town only have short segments of sidewalks, that just end in someone’s yard. Knowing that a wheelchair user could navigate via a driveway to the street which as some point connects to a sidewalk with a ramp would be helpful.

@Hjart I’m not sure what is the point of putting a noexit tag on the last node. The wiki discussion page even suggests adding a noexit tag to cul-de-sacs. Instead of adding the noexit tag, ask Geofabrik (Frederik Ramm) to removing the warning.

I’ve asked a friend to get me a contact with the Amazon team to see if we can get some help on this issue.

Take a look at the person who added the driveway - they may work for Amazon.

To your question about how long should a driveway be before it’s added, my opinion is that if it can be ground truthed, then it can be added, even if its only a few meters long. Mapping even short driveways does have an advantage - it says there is a driveway.

Ilya thanks for contributing the data. Hopefully other operators will consider doing the same.

Alan - Thanks for shepherding the design through. But you would have so show Yakama Indian Reservation. I’ve been meaning to adjust the boundaries to what they are currently. Now I’m going to have to fix it.

It sounds like you need georeferenced aerial imagery. We can’t help you with Google products. Instead try searching for georeferenced imagery. For example Sentinel satellite imagery.

Welcome to OSM!

We are having a humanitarian mapping event this Sunday at UW in Seattle. Checkout our Meetup for details on the event. Good chance to help out and learn more about OSM.

Clifford

@SomeoneElse - I love your username. I used it all the time when I was a kid and my parents asked me who did it.

Most of the SEO edits from this group I just fix. They are mostly okay. But what I’d really like to see for these companies to just follow the guidelines. I’ve met with two different SEO firms. One of the largest and a local company located upstairs in a house in Seattle. Neither of the companies are adding to OSM, probably because we are way more difficult to add to our data. Other companies just want a spreadsheet and to follow their “tagging” guidelines.

I tried to contact the SEO companies that I know are behind some of the edits, but they just don’t respond. I’ve even tried shaming them on Twitter. Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of respect for them.

So now I’m thinking of approaching the actual firm making the edits to work with them. Is there anyone on DWG that has the time and would like to work on this? Let me know.

@TomH - Guess I need to change my user name to Random_User. Thanks for the kind suggestion.

@Mateusz Konieczny - I’ve talked to a couple of DWG members over in the past year, not a formal complaint but just to keep current. They appear to be well known to DWG even suspect which SEO firm is paying to have the changes made.

My exercise was more to see how wide spread the edits were. It looks to me like just one firm with a couple of people working on the edits. I do need to do some more analyzing to see if I can get a count of the number of people.

It would be interesting to see what DWG is doing about them.

OpenSidewalks.com was the original proposal and is now incorporated into OSM. It was created by the Taskar Center at the University of Washington with the goal of helping people with limited mobility. It’s being implemented in Seattle, Austin, and Santa Clara. Other cities are to follow, and not just those in the US.

AccessMap.io is a demonstration of the power of routing using OSM. The code is on GitHub

Bryce, Thanks for moving the code for the best OSM phone/tablet editor over to Github.

Best, Clifford

FYI - AccessMap.io is basically a demonstration of what routing for people with limited mobility. It only covers Seattle.

The Vector Tiles Reader is similar to what iD allows you to do, that is read the data from vector tile objects.

GeoServer does have an option to serve vector tiles, but I haven’t figured it out yet. It provides the user with an .html object that contains styling for the vectors to render in a browser. The user is able to change rendering on the fly from the browser. From conversations with Brian Housel, I expect the iD development team to add the ability to style the vector tiles in iD at some time in the future.

I just saw @TheSwavu’s post after I created a bug report. The key doesn’t work on my linux box or MacBookPro.

See https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/16460#ticket

You can also adjust the imagery offset. At the bottom of the background settings on the toolbar is a tool to adjust the image. Ideally you would have a good reference point to adjust the imagery with. If there are many existing objects mapped, you can use them as a reference. (That doesn’t make the offset correct, just matches what was used before. I would use extreme caution before attempting to move mapped objects to new imagery.)

@mapeadora thank you and the entire GeoChicas team for work you are doing. This is an important subject. Getting survey data from the community helps us better understand the issues.

When you are ready to publish our final results can you produce the infographic in english? I can understand some of the references, but I’m afraid that I’m missing important detail.

Thanks, Clifford