It's mapping time tonight! First of the London evening mapping parties for 2010. The weather's glorious. I'm so excited I might pop out at lunchtime and do some mapping just to tide me over until this evening!

I didn't do a very good job of sorting out the details in plenty of time. Sorry out that. Busy busy. If you didn't already see it... CAKE!

So you may be wondering why I've drawn the cake diagram over an already mapped area. Well basically the whole of central London is already mapped. We'll need go for super-detailed mapping of one sort or another. Obviously we can travel out to zone 4 for something more interesting, but that'll have to wait till later in the summer. Remember this is only a quick mapping session between 6:30 and 7:30 before heading to the pub (our old favourite, the Blue Posts), so I'm not expecting much to get done. But we are looking at mapping every shop as a POI now. Also... and this is the real reason for a Soho cake,... the dreaded building outlines are still annoying me.

I'm going to bang on about building outlines again for a sec. Sorry. I appreciate that it's not everyone's idea of an exciting kind of mapping, and we should all do mapping which we find fun, and scratch our own itches, but here's why building outlines are itching me. If you look at a zoomed out map of London, the building coverage still looks weirdly inconsistent. This is not a minor cosmetic detail. When I made my OpenStreetMap jigsaw of London, I had to switch the buildings off because they just look pants. Surely anyone looking at OSM in London will think the same. I reckon it's not much work to at least smooth off the building coverage into a rounded blob shape covering central London. I'll have to make a diagram to show exactly what I mean, but look at the zoomed out map again. One of the ugliest inconsistent gaps at the moment is the West side of Soho ...hence the cake location

So last night I sketched buildings from Yahoo for my slice 10, and I popped in a bunch of "FIXME=check building outline" nodes where it looks like there may be alleyways or some other detail not quite visible in the yahoo fuzziness. I've left it very late to set this as a homework assignment, but if you get chance before tonight, why not do the same? This evening I'll spend an hour going around the FIXMEs, and try to make some corrections. This process works, and is actually quite satisfying. I had some fun last week doing a patch in Holborn (a cheeky mini-mapping party between me and Welshie)

OK ignore me.

If you're in London sign up for a slice of the cake or sign up to just join us in the Blue Posts, Newman St. at 7:30