OpenStreetMap
I'm back in Homfirth West Yorkshire over Christmas. Haven't been back "home" in a year now, and it's been looking annoyingly incomplete all this time. So I guess it's my responsibility to do something about that. Someone else has taken care of Meltham, over in the next valley.
Couple of problems with this. In general I'm still only used to mapping based on Yahoo imagery. Without this, it seems to be necessary to be far more focused and thorough about the quality of the traces you're gathering, e.g. follow an approach like 80n's "keep turning left" rule to get a trace along the length of every little residential road. Haven't tended to be quite so thorough with my mapping in the past.
NPEmaps are not available as a WMS feed into JOSM at the moment. Is that right? Don't seem to be working for me.
Also not much daylight around christmas time, so the rest of my family tend to be more interested in heading out to do countryside walks while it is light. As a result, I've gathered more traces of random little footpaths and tracks than actual streets of the town.
...but on the plus side, I've managed to teach my Dad the basics of using JOSM, and he seem enthusiastic about getting Holmfirth mapped out. We'll see if he manages it (He is quite possibly the least tech-savvy OSM user out there)
Discussion
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 28 December 2008 at 20:26
NPE maps have been available as a JOSM WMS. The JOSM WMS doesn't work with Firefox 3 and stopped me using it. Apparently you can install Firefox 2 at the same time, and then do some trickery so only JOSM uses FF2.
Footpaths are important to do and often overlooked when only mapping. I've been doing the same of going for walks with family, it's just annoying when we have to stick to the few paths already mapped, sometimes making a whole trip with nothing to trace.
Comment from Richard on 28 December 2008 at 21:21
DO NOT USE JOSM FOR TRACING FROM NPE
(can I stress that any more?)
The NPEmaps/JOSM WMS layer was done by taking the raw sheets and rotating the entire sheet, very crudely, in the likes of Photoshop. The new NPE layer in Potlatch has been rectified to the National Grid on a 5km x 5km grid - vastly more accurate. Please, for the sake of accurate maps, use Potlatch's new NPE layer for tracing (or, alternatively, provide a 900913 plugin for JOSM so it can use it too :) ).
Comment from RichardB on 28 December 2008 at 21:34
Since I downloaded a new version of JOSM - I've not been able to get the NPE layer either. It just comes up with "Exception Occurred". I don't think it's anything to do with Firefox - because I have FF2. Only the NPE layer doesn't work. The NPE layer worked when I had an older version of JOSM (and also an older version of the WMS plugin).
If you're tracing something fairly small - and you can align to existing traces nearby - the error is not going to be that large when tracing from JOSM - especially if you align regularly. The main thing that bugs me about the Potlatch NPE stuff is that you can only view the NPE maps at zoom level z=14 - and it's almost impossible to do anything resembling an accurate trace at that level. Is it possible to offer NPE at, say, z=16 to z=18. Yes it'll probably be a bit pixellated - but it would still be useful.
Comment from Richard on 29 December 2008 at 10:23
TomH has generated z15 tiles and they'll be in Potlatch in a week or so. I wouldn't want to offer z16 or above, though - it'd imply a level of accuracy that simply wasn't present in the original surveying.
Comment from Harry Wood on 29 December 2008 at 11:53
This time last year I used NPE a few times via WMS plugin. It was obvious to me at the time that the images were wonky, but it still came in handy as a sanity check / get my bearings within JOSM. Would be nice to have this within JOSM again some time (the better rectified images)
I have an older installation of JOSM (and WMS plugin) where the wonky NPE maps do still work. That's pointing at
http://nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/openpaths/freemap.php?layers=npe&
But there's been some changes to the WMS plugin.