Tonight is curry night! Sign-up! Sign-up!

We don't normally do Mondays, but even so I've a feeling this one could be quite popular. Nick's been promoting it on facebook where we already have "13 confirmed guests".

We're heading to brick lane to do a bit of mapping and then meet-up at the vibe bar, which has an outdoor seating area under and tent type thing. We'll sit there and have a chat before heading to a restaurant.

There's plenty to chat about. Thanks to the efforts of Thomas Wood, the NaPTAN Import has finally arrived in London, giving us a spectacular sprinkling of bus stop nodes! We've continued to fiddle with U.S. interstates. Here's a duplicate nodes map. More on that soon. Also emerging today, a new improved whitewater maps from Johnathon Riddell. Gnarly! I dare say the forthcoming foundation elections will come up in conversation too.

In other exciting news, I went out exploring yesterday afternoon and discovered that the path around this reservoir (part of the "capital ring" route) has been blocked up with construction hoardings.

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I've been pondering landuse again.

Some people seemed to be confused by using the tag https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landuse=farm for mapping farms fields AKA farmland AKA farms! A field is part of a farm is it not? The confusion seems to come when people see the farmyard tag. So let me help you out here:

[UPDATE: This is a very old 2009 diary entry. Some of these issue have now been clarified in the documentation. In particular landuse=farm has since been documented as clearly the wrong tag to use]

...

To be fair though, this does leave some unanswered questions. There are many awkward questions about mapping landuse, which haven't really been answered with any kind of guidelines as far as I'm aware.

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As I said on my blog, big thanks to everyone who helped me celebrate by 30th birthday by coming along to my BBQ bash.

More photos on facebook

As well as consuming vast quantities of meat'n'booze, quite a few people got involved in mapping Tottenham on the Saturday Morning (see Cake Diagram). I feel quite guilty about dispatching people to do my mapping dirty work. ....Guilty? or jealous about my territory? not sure. Anyway hopefully everyone had fun. I even organised some sunshine! Not bad eh?

Next one will be Brick Lane on Monday 17th. Sign up! Sign up!

So we had our big post box gathering session in Mayfair over a week ago now (Another London evening meet-up) I guess maybe I should report back on the spectacular number of postboxes we've added, but so far I've not even found time to enter my data. Promise to do this soon though.

This meet-up was papertastic, with most people opting to use the walking-papers.org service over any kind of GPS-based mapping. GPS is not so effective in central London, so paper is the way to go.

A good bunch of people this time. Lots of new faces, including some people quite new to mapping (I want to attract more of these to come along!)

We also had Nick demonstrating Mapzen. The new OpenStreetMap editor under development at Cloudmade. I'm excited about the tutorial features which are designed to help newbies learn the ropes in a more gradual less "thrown in at the deep end" kind of way, rather like the training missions in computer games.

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We've been pondering TIGER fixup in the states, and getting basic interstate routing working. I think Andy's going to blog about it a bit more. I made a fun clickable visualisation of routing connections. You can use it to figure out where major connectivity problems exist in the tiger data, or you can use it to test your knowledge of U.S. cities!

Cities like... Chattanooga. Never heard of it? Neither had I, but I've spent a good few hours editing the motorway junctions there. Like this one for example:

But this evening we're turning our thoughts closer to home. Tonight's mapping party is in Mayfair. Come join us!

I picked this location based on detailed analysis of cross-correlated data visualisations, but it turns out I should've just asked Dave why he didn't map the postboxes around there when he was mapping it back in 2006. Time to revisit the area I'd say... If you're in London, come join us tonight!

The last London mapping evening, was on Thursday last week, which was uncomfortably close after the big conference weekend. I've been ultra busy all week following up on things and catching up on things (CloudMade have had a flood of enquiries about this that and the other). Happily User:Solexious was keen to prepare a nice cake diagram, which was one less thing for me to worry about. Thanks for that.

By the way, if anyone ever wants to get involved organising a London meet-up, or just one aspect of London meet-up, please feel free join in and/or take over. Choosing pubs, preparing cake diagrams, setting up event listings, etc, all takes time. I mostly enjoy doing it, but I also quite like not having to do it :-)

In fact I didn't have to choose the area & pub this time either. The Kings Road mapping party was Matt's idea. It's a frightfully posh area. I think we all enjoyed not having any grotty concrete housing estate to map for a change. No no, it's all quaint little residential streets with white columns, or multicoloured pastel washes, in an area which apparently has the largest per square-metre property prices after central Hong Kong!

