“I’m sort of enjoying this!” It becomes addictive!

“A few times in the past I’ve come across huge swaths of untagged nodes, I guess this explains it.”

I recently found many such nodes when checking an area with ‘KeepRight’ and arranged with the original mapper to delete them.

Might be worth while to run a ‘KeepRight’ check over your Regina SK area just in case any stray nodes still need to be cleaned up.

If any of my edits ever feature as ‘suspicious’ please let me know. As Andy says, they are likely to be cockups - genuine user mistakes. I usually check via KeepRight but that doesn’t cover all eventualities.

Hi, and welcome. As well as adding street names you might like to look at KeepRight which checks for possible discrepancies on the map. Being local you could then check ‘on the ground’ and make any necessary corrections. Here are a couple of examples…… http://keepright.ipax.at/report_map.php?schema=48&error=64402691 This path isn’t connected to any other highway - should it be? Perhaps to the street in the next example? Making sure that connections are correctly mapped helps routing engines do a better job. http://keepright.ipax.at/report_map.php?schema=48&error=60284940 This highway is tagged just as ‘road’ which isn’t very informative. Perhaps ‘unclassified’ or ‘residential’ might be more appropriate? Message me (NZGraham) if you would like any help - I use JOSM too which makes things easier.

Excellent diary entry. The final comment about “having diverse people work together is the perfect recipe for creativity and progress” is applicable to so many other aspects of life, not just OSM. Thank you for your insight.

In addition to my previous post I’ve been looking at some features in Mark’s local area and would like advice on the best/most correct way to name tag these sample features:-

way/249356827 I think it would be better if this were tagged with…. name= ‘whatever are the Chinese characters for Xishan Park’ plus ‘name:en=Xishan Park

way/243874128 I think the existing ‘name=七星公园Seven-Star Park’ should show only the Chinese characters. Is it correct to mix languages in a single name tag? Leave ‘name:en=Seven-Star Park’ in place.

Advice welcomed. Ultimate aim is to load Chinese and English language name tags for streets and certain POIs so that tourists can use OsmAnd and configure map to display in whichever language they consider most useful. Bit of Chinese/English (New Zealand!) co-operation.

Hi Mark, Please have a look at this page from the OSM Wiki osm.wiki/Multilingual_names#China

I reckon the best way to help foreigners is to add complete name information for streets. So many streets are completely unnamed - even in Chinese characters. The addition of ‘name:en=’ tag would be even more help. Users of OsmAnd can set the display language to either local lanuage (Chinese) or English (and many other languages).

Please check your messages on OSM - I have sent you my QQ and Wechat addresses if you want to make contact that way.

Graham

I think you can tag buildings as hotels - have a look at this page tourism=hotel

“If there is something you use/like that is not on the map that (to me) is far more important than getting things dimensionally ‘accurate’.”

I agree so much. Add ‘missing’ features first then follow up with enhancing accuracy.

House numbers are especially useful for navigation when previously continuous streets get divided into several truncated sections by newer highways. Have a look at Old Farm Road way/28482776 and Dey Street way/298758597 in Hamilton, New Zealand. I’ve now almost completed surveying these and have added house numbers as best as possible to make things easier for strangers to find the correct section of road for a particular house. Any form of interpolation was definitely not an option for this exercise! Lots of breaks in the expected number sequence plus subdivided sections bearing ‘house A/house B’ type of numbering. Positioning of back houses on subdivided sections was often impossible to ascertain from the road. A slightly less labour intensive option I’m considering is to only map the lowest and highest odd & even numbers in a street. At least that should enable users to identify which direction the numbers run. Generally I map house numbers by walking the streets with a GPS unit. I create waypoints standing centrally outside each house – the waypoints are named with the house numbers taken from letterboxes which here in New Zealand are on the street frontage of each property. In the case of subdivided sections I’ll name the waypoints something like ‘298 front’ ‘298A back’. I use JOSM as my editor, loading the waypoint file and matching the numbers with buildings which I trace from Bing imagery.

“By the way I was not able to get the data into OSMAnd” I’m a very new user of OSMAnd and I didn’t think that it was possible to input data directly to it. I thought the input was done into the OSM data base and OSMAnd just (eventually) reflected the OSM updates? I could be wrong of course. Another way of getting some action would be to add map notes based on the info in “a frakkin’ G00gle m*ps” and hope that local mappers did the on the ground checking.

I’ve had a deeper look using Overpass Turbo and there seems to be a dearth of comic shops worldwide! At least in the UK local OSM mappers could use your link “a frakkin’ G00gle m*ps” to guide them to their local shop, check out the info on the ground and then add it to OSM. I reckon that would be legitimate surveying rather than copying from an illegal source.

Edit - ‘books = comic’ - singular.

Don’t know the answer to your question but your mention of tag ‘books-comics’ has enabled me to improve the tagging of this local comic shop node/2517131917 Previously I had just tagged it as ‘shop=comics’ which I wasn’t totally happy with but I couldn’t think of anything more accurate. Thanks :)

“display name of highway” Excellent improvement. Didn’t realise how useful it was until I did some editing this evening. So easy to see where one is on the map without having to click on highways to see the names. Thank you.

Thanks for a great write-up Joost - very comprehensive. I had of course added Osmand to my recently purchased smartphone but definitely needed something like your guide to help me get the best out of it. Please could you check the link in this sentence “make pretty travel maps like this one, you should activate “Logging services & Sleep Mode”. - it takes me here https://joostschouppe.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/using-osmand-on-the-road/umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/verlengd-weekend_8367 - a ‘missing page’ site. Graham

Excellent idea! I especially like the ‘before & after’ pictures in your first article.

AndiG88 - So presumably you would agree with me doing the sort of correcting mentioned in my question on the help forum? https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/30197/how-can-i-find-mis-spelled-tags-on-the-map The subsequent comments about ‘bulk editing’ really frightened me off doing anything further about checking and amending fairly obvious mis-spellings. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with ‘bulk’ or ‘automated’ editing!

As a relatively new contributor to OSM I didn’t realise that this was another step in the mapping exercise. I often think that there could be a more specific tag for something - especially for various types of shops/businesses. I’ve just created a page for tag ‘shop=business_machines’ here shop=_business_machines This was my first attempt at creating/editing a wiki page. I created it by opening a similar tag and changing the URL to ‘shop=business_machines’ (including the underscore) and then opening that URL and entering the details by using the first template which you mentioned. I’m concerned that the underscore doesn’t appear in the ‘title’ part of my new page. How do I correct it please? Any other comments about my page please? I’m keen to learn! Graham

I share your philosophy. It is very satisfying to start with a blank canvas (or almost blank if just the streets are already shown) and see it transformed into something colourful and interesting after many hours work. However, unlike an artist’s work, OSM art is never really finished - there is virtually always some other piece of information to be added!