Yes York itself is coming along very nicely these days, but looks like Copmanthorpe needs some work. Welcome!

Routing on devices, or routing online?

maps.cloudmade.com example

embedding routing on your site with Web Maps Lite

Hmmm. slight HTML slip-up there. lemme just close this crazy italicness

... Edgemaster! London OSM dates. Dont forget! Come along to geomob on Thu. they'll be a bunch of us there.

Thinking about pedestrian routing is just one of many level-of-detail type questions, all of them pointing in the direction of "map everything as an area", as the ultimate solution to all problems representing reality.

It's insane though. You realise that don't you? :-)

heh. You want to aim for a pub quiz? Usually we hit them by accident every now and then. Maybe we should go to the Island Queen in Angel again.

my NaviGPS is advertised as waterproof too, but managed to get some water inside it somehow while I was kayak mapping. I didn't attempt to disassemble it. I just left it with the battery flap open to dry it. After about a week it started working normally again, although the screen is permanently missing a row of pixels.

I saw an interesting comment here "Google Maps have recently introduced a mandatory reverse geocoding feature,...". Might explain what you're seeing. But you'd have to give us an example lat/lon.

Yep. This kind of thing does make copyright infringement easy. It's so easy you can do it by accident. As an OSM mapper I find I have to abstain from looking at this kind of site, because it's so enticing. Suddenly figuring out what's missing is a doddle.

In my opinion we should discourage people from running this kind of site, or at least discourage anyone who contributes to OSM from looking at them.

Excellent stuff Roger. The map looks amazing. Cheers me up on a Monday morning!

I had someone else emailing me expressing concern about these diary entries. Not sure Fake Liam123 is a particularly clear joke for those who haven't been following talk-gb

Internet booths hey? Well you could certainly place a node with internet_access=terminal. Maybe just add another tag note=booth. I'm not aware of a "booth" tag (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:booth=yes/no has been used but only a few times. There may be a better tag to use)

OpenAerialMap is offline these days. Hopefully it will come back at some point.

For London we have Yahoo coverage. See the UK yahoo coverage map. Within these areas there's absolutely no reason to be using landsat (much lower resolution)

It's a bit fiddly to set up the yahoo downloader for the WMSPlugin, but worth doing. Certainly all of the building sketching I am talking about here is based on Yahoo imagery not landsat, but basically for any kind of mapping in London you'd be missing out if you didn't set-up the yahoo imagery.

Yes layer could be a solution, but I think osmarender is better at handling layer tags than mapnik at the moment

@Wynndale yeah I see what you mean. Actually I pondered that problem when mapping around the BT tower before. One to discuss in the pub I guess
@Edgemaster Shame you can't make it. Next time then!

Yeah. I noticed your area looking nicely sketched out. Looks like you've gone for lots more detail than me. Must've taken a while!

I'll explain my thinking a little more.

Buildings outlines would ideally be mapped either not at all, or completely and whole-heartedly (like in Helsinki). The only decent middle-ground would be based on some sort of importantness metric. That approach works well for many maps, but maybe it's too subjective to work well in OSM.

In London we've just ended up with a disorganised hotch-potch of building outlines. It's easy to see how this happened. It's a massive city. Sketching building outlines is tedious. Surely it could never be done across the whole city, and so nobody attempts it. Instead though we have a handful of important buildings sketched in, plus a handful of buildings which happen to have interesting outlines. Then in outlying areas we have funny little clutches of building outlines for concrete housing estates. This is because they're really difficult to map in any satisfyingly complete way without showing the buildings. These are the worst offenders though, because they are not important buildings by any stretch of the imagination. Then more recently we've had the likes of Dave & Blumpsy battling for completeness supremacy with really beautifully complete building outline mapping along with housenumbering in their areas.

Nobody's intentionally damaging the map, but when you zoom out and look at it, we've collaboratively created a rather ugly imbalance. The London mapping party gang are in a good position to experiment, discuss and figure out a way forward.

@Tom Chance - Yeah building colour does feel a bit overpowering. Mainly when zoomed in like this. The roads are dawn over the top of buildings which has the effect of hiding the colour a lot when zoomed out.

@TimSC - I quite like the idea of getting the retail strips in as pink landuse=retail areas. Been doing a bit of that. In central London in gets a bit fiddly trying to decide when an area is no longer retail. Plus what landuse is an area like soho full of restaurants & bars?

@Nah. The rest of the world will just have to organise their own mapping parties :-)

Congratulations Neil. Great work! I see you've updated the wiki page too (We have a whole list of other UK paths to map if anyone fancies it!)

Yeah. This one was marginally easier than other quizzes I've been to. I think I knew about 5 or 6 answers out of the 30... But I think I knew about one answer which Stephen & Welshie hadn't already written down. Useless.

Yes it's good to have nice illustrative photos on tag documentation wiki pages. I think it helps a lot even in cases where the meanings should be obvious. I've been doing a bit of this using photos from my own collection/mapping (as in this case) I've also occasionally gone on a little wikimedia commons hunt for nice pictures e.g. backery and garden centre. Lots more work to do on this, and on sorting out tag docs in general. Speaking of which...

@flohoff... landuse=meadow or natural=meadow? It's not as clear as it should be

@randomjunk Yes back in 2006, given that you single-handedly mapped the the area of Thursday's entire cake during that old mapping party, I suppose we can forgive you for not mapping the post boxes :-)