Ah yes. I see you’re way ahead of me with a data-driven tracker. So we could progress Mali village coverage now with an auto-generated list like this which examines the data in each village to detect some checkpoints such as… “Yes/No the village is mapped as a polygon rather than just a node”, “Yes/No the village has at least one highway trailing out the edge of it” (connecting roads), “Yes/No the village has at least one short highway within the village” (road details within the village) That’s all doable from imagery. Then there’s things which require more local knowledge such as: “Yes/No we have the name of the village”, “Yes/No a school building is mapped”.

A data driven tracker like that could be display-only, but useful if it updates quickly somehow (minutely diff powered) or maybe has an update button for a mapper to trigger it to rescan a village.

When you say “use your OSM-login and then work on stuff” You mean like a acquiring/locking the task you are working on?

Great stuff. This reminds of the 2012 Mali Crisis HOT mapping efforts. We were starting with nothing but bing imagery, and trying to get some basic coverage of the little villages dotted across this vast landscape. User:PovAddict developed a nifty little tool codenamed “kuona” which presented the microtask of spotting villages in bing tiles. We then manually checked through the spots where people had clicked, and added in village centroids or polygons. In many cases that’s as far as we got. I scripted a thing to look at the map data, and cross off the spotted villages which seemed to be already added. We didn’t know the names of course. Then there was work which happened in some cases but not others, to map some details within the villages, and (probably more importantly) connecting roads (dirt tracks) between villages.

You have some interesting approaches here. I’ve heard of trello for project management, but haven’t seen it used for mapping management before! I wonder if there’s a smarter way to track status of such things though, driven directly from the map data.

I think your approach of chatting to people on facebook to find out more about a particular village, is really neat. I’ve used the “Notes” feature as a super-simple way of getting people like this to contribute without needing to learn editing, but maybe there’s something even simpler about your approach of presenting them with these grids.

Hi Bernhard. I’m currently on my honeymoon in Thailand. I am using the maps (using MapsWithMe app), and I notice you’ve mapped the resort I’m staying in, so thanks for that!

@Tom Chance. Yeah you’re right. Lots of nice features of google maps tools. We’ve got most of it, but developers have to go hunting for the features across many open source tools. There’s a thing I’ve noticed google fusion tables does, to avoid the problem of too many markers overloading the browser, it actually render markers onto raster tiles if there’s too many of them. Seemlessly switching from pure javascript to some server-side work (I assume). It’s really neat the way this happens without the developer needing to be aware of it. Some joined-up thinking like this in OSM toolsets would be a good thing for the hackathon level of developer.

Yeah you’re probably right. Haven’t tried, but I presume it’s UK only from what you say. I’ve added a note on the wiki listing.

Cool. Which bits of OSM data are they using? Can you work it out? Footpaths I guess.

It like it! Combined with “location filters” it feels quite like natural language. I tried “library in london” for example.

Good rant. I agree wholeheartedly. Linked from the minutes there is a good detailed explanation of how to give credit to OpenStreetMap

@ThomasZander Really? I’m trying to imagine which kind of mobile development you are you doing. A cross-operating system approach which is not HTML5. …titanium?

Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure the sysadmins aren’t going to just switch it off one day. If it was going to happen it would be discussed more widely, or at least announced more widely. I think I remember mentioning to grant at the time, that the JOSM plugins are all set-up to use SVN.

Takes a bit of imagination to see a santa there. It’s a bit like spotting shapes in cloud formations. I like it!

Somebody could ruin this dreamy serendipity with some cold hard engineering. Process the planet file in search of a shapes that match most similarly to a predefined santa shape :-)

I created a wiki page, mainly so I could make this findable in the Tile Stitching category. Quite a few different tools do this. Maybe we should make a more general page ‘Tile Stitching’

I do like my links :-) Actually I wrote this on the train without and internet connection. Frustrating. I had to leave the links to fill in later.

p.s. I’ve added this here: osm.wiki/Talk:Notes#Todo._Guidelines_for_resolving_notes let’s start thinking about what the guidelines should look like.

