Disagreements? In the OpenStreetMap community? Never!

You could ask this question on the mailing lists, but you'd probably start an argument :-)

Ah yeah. But the logo actually has two gliders sat on top of eachother

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I tried it. It doesn't work, although it does do interesting things for a few generations.

Some nice mapping there! Not sure where you're trying to route exactly. Maybe you can post a CloudMade routing URL such as: http://maps.cloudmade.com/?lat=14.556991&lng=121.023588&zoom=18&directions=14.557971884196188,121.0226172208786,14.556632295881698,121.02531552314758&travel=foot&styleId=1&opened_tab=1 (use the 'share' button)

Nice presentation. I have some corrections/thoughts on some slides

Slide 22 - ...and bing imagery too now!

Slide 25 - Osmarender (perhaps more correctly, the tiles@home project) is no longer updating faster than the mapnik renderer. In theory distributed rendering might be a boost, but in practice mapnik on one machine can blast through the rendering tasks fast enough to cope with minutely diff updates, meanwhile tiles@home gets slowed down by upload bandwidth.

Slide 34 - Not sure if CloudMade are actually maintaining better uptime than the main OSM tile server these days. A reason for using CloudMade is to have paid-for support & guarantees. The central OSM tile server is not a guaranteed service (Tile usage policy)

Slide 16 - I would've thought the key point to add here, is that most free "Cloud" services provide flexible mash-up APIs (the basemap and geocoding examples of the previous slides) but do not provide access to their raw underlying data map data. OpenStreetMap does

I'm trying to picture end-uses which utility companies might have. I tend to think of them deciding where to dig a hole in the road using ultra-detailed "mastermap" GIS systems. Clearly OSM doesn't offer the kind of detail and accuracy (e.g. we don't have the width of sidewalks and the position of the curb down to the centimetre, and we're not really geared up to deal with that level of accuracy even if we did have the data) So perhaps you should mention that limitation up-front.

A selling point you didn't mention though: Licensed datasets, which companies may use internally, cannot be so easily re-published (e.g. on the web) without hitting restrictions. Some publishing tasks may not require ultra-detailed base maps, e.g. a map of where roadworks are being carried out in a city. Web mapping services are ideally suited to this.

I was going to suggest you get in touch with Peter Batty, but I see you're already referencing him on slide 33. Another suggestion for you SmallWorld experts. It could be helpful if you created a wiki page on SmallWorld. There's a red link on this page just waiting to be filled in. On Slides 29 and 30 you seem to be saying there's some built-in ways of working with OSM. That kind of thing could be documented on the OSM wiki. Also look at this from the point of view of explaining to OSMers about the needs of SmallWorld users. How could working with OSM be made easier? Detail SmallWorld data formats for which we might be able to develop converters.

You didn't actually mention the base URL for your new service: http://openstreetmap.us/xapi/api/0.6/

It works! Example: All the libraries in London : http://openstreetmap.us/xapi/api/0.6/*[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity=library][bbox=-0.57,51.24,0.31,51.75]

Great work!

Well there's certainly worse stuff "clogging the blog" (new users keep thinking it's a good place to ask questions)

I think at this stage the license working group would like to see people spread the word, and encourage others to click to accept. My understanding is that they're deliberately holding back on publicity, while making final tweaks the contributor terms. In the meantime why not support it with a diary entry?

I wouldn't recommend writing an OpenStreetMap editor app as your first iPhone app. An OpenStreetMap editor is a pretty complicated thing. You have to consider authenticating, bundling edits into changsets, dealing with conflicts etc, and yes... downloading whole bboxs of sometimes very complexly interlinked data. Although the designers and developers of the OpenStreetMap API would like to encourage people to develop new editors, it's not really an easy afternoon programming exercise.

You might want to check out the OpenStreetBugs API as a way of allowing simple contributions.