I met with Joe Eckert who was interested to see my mapping techniques, and interviewing me about OpenStreetmap for his research. It was a good mixed mapping session for this purpose. We wandered around some of these pleasant residential backstreets, and also mapped a length of Kings Road itself. Lots of shops, which I photo-mapped (which means leaving most of the effort still to do back on the computer) Very hoity-toity fashion shops. Nothing like my mapping Roman Road at the previous Bow mapping evening (The fast food icons are mostly kebab shops. Classy)

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It's looking like tonight's King's Road Mapping Party (Central London), will be a big one. We're starting to run out of cake slices for people to bagsie!

I haven't had chance to enter in my data from the Bow mapping party yet. Gah! Too much going on!

I remember feeling after the 2008 OpenStreetMap conference in Limerick, that I'd just been bombarded with more exciting ideas and met more interesting people than I could possibly hope to keep track of. This year it's the same feeling x2 + canals + houseboats + bicycles = State Of The Map 2009! Utterly awesome.

For me the conference got off to a slightly over-the-top-partying start on Thursday, as I arrived on the train and went straight to the bar, drank all evening forgetting to eat any food, spent an hour and half wandering around canals looking for my house-boat, and finally managed to accidentally fall and dunk one foot in the canal as I was boarding the house-boat. I woke the next morning feeling very rough, and headed to the Friday "pro user" day with one wet foot!

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It's hot hot hot in London at the moment, but by the evening the streets are at a very pleasant temperature for a spot of mapping. So that's what we did last night over in Bow East London. The tube journey over there was sweaty as hell though. I think the central line was at about gas mark 7 (yes I know... I should get a bike)

I mapped an interesting little patch of new cafes and pubs in a canal criss-crossed area sandwiched between Mile End park and Victoria Park, before heading into some grotty concreteness which Tower Hamlets is more known for. Just as I decided to head to the pub I discovered my cake slice was flanked with a road full of crappy little shops. I'm getting quite into my crappy little shop mapping now though.

The Morgan Arms was in a little oasis of swankiness. Very nice. A big table was no problem, although it was only just big enough. Another good turn out. Very good considering we were a bit out of the centre. Good to see Mike along again, and we had one or two other new faces. Most of us were boring and ordered burgers (the official mapping party dish) We wondered what the oddly described prawn dish would look like, and we wondered when Jenny had got to. We also talked about...

SOTM! It's SOTM fever at the moment. We're all excited about the big trip to Amsterdam. It's going to be great. Really looking forward to it, although it's creeping up fast. I need more time to prepare!

Other server admin talk. LightHTTPd conf and all that malarkey, and how ipv6 is the most important thing for OpenStreetMap right now (not)

Finally Jenny arrived, and confirmed our suspicion that she'd been out doing a very thorough job of mapping until it got dark. She also ordered the oddly described prawn dish. All the important questions answered!

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Tonight there's a #geomob meet-up (Geo mobile developers). Steve's in town and he's weaseled his way onto the programme at the last minute.

Tomorrow Evening we're mapping East London. Should be nice to get out and about and map some London streets which are receiving a severe sunshine baking at the moment. Know anyone who lives in an easterly direction? Invite them along!

And finally... ZOMG! It's nearly time for SOTM!

The Kings Cross mapping evening was another big one. ~15 people there! rivalled only by last year's Euston Rocket meet-ups. It seems that northern side of central London attracts a lot of people. I picked it rather hastily, along with the pub choice, because the date crept up on me this time around. "The Waiting Room" pub is part of a Premier Inn (ultra-modern and not in a good way). But actually this worked out nicely because with so many people, we would have struggled to fit into one of the more stylish pubs in the area. In this pub we had loads of space. A massive circular table for the knights to sit around, whilst the others (kings and queens?) sat on sofas alongside.

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Mapping Kings Cross tomorrow (Thu) evening. Could be a big one. Come along!

Last night I spent an hour or so sketching some roads in Tehran. This was my little contribution to the efforts of the Humanitarian OSM Team. I was doing some armchair mapping, adding some missing motorways and also tweaking some roads around Azadi Square, which looks beautiful in the Yahoo aerial imagery. Not such a beautiful place to be yesterday unfortunately.

"Heavy restrictions have been placed on the BBC and other foreign news organisations. Reporters are not allowed to cover unauthorised gatherings or move around freely in Tehran ... Our correspondent says the picture outside Tehran is more confused but there are reports of demonstrations and government attacks on demonstrations." - BBC

Freedom of speech is a basic human right, and an essential ingredient of properly conducted elections. After the election Iranians are showing that, if they are not given freedom of speech, they can start to use new technologies to take it for themselves, with a bit of help.

