We haven’t had a London pub meet-up in a while. I probably could’ve organised something, but got waylaid by Dundee, and preparing a talk for Dundee, and recovering from all the excitement of Dundee. But of course we need to squeeze a pub meet-up before Christmas…

The Xmas OSMLondon pub meet-up is TONIGHT!

Dundee? I mean State Of The Map EU in Dundee of course. Great fun was had by me.

Here’s me at the kick off session, not quite managing to do my usual mega-cheerful grin, because I had to get up a bit too early off the sleeper train. More of a normal smile. And I’ve slapped some photos on instagram.

• Day 1 fun
• Day 1 sessions
• Day 2 fun
• Day 2 sessions

Instagram isn’t a proper way to do these things, but they’re not really proper photos. Just my crappy snaps. The official photographer shots will appear somewhere better I hope. Maybe the wikimedia commons category. OK I’ll photobomb that with one of mine :-)

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On Tuesday we had a London pub meet-up. We are still doing this every couple of months. I stopped writing diary entries about them, but for some reason (for your enjoyment!) I’ve decided to write about this one. So here goes:

We were at the Jack Horner Pub. It’s becoming the default choice in this bit of London where previously I would’ve chosen the Blue Posts (Sam Smiths pub. I still quite like them but there are reasons not to). Meanwhile Fullers make it quite easy to book a table on their website(s), so in uncharacteristically organised fashion, I booked table! but characteristically I arrived quite late. I only booked for 8 people, and that turned out to be about right on this occasion. A small intimate gathering.

We had along Json Singh from india, who just moved to London. I like the way he’s named himself after a file format (I was forgetting to ask him about that). So we talked to him about the state of mapping in India. It sounds like it’s progressing well with lively communities in the cities, although sometimes struggling to build formal organisations, partly because it’s a little bit illegal there, so has to remain a bit underground. That’s mostly because of tensions around showing of borders. I wonder whether vector tiles will soon allow us to do the same slight-of-hand trick that other map providers do, showing different border positions depending on your IP address location. It’s kind of comical how well that trick seems to work to take the heat off. Another thing which is daft, is that there’s no official openly published data on the border position which officially must be shown on maps of india. That would be a basic way of helping assert a particular desired border position. But no.

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We have two London events coming up! A standard pub meet-up this coming Tuesday (4th June), and a tech presentation the week after (Mon 10th June). I’m looking forward to both of these immensely. The pub, because I’ve been wrapped up in work lately and I deserve a beer. The tech presentation, because I’m sure it will be excellent. I manage to get along to the London Ruby User Group semi-regularly anyway, to be with this crowd of ruby developers, but hopefully we’ll have a few OSMers along this time too, for this talk by Andy Allan “Things I’ve learned maintaining OpenStreetMap”. As usual you can find out more about both of these events on the London wiki page (but note you do need to sign up for LRUG following their instructions).

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At the new year I had the crazy idea to go for a 2023 OpenStreetMap Editing streak (Try to do at least one edit every day). I knew I wouldn’t manage to go the whole year, but once you start doing these things on January 1st, you feel compelled to carry on.

But I only managed… two weeks

This is a screenshot of part of the “How Did You Contribute” tool. Designed to look like github’s profile section for showing off your contributions (Lots of other neat facts and figures besides that on that tool).

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Back in October in we had a London pub meet-up in the Monkey Puzzle pub. It was pretty well attended. There were three or four people I hadn’t met before. For example I was pleased to meet user okwithmydecay. This username was familiar, I think because I’ve just seen him doing lots of editing in London. Good reason to recognise somebody’s username! We like that!

I took along some OSMUK leaflets which I have received a pack of (Order OSM UK leaflets here). I say leaflets, but they’re more like postcards. Single sheet of card. I think there’s five different designs with five different messages/target audiences. Me & Andy (gravitystorm) were critiquing them in the pub, although on the whole we decided they’re rather good, and certainly good that people have organised this.

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Next week we’re having an OSMLondon pub meet-up for the first time in a while. Or at least I am. People don’t seem to like setting themselves as “attending” on osmcal.org, but I don’t think I’ll be alone in the pub. Looking forward to it anyway!

Today I wanted to print out a map of “Parkland Walk”, a local nature trail (and former railway). This was a project for/with my 6 year old son, which I spent a bit longer on than I should have today. In his class they’re doing various activities related to Parkland Walk. I thought it would be fun to give him a big map in style which he could colour in.