A lot of mobile developers have created apps backed onto their own server-side APIs, with OpenStreetMap data fed in as planet downloads. This enables you to tackle problems like low-bandwidth map bbox transfers and data filtering by tag, features which have so far been left out of the main API.

Is that this one? : WikiProject France/Cadastre/Import semi-automatique des bâtiments

Unfortunately we're not bristling with server resources at placr, otherwise it would be a good thing for us to be helping to host (transport related) There's always dev.openstreetmap.org? Going beyond a low powered VM should be possible somehow. We'll have to see what we can sort out.

But anyway, keep up your experimentation! There's appetite for this stuff.

like "Routing" you mean? There are a few existing routing websites/services. See the Routing page.

Hiya. This is your OpenStreetMap diary. Use it to make quick notes about what mapping you're doing, or as a more wordy blog. But it's not the right place to ask this kind of question. There are better contact channels for this, such as help.openstreetmap.org

Yeah I was reading on your blog. I remember quite a few occasions like that. After every project I would think "If only I'd started a little earlier before the deadline on that" ...and never learned the lesson :-)

@Richard. Cool. I spotted another weird data thing yesterday. Potlatch didn't load some long ways. I took a screenshot I could send you.

@alexz I didn't mean that bit of data. Maybe "boundary" was the wrong word. I was meaning the odd shaped boundary of the hi-res aerial imagery that bing has decided to provide at that location.

@Andy Allan - linked that here

@amm Cool. I hadn't seen either of those links. Was that OSM inspector layer was added recently? I guess Nick Roet's routing demo thing should be linked from the 'Front Page Design' discussion along with other 'feature' ideas... such as OpenStreetBugs integration.

@nmixter - Alrighty then. I shall install those apps! My tracks wiki page certainly needs work

Yeah I saw your redesigned sidebar. It looks nice.

I can make some of the changes you're suggesting, but not others. That's because I can edit the wiki page here: osm.wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar which controls some of the sidebar, but not all of it.

Other changes ('This wiki page' and 'wiki toolbox split') are only possible by changing the MediaWiki skin. Although it's easy enough to rearrange links within the skin code, it can potentially make it more difficult to apply updates to the wiki software. That's just a possible downside. In practice it may be do-able. I'd have to ask firefishy to do it (he has server access)

Another problem is that these things can hint at consistency with the front page design, and that's a whole other thorny discussion. But let's take it one step at a time.

I like the idea of changing "Main Page" to "Wiki homepage". We'd want to actually rename the page too, and this is more of an undertaking. I've proposed this change, to set things in motion here: osm.wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Rename_this_page

ha! well spotted :-) (fixed)

The radio waves bounce off buildings, particularly reflective glass fronted buildings. Things like this will cause your location to jump, as the GPS unit corrects itself later on. The device will tend to extrapolate a little bit from your previous movements, so guessing which direction you're going and how fast, all based on a fuzzy picture it builds up from signal timings it receives as input.

That's GPS for you. Sometimes you have to mix in a bit of guesswork, dead reckoning. Don't be assuming that you GPS trace is more accurate than anyone elses, but by the same token, don't be afraid to edit and add OpenStreetMap data even if you're a little unsure of the accuracy.

It's a shame we don't have any helicopter pilots involved in other countries (like the UK) It would be a good way to get a bit of cheeky aerial photography, but there's not much point strapping any cameras to your chopper. In the U.S. we're well served by Yahoo! imagery :-)

Hey CaptainKirk. Glad you found out about OpenStreetMap. Foreflight? Not heard of that app.

So you've correctly entered a node tagged with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:aeroway=helipad. There's no need to tag it with an icon file or anything. You can see it showing up on the osmarender layer.

It looks like the default Mapnik renderer is not showing an icon for helipad at the moment :-( another example helipad

Even so the data you contributed there was correct, and we welcome your contribution! It may also be that this Foreflight app will be able to use the data.

Oopse. Fixed. That's funny because I kept reminding myself "his surname is Acrewoods not Chance", but no! also was forgetting to link to your blog post