Your dairy entry hit osmweekly. https://www.weeklyosm.eu/archives/18306

Based on experience validation feedback works best the faster it is given. Catch someone within twenty minutes and they’re more likely to act on the feedback. They also are more likely to complete more tasks on the poject, so sitting on a project and validating it quickly means it is more likely to get completed. Tone on validation comments makes difference as well. Two projects very similar, I validated one and another mapper who was a bit black and white the other. Similar rapid feedback, mine got completed in half the time.

After a month forget it, they may have changed their practices anyway.

This morning I received a comment on a changeset from 2019, apparently it didn’t match the latest ideas of tagging.

Be aware that HOT validation doesn’t quite follow OSM rules where the process is changeset comment, wait for feedback, then correct. Validators tend to just correct possibly with feedback.

Projects with buildings, I don’t bother validating them. It’s a waste of my time. I can draw a new building correctly tagged in JOSM with the buildings_tool in two or three clicks of a mouse. Cleaning up a misshapen building drawn in iD takes more mouse clicks than to redraw it.

There is another type of validation which is load up a fairly large area of the map then check for duplicate buildings with the tool. Run JOSM validation on the area, it picks up a fair number of errors that can be corrected. You really need ECC memory to avoid errors and a fairly quick processor. dellrefurbished.com 5820 workstations work well.

The downside is the errors caught are not fed back to the project, but the quality of the map is improved.

Another way to improve building quality is using JOSM and the buildings_tool plugin. There was a mapathon held in Calgary some years ago that mapped buildings that got negative feedback for the quality of buildings mapped. For once in my life I actually organised a mapathon, we had five new mappers and one experienced mapper. It took a bit of time to install JOSM and the buildings_tool but once done they mapped very quickly. We mapped around three times the number of buildings that the first mapathon mapped and there was no issue on the quality of the mapping. I’ve noticed in a mapathon quite often a mapper will only map a handful of buildings.

The other advantage of JOSM is it does a fair bit of validation on the upload so untagged ways etc. get warned against. I think iD does some but JOSM is stricter and gives immediate feedback which feeds into more tiles mapped.

Oracle’s java is sometimes prohibited on corporate machines but Microsoft’s OPEN JDK works fine. You can also run JOSM from a USB stick if need be.

Have fun

John

It appears that Brampton open data is not licensed for inclusion in OSM but the same data is available through stats can.

You can request the Legal Working Group review the license, this normally takes a couple of years or I suggest you use the Stats Canada source for the data.

Cheerio John

“The addresses are in the StatsCan data, as when I ran Peel’s open data they informed me they were pulling out addresses from our site for their program.

If they pulled Peel’s I don’t see why they’d pull Brampton’s separately since Peel covers Brampton.

So they can use the SC addresses as a source but not Brampton’s since OSM LWG considers the city’s name changing in the license to be a new license.

Kevin”

osm.wiki/Potential_datasources/Local_data look for Canada.

Toronto is fine and has been approved by LWG but many other municipalities license does not work.

Cheerio John

There is a process for imports.

Have you checked to see if the information is available through Stats Canada and the federal government open data portal. Often the same data is available but under a different license which is acceptable.

If it is then use that source as it does comply with OSM import rules.

John

I interpret your hint as having an extra post-validation quality check, on each HOT project. once the project gets closed, moves from Published to Archived, it would need going through this sort of acceptance step. I have followed projects in Panamá, being closed just like that, and I think that such an acceptance step would be quite useful.

The process can be used on archived projects, or even on live projects. Duplicate buildings and untagged buildings can be corrected even with live mappers mapping. Just quickly download just the error asset once more, correct and upload.

If an NGO wants to use the map then the faster it is corrected the better but I agree having a formal step before archiving would help diminish the errors lying around the map after an inexperienced mapper has been in..

Note to qeef I’ve amended the original to mention mapathoner plugin rather than use a script from a third party source.

Thanks John

Thank you both for the comments.

Note to qeef Is there a write up somewhere about Mapathoner and how to use it?

Many Thanks

John

I think you need to go back twenty five years to a time when Sun Microsystems were building computers that needed to have programs specially written for their hardware and that is the origin of JAVA. The promise was one program could run on many different hardware platforms and twenty five years ago there was a variety of hardware platforms. Today many have disappeared. Remember the Itanium or even Data General for that matter? Sun Microsystems has been taken over by Oracle and they have pointed out a number of security problems in early versions which pushes you into their latest version with it’s altered license.

Today computer hardware is dominated by the X86 processor so there isn’t quite the need for software that runs on any hardware. However there is still a lot of software written in JAVA and the cost of building an application such as JOSM is substantial. Can this be avoided.

As mentioned above there are a number of OpenJDK solutions available. The Microsoft version is only one but one that will have a very large user base and that means it should be solid. Someone else will find the undocumented system features (bugs). Provided JOSM is written or enhanced so that it can run under one or more then the investment in the code is safe. If it can only run under the Oracle version then you are at Oracle’s mercy as to the terms you can use the software.

I personally feel very comfortable with the Microsoft implementation but it is up to the JOSM programming team to write and enhance the code in such a way it can run under other OpenJDK solutions rather than be locked into an Oracle solution.

Running JAVA on some corporate machines breaks company policy.

Oracle has changed the licensing on JAVA and I used to deal with Oracle on licensing matters professionally. Their interpretation of their licenses seemed to vary depending who you speak to. Several times I’ve have to refer them back to previous conversations where the interpretation of the license when it was purchased was not the same as the person I was talking to was saying.

I think Microsoft’s offering of OpenJDK which replaces JAVA avoids both these problems. Running it from a flash drive doesn’t really avoid the problems above. Do the problems matter? If you’re running a mapathon and some people bring their company laptop being able to use the JOSM buildings_tool makes a big difference.

I’m not saying you must use it instead of Oracle’s JAVA or that it is better than any other opensource JDK but I merely bring your attention to the fact it exists. Note the other implication is JOSM is now totally independent on what Oracle decides to do and thus we don’t need to think about a possible replacement.

Subjectively JOSM seems to run a little faster as well but I haven’t built and run a formal benchmark.

Sorry I don’t run Linux I’m afraid.

There is a choice of operating systems so the install will vary by operating system. Under Windows ten there is an .msi file microsoft-jdk-11.0.10.9-windows-x64.msi which installs and offers you the option to make Microsoft OpenJDK the default for .java files.

Very easy to do.

I think its a retrograde step. A big user interface change such as this as a major impact especially on casual users who are used to the existing interface.

It certainly isn’t as clear to my untutored eye and taking into account red green colour blindness or even the partially sighted is removing blue such a sensible idea?

John