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“30 Day Map Challenge” happened over November. Remembering this from last year, I knew we were in for a bombardment of cartographic creations on the #30DayMapChallenge hashtag. Combining this with a search for “OpenStreetMap” mentions I sat back and let the mappy goodness flow into my tweetdeck for the whole month.

Here’s some I particularly liked:

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Last night I sat and armchair-mapped a load of hospital buildings for Northwick Park Hospital here in North West London

I tend to follow a rule of no armchair mapping in the UK these days, but I have a few extenuating considerations where I allow myself to break that rule. This is a big hospital. It’s the kind of thing we should certainly have mapped properly across London and the whole UK. I’ve armchair-mapped quite a few hospital buildings like this in Africa after all! I wonder how many other UK hospitals are missing building detail.

Actually the omission seemed wierd to me, as if maybe the buildings had been mapped but recently deleted. I thought it looked as though somebody had swept in and hit delete but missed just one or two little buildings (that little dentist), but how to prove it? I spent some time trying to figure out if I could find deleted nodes in a very constrained bbox e.g. using Overpass date features, but I gave up. Finding deleted data is difficult.

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A few days back I noticed a new patch of hyper-detailed mapping appearing on the London map here near Stroud Green Road, with gardens and garden fences all drawn in. It’s impressive! It looks amazing if you zoom in on that patch:

But I felt some frustration when I first saw it, because of the old imbalance of detail issue. I don’t mean to say I’m angry with someone for adding this detail. It’s more a case of being frustrated by an OpenStreetMap problem which we collectively never solved, and I’m frustrated that I can’t actually think of a good solution!

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I updated the “Long Names Of OpenStreetMap”.

Now there are 722 long names, that is, objects with a name longer than 150 bytes.

I haven’t run a full update since October 2017. Back then there were 464 long names. So I guess we’re getting worse at keeping our names short.

It looks like bus routes with very long name values are becoming more widespread. For example here is the “391 “B”: Veresegyház, Misszió Egészségügyi Központ => Veresegyház, Dukát utca => Veresegyház, Cserje utca => Veresegyház, Eötvös utca => Veresegyház, Újiskola utca” bus route. Snappy name!

Maybe I should’ve limited by character count rather than bytes. Cyrillic scripts are at a unicodey disadvantage, not to mention chinese.

Not all of them cause wacky rendering like the theatre example in the screenshot above (node).

I do think they all have something in common though. Using the name tag for something which isn’t really a name.

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A rare thing happened with some shop mapping I was doing just now. I was adding “HOM Concept” from my Mapillary view out of a bus window. I looked up the website of the shop …and look! OpenStreetMap!

Actually it might be the first time I’ve ever come across a contact page for a small London shop (just a few branches) as I was mapping, and found an OpenStreetMap map.

I have noticed OSM maps popping up around the web more and more lately. That’s something I’ve always pondered ways of encouraging, dreaming up quite a few different angles on the challenge of attracting web developers to use OpenStreetMap, but I guess it’s predictable that the thing which really shifts them off google maps is google maps themselves, as they start getting more strict with charging for high traffic.

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We’re coming to the end of the UK quarterly mapping project on footpaths.

The https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:designation=public_footpath edit tracker

…is running for just 5 more days. So last chance to get on there UK folks! This is all about our UK system of legally designated “public rights of way”, so if you’re elsewhere in the world you may stop reading now.

You may notice that I only just became a new starter on there myself! This is partly because I found it a bit tricky to understand what we’re supposed to do, but I finally sat down and figured it out at the weekend. Sorry it took me so long, but better late than never, here’s a few quick pointers:

Use Rob Whitaker’s PRoW data comparison tool. There’s a list of regions where he’s managed to get PRoW data.

Drill down to regions -> districts -> borough. You might pick where you live, but not everywhere’s on there. Failing that, try to find somewhere you know. Failing that, I guess it doesn’t matter where you pick.

Now you’ll see a map with lines. Here’s a bit of Watford

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Just thought I would re-iterate something imagico blogged about. Some important features may have disappeared from the map near you. You should check! Use the OSMInspector “Areas” view:

Generally the pink things are more serious data bugs on there I think, and they’re worth fixing because it could be a big building, or local park, or some other important feature which may have recently disappeared. This is due to a change in the renderer. It’s an improvement, but it means it is being more strict about these data bugs, so we need to fix them! (Yes we’re fixing for the renderer, but these were worth fixing before because other systems will always have struggled with this data)

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I don’t think anyone blogged about London OpenStreetMap Q&A events yet, but we should! We’ve been experimenting with this new event format in London. Well I haven’t. I’m still setting up occasional pub meet-ups, but thanks mostly to Firefishy’s organisational efforts, we’ve been escaping the pub, and doing something a bit different.

