You might have thought you were being balanced Harry but to be fair it wasn't very balanced - it was from an anti Armchair mapper viewpoint. And overall it still is despite my changes.

I know many people do dislike armchair mapping but an anti armchair mapping standpoint is not helpful overall to the community. Armchair mappers are a large part of the community who are seen as a second class citzen but the anti-armchair mapping movement.

I am up for some of this hopefully I will be back based on London in a few weeks for a new contract. I was thinking I would do some more effort in London before/for the Olympics.

Oh about "armchair" mapping in general:

Harry, that wiki on Armchair mapping is not balanced at all. It is very anti armchair mapping. IMHO written by an old school mapper that doesn't embrace the modern toools we now have available.

A balanced approach would be adding "advantages" rather than just "disadvantages".
(Here are a few advantages of the top of my head

a) quicker to get coverage. I can get many, many times more coverage mapped doing armchair versus normal/old school mapping.
b) Some things are difficult to do without armchair mapping/aerial imagery. Building outlines, etc.
c) more accurate quality “form” of the roads, etc- e.g. You can get much better curves of roads via armchair mapping. have spent ages changes traffic islands, major roads etc to this from obviously inaccurate. No one maps on foot, car, etc by going down the white lines in the middle of road. With armchair mapping you can do this with ease. (you can always realign, if needed, afterwards)
d) The entry level to participate is lower, you don't need expensive equipment, it is less elitist.
e) most things road, etc don’t change for decades. If roughly know an area and you are mapping/tweaking major roads that you know were there x months ago and have not heard they have changed you don’t need to physically walk/drive down the road to map it as some normal/old school mappers would insist on.

(maybe I should add some disadvantages to normal/old school mapping too)

It works best in a combination of some knowledge of the area rather than totally blind – which is how I try and do my mapping.

I have a write a more balanced view on the wiki later.

Yeah i expect a mistake/oversight too. I was a little worried OSM might cut them off from the tile server in fair use as they will have a lot of traffic.
It is early days for them and but a huge site to get onboard for OSM and one were a reasonable percentage might join OSM to make the map better.

and in the openstreetmap view of the map they use tiles straight from the tile.openstreetmap.org server

That isn't allowed either is it?!?

A busy site embracing openstreetmap that can only be good.

But I don't see any copyright notices at all to openstreetmap

http://www.geocaching.com/map/

I thought they are meant to do that. They have cloudmade and mapquest but no openstreetmap.

Alexz,

How on earth did you make that conclusion?

There is nothing wrong with what El Segundo can't win did.

Look at the sat imagery of the place you can clearly see the bench there.

I consider it very responsible to delete of those that can't and don't want to or purposely try and derail the project by not signing up, and then recreate it.

It amazes me that people always think the worst here. I question there motivations to the project at times

I could have easily done he same in that situation even without ever seeing the place. And that is what I do if I see a node that is questionable then I will delete it and recreate it from sat imagery, local knowledge, etc. However here I would be accused of doing something illegal......

2012

I thought I would add if anyone is even listening that OpenMaps (5.6x%) claim never to have been aware that they might be abusing the tile servers (did anyone even tell them *shrug*) but are looking to fix this in the next version.

http://blog.izeize.com/2011/10/openmaps-app-blocked-by-openstreetmap.html

Thanks a lot for the stats you provided.

The list for those interested was the first 20,000 user agents (so not all the traffic) and a total of 173,184,462 requests.

A brief breakdown (I would expect these percentages to reduce a little if we had the over total of requests)

MOBAC/* 15.8x% (20+ UA)
JTileDownloader 0.50% (4 UA)
NaviComputer 6.4x% (1 UA)
OpenMaps 5.6x% (20+ UA)
Locus 4.7x% (20+ UA)
omaps 2.6x% (20+ UA)
OSMand 1.1x% (10+ UA)

People complain about JDownloadtiler with 0.5% when something called JOSM has 400+ UAs and more than double the downloads at 1.1x%

And from the corps
Google
GoogleEarth/* 0.5% (nearly 100 UA)
ERSI mapping company
ArcGIS 0.9x% (30+ UA)

I hope that adds some more facts to this debate. I haven't covered everything just ones that were mentioned and which I thought were of interest.

amn,

So all the different mass downloaders don't take up all 50% of the traffic. True it may/will be more but flood protection is normal and many large sites we are not unique here. Lets get more aggressive with it then. I think the real problem is not people that want to say download a small area offline it is those that try and download whole countries, cities, etc.

What are end users here? Users of mobile apps? They are the most useful for me as a user for OSM data having a map on my mobile with GPS to locate/track where I am. This is the modern way people us the map. We need to think of ways of accommodating these people. Also I actually do like to be able to download maps on my phone for areas where sometimes there is not 3g signal available but GPS works. e.g. going walking no 3G signal, GPS works would like to download maps beforehand.

The questions of strategy and architecture of tile usage image will not be even tackled here as they are difficult questions. If OSM doesn't provide tile map data the project will die.

Ok so less then 10% so it is really not that much.

I thought a few years it was a much bigger percentage and therefore a bigger problem. Reducing this doesn't sound like a massive improvement to your web infrastructure - if it is an capacity issue now then you/we have bigger problem than a offline map downloader.

Most people (normal users, devs) are going to use the osm site for the tiles even if another is available. This will be more so if there are no restrictions on use for this. People will use it unless we actively try and stop them then abuse will continue.

Sadly with no sysadmin group I miss out on the discussions for this and the chance to input and I would volunteer to help out with this team if needed.

I am unsure where the bottleneck is (previously I thought it was the servers themselves now it implies it is the network infrastructure).

For an abuse situation if it is load like I understood before an offline map program would try and download enitre large cities or countries on all zoom levels. This is understandable a lot of content all in one go and what I understood was/is the problem. Maybe this is a different issue now.

But is the problem serving content or just the requests even if they fail?
Is it these hogging apps getting through sometimes and then causing issues with excessive processing and bandwidth or if they fail at the server level (so the same amount of the request are routed through the servers but less processing and bandwidth is used to send a rejected response)? Maybe it is just the sheer volume of traffic irrespective of the server response.

But to stop requested being processed by user agent, referrers is not the most intelligent way as these can easily be spoofed to use generic ones. I would look at stopping them based on the pattern of the downloads per session (or IP is that is not possible). This a distinct pattern; all tiles next to each other, massive amounts of consecutive tiles.

Re-architecture might be required too.

There are a few options.

For example,

Changing the tile location and only having access to it via a logged on source.

OSM site will have a logon to all traffic routed to the tiles servers as an app tier.