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I was up in Yorkshire for the weekend for a friend's wedding, so I had signed up to also go along to the Pately Bridge Mapping party. On the Saturday we had utterly miserable weather in West Yorkshire. Francine decided there was no way she was getting up early to go to another mapping party in the rain. I very nearly opted to stay in bed too, but my dad and I decided to go for it.

Good job we did, because unbeknownst to me there was an email sitting in my inbox from Chippy, the guy organising it, saying "i'm flat on my back with some kind of fever-flu". We arrived in the Pately Bridge car park, and waited for him, and gradually it emerged that other people were doing the same (should've brought my OpenStreetMap cap) Then Rollo, a guy from from the AGI northern group, arrived with a bunch of other people, a gathering of ~20 people, at which point it emerged that I was the only one with any OpenStreetMap know how! It seems Chippy had done a better job than expected at attracting newbies from the AGI northern group and also Leeds university.

So we crouched around some dubious printouts my dad had run off, and I drew a cake diagram there in the car park. I gave them a rough description of the kinds of things to be making a note of, and sent people off on their merry way. Mostly we were in teams of three or four, some borrowing GPS units from the well equipped Mike Shankster from the environment agency.

We met back for lunch in the Bridge Inn. This was a pretty big pub, but not quite big enough for a large party. What's more some people had brought pic-nic food and some people hadn't arrived yet, so we didn't have much choice but to sit outside. We had a nice lunch and a nice chat about OpenStreetMap

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With Matt, TomH and Firefishy all ducking out, who was left to map Peckham last night? As it turned out we had great mixture of people with some mapping party regulars, some new faces, and some other familiar characters from the OpenStreetMap community.

>> Photos <<

Scott Day, who does the maps at SouthWark Council, had arranged to meet me while I was out and about mapping the cake slice 4. This turned out to be an evil tangled nest of modern housing estates with footways going in all directions, and what with half concentrating on chatting with Scott, I got fairly lost and probably didn't manage to map it very systematically, but I got quite a few photos of housing estate maps (That old cheat)

Tom Chance lives locally, so it was nice to be able to hand over responsibility for pub choice and cake diagram. Dankarran was also along.

Bar Story was an cool venue. A departure from our usual standard pub. Funky music inside, but for the sake of map chat, we sat ourselves outside on some funky railway sleeper seating, which later on turned out to be pretty close to the funky raging bonfire!

Lots of map chat related to Local Councils. Scott Day has an very interesting insider perspective, and he is going to be researching the possibilities around OpenStreetMap for Local Councils. Tom Chance is one of the people behind the excellent Sutton Green Map. That along with his other political work, means he knows all about local councils too.

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We spent the hottest weekend of the year so far... in the office, for the London Hack Weekend. I put photos on facebook just for a change. It was a good get-together. Steve's been over from the U.S. and the pub gathering on Friday was particularly good, with special guest appearance from Frederick.

Now you can get involved in translating the website interface, especially if you speak something more unusual than the languages we already have.

Wednesday we're mapping South Bermondsey. Hopefully the weather will hold out till then. Sign up! Sign up!

Neuer Tagebucheintrag... Speichern

Last weekend I was visiting a friend in Northampton. I did manage to do a little bit of mapping in-between pub crawls and other such shenanigans. Northampton is one of the lesser mapped cities, so even though I didn't gather much data, it was still quite satisfying to enter it in last night. Helping to fit a few more pieces into that jigsaw. I actually did a lot more mapping while out on a walk in the Northamptonshire countryside near Great Brington & Little Brington. Charming little villages, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find that absolutely nothing has changed in the area since the NPE maps were drawn.

The process of keying in data for shops (crappy little shops) from millions of photos along Cricklewood Broadway was more tedious, but actually the rendered results are quite satisfying.