These are presentations evenings, and also (trying to be) an opportunity for discussions and questions, and getting help with mapping or using OSM. We’ve had a few now. They’ve been pretty successful, with increasing attendance each time. On Wednesday night we had maybe 30 people attending.

I’ve been forgetting about the FOSS4G UK conference, which was taking place Thursday and Friday. We missed an opportunity to advertise our thing as a warm-up event to that. Some people figured it out though. Janet Chapman was going on to give a similar talk at the conference, and there was at least one other person who was visiting the UK for FOSS4G UK, and taking in our event beforehand.

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I just added Zoffany Street to the map in more detail (all buildings and addresses):

It’s a very short little street. A modern block of apartments on one side, and old cutesy coloured houses on the other. Relatively unremarkable except…

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A few weeks back I gave a talk in London which was a sneak preview of my “Diagrams Of OpenStreetMap” SoTM talk Yes! I’m heading to Japan for the conference soon! I’m the only one from the London crowd going, so this wasn’t a spoiler for anyone in the audience, but this diary entry is a small spoiler. I thought I’d give some details of just one diagram from the talk. This one:

You may recognise it although I think its “Component Overview” home on the wiki is a bit hidden away these days. But anyway you wouldn’t recognise the right hand side because this is newly redrawn as of last night! In fact I’ve done a few iterations which I am unveiling as part of the talk. The left hand side editors were given an update, but last night I was tackling the more tricky right hand side where we try to show different rendering stacks and map display approaches available and used in the wider ecosystem.

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A month ago the Grenfell Tower fire happened, killing >80 people. Back in 2009 we did an OpenStreetMap mapping party near Latimer Road, and I remember mapping the area around Grenfell Tower.

Grenfell Tower as it was in 2009 - cc by-sa, R Sones

We were quite adventurous with our mapping parties back then, often travelling to corners of zone 2/3, meaning somewhat outside of central London, where the landscape is various flavours of urban, not quite suburban. This particular area always stuck in my memory as one of the most starkly mixed wealthy and deprived, or as I put it at the time “concrete estates and super-posh georgian terraced houses strangely existing side-by-side”.

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We’ve got an OpenStreetMap London pub meet-up tonight!

We’re managing them approximately monthly these days, so last month we had a pub meet-up to kick off 2017. We went to the Wenlock Arms. It’s a nice little pub which almost got demolished but was saved after a campaign. Now with all the big new buildings around it reminds me of the very last scene of Batteries Not Included. But they have modernised a little. I remember their rather sparse pub website used to link to OpenStreetMap, but sadly their website was since rebuilt by some boring web designers with boring google maps.

I remember it used to be good for real_ale=yes, and that was certainly there still. Crazy strong stuff. Luckily I’d stuffed myself with fish n chips before arriving because food=no! But it does have real_fire=yes!

(Another photo for the https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:real_fire=yes tag)

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I was meaning to say (and left it a bit late) it is a great honour to be nominated for the OpenStreetMap awards.

I have realised recently, with some embarrassment, that despite trying to contribute in many different areas, my greatest contribution to OpenStreetMap has almost certainly been my diary entries about people sitting around in pubs! :-)

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Check out this thing which I just got working again:

>>> Long Names of OpenStreetMap <<<

So that’s elements with a name tag, where the name seems to be very long. It’s a full list of the longest names in the planet (>150 chars)

I just found this old code and dusted it off. I made it originally back in May 2010 when Richard Weait ran a “Project of the week” looking at long names. I called it “namecheck” at the time, but I’m renaming it “longnames”.

A crazy long name is probably a data bug to be fixed. It certainly looks like a bug when we try to render it.

But… well taking that example. Here we have a few university buildings, each with a name, which list several departments. Can we class this as wrong? I think so, yes, but I’ll have to make a hand-wavy non-scientific judgement: I’d say it ceases to be a name of the building and becomes more of a “description” when it gets that long…. in this case. And maybe that’s a problem for a lot of them.

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