You raise some interesting questions, and I certainly don’t have answers for all of them.

I’d say the default assumption for an anonymous note would hopefully be that somebody local is reporting a problem or supplying some information to add. But clearly we’ll need to apply some common sense here. So obviously in this case you’re suspicious about the source of the information, and this takes us into a legal grey area. Taken collectively, it starts to look like copying from a potentially copyrighted source. This is made less severe by the consideration that Aldi would probably quite like to have their store locations on OpenStreetMap (if they ever thought about it) but made more severe by the possibility that google geocoding has been involved. We can bring in more sources. Use bing imagery to look for big things which look like Aldi stores. Maybe we can even use google streetview to double check some stuff. Legal grey areas aplenty!

Normally I would say this is not an approach for adding data to OpenStreetMap, but since you’re working to resolve notes from somebody else… maybe that changes things. I’m not sure really.

A couple of other things I would note about notes: I’ve seen a few people getting up tight about how they can resolve certain notes, as if they need to do so, and they’ll just die of frustration if they can’t resolve it one way or another, but maybe sometimes we need to just chill out and leave them dangling for a while. After all, to my mind there are two perfectly valid categories of notes. (1) People supplying information, which any mapper can then add to the map using nothing more than bing imagery, but also (2) People raising a question which will require survey on the ground. This second type of note cannot be resolved by sitting at your computer, so either you’ll have to head out there, or just put up with that annoying note left dangling. In the context of that, might it be useful to leave these Aldi notes on the map so that next time you or anyone else are in the area, you can check for an Aldi on the ground?

Also you can reply to anonymous notes. Obviously the original user won’t be emailed about this, but it’s not impossible that they will swing by again to see this. Again this requires us to be a bit patient and leave the note dangling for long enough for that to happen.

We’re forging new ground with the “netiquette” around how we process notes. There’s certainly more we can add to the wiki offering guidance around this stuff, but they’re still quite new. Personally I don’t have that much experience of dealing with them, but it’s clear we need to direct more attention to them (e.g. get more people roaming with apps to try resolving on-the-ground type queries) I do wonder whether we should have some sort of layer of classification for the 1’s and 2’s mentioned above.

There’s a standardisation opportunity which is constantly evading us here. It’s always bothered me, ever since I wrote the two MediaWiki extensions years ago, and I’ve been meaning to come back to this. So MapBBCode has a new “map sharing” syntax, and it’s also a map sharing service, or maybe the term should be something like “annotation services”? Recently we’ve seen umap come along, and also geojson.io They all do slightly different things, adopting different syntaxes. The other family of similar map sharing ideas comes from static map image services which we’ve had for a while. With some services the data needs to be put into a URL params. This is even possible on the OpenStreetMap.org front page (marker and box parameters) but as with the syntax approaches… no real standardisation yet it would seem.

SPAM

Well I was going to name them after the streets “Team St Michael’s” and “Team Star”, but that made yours sound better.

It is good. It’s a shame Kate and Heather had left the room when he got his camera out. Should’ve taken a few snaps myself, but you can see how well my iPhone does when it decides to flash in pub (middle photo)

They should not be mapped as both a node and an area. See One feature, one OSM element mapping guidelines. So yes the correct thing to do would be to move all tags off the node onto the area, and delete the node.

I hunted down this for you. In iD you can apparently select the area and the point, then use the “Merge” (+) operation

In JOSM the Paste Tags action lets you do it. In Potlatch I think you can copy tags from the last selection.

Happily things have moved on a bit since a couple of years ago when you were asking this. There’s now ‘Go Map!!’ and ‘Pushpin OSM’ apps which are pretty good mobile editors for iOS.

I’ve just been updating this question: How can I edit OSM with my iPhone?.

I thought I might be able to edit or update or comment upon that old slashgeo page, but I don’t seem to be able to.