In other news, the audio from my talk to the BCS is now available, although it seems to cut off before the end. I tried to use this to make a "slidecast" on slideshare.net, so you could try getting that to play back, but it's not working on my browser :-(

We're having a London Hack Weekend this weekend. Search, Monitoring and rollback, API improvements, Advanced multipolygons, Turn restrictions, non-mainstream editors, rewrite Potlatch in AS3, GPX API, i18n_2, OAuth Come along if you know how to hack on any of that. If not, well rest assured it'll all be working by the end of the weekend :-)

Last night we mapped Kilburn (A London mapping evening) or at least some of us did some mapping before meeting the lazy ones in the pub :-)

I took a bus all the way up Kilburn High Road, past where it becomes the dubiously named "Shoot Up hill" and mapped the section called CrickleWood Broadway. It's all the same road, and pretty much all full of the same crappy little shops. I walked along and took a photo of each and every one of them, so it looks like I've got several hours of farting around with AgPifoJ ahead of me (haven't done it yet). I'll try to add https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:shop nodes for each of them, and also get addr:housenumber off the shop signs. As I mentioned before, there's wiki work to do on documenting different types of shop tags better. I'll no doubt spot a few tagging dilemmas while I'm going through these photos of crappy little shops. For example:

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On Sunday I got up early and got a train over to join in with the Milton Keynes Mapping party.

It's a funny old place. Or rather it's a funny new place. Built in the 60's. Very spaced out, with lots of car parks. Built for the motorcar, but also pretty good for the bicycle. Francine and I (yes I dragged my long suffering girlfriend along too) were on foot.

I had planned some unambitious POI mapping around the city centre. This had several lazy advantages: a) less walking, b) stay out of the rain in the all the massive shopping malls, c) keep Francine happy by making occasional clothing purchases. We did this in the morning, and also went and took a peek inside what turned out to be the XScape indoor ski-slope centre. So that explained the funny shaped roof!

But even Francine realised, when she saw the monstrously huge cake diagram printed on the wall, that this wasn't going to help finish the whole of Milton Keynes, and so she volunteered us to map one of the suburban cake slices too.

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I finally cleared my mapping backlog including the past two London mapping party locations. I've just been adding POIs along Charing Cross Road. They'll be appearing shortly, but I have to say the area's already looking superbly POI'ed up.

As I was doing this I dived onto the wiki a few times to improve the shop tag documentation. I can see there's plenty more work to do on that. Each shop type should be documented with example photos and short sharp descriptions, followed by explanations of how to distinguish one type of shop from another. Although it's tedious wiki fiddling, it is important because no matter how obvious these things may seem, people can find ways of misunderstanding. Non-native english speakers don't always have a clear idea of what these english words mean, and also in other countries shops are different, so to nail down exactly what kind of shop we're actually talking about is important.

It's also important as a kind of land-grab exercise. If well established and well used tags don't get documented, then the ever churning mass of tag proposals and their wiki discussion/debates will spill over into areas of tagging for which mappers (the important people) already feel like they have tags established. Then of course we've set ourselves up for a big clash of opinions, which could easily have be avoided by a quick few sentences being added to the wiki. With this in mind, I've decided not to turn a blind eye each time I need a tag and can't find it on the wiki.

Speaking of finding things on the wiki... It just got a whole lot better. Firefishy installed lucene search for the wiki which on some keywords is a lot more effective than the basic old MySQL powered search. So go search out those tags!

We finally had a Latimer Road mapping party last night. The patch of unnamed streets in this bit of West London had been bugging me for about a year now. Why had nobody ventured into the area in all that time? We thought the reason was that it's a horrible bunch of dodgy concrete jungle housing estates. As it turned out it was a combination of concrete estates and super-posh georgian terraced houses strangely existing side-by-side. Quite similar to slice 7 at last year's session near Elephant & Castle (woosh! the map's come on a long way since then!)

We converged on the pub, and discovered that "The Station" had a new name "Garden Bar & Grill". That kind of thing causes a problem for meet-up logistics, but look on the bright side node number 391843331 makes us more up-to-date than beerintheevening.com, fancyapint.com, google streetview ...well for that pub at least. And a very nice pub it was too, although at those prices it would be. I guess this pub caters to the inhabitants of the georgian terraced houses rather than the concrete estates.

Everyone found us in there eventually, although we did start to wonder about someone who had signed up on the wiki at the last minute by the name of 'Wynndale'. He'd volunteered to map the westerly cake slices 15 & 16 which were rumoured to be the skankiest of the concrete estates, deep within White City gang land. We started to fear some sort of mapping casualty before we'd even met the chap, but he turned up a bit later on.

Whilst enjoying expensive beers on plush sofas we chatted about various things: Our encounters with dubious bugs in JOSM, which (still in fact) don't make it clear when an upload has failed. JOSM should perhaps offer an old style uploading option, as a fall-back alternative to the new diff upload. The causes of 'precondition failed' error responses and how they are triggered in the API by relation editing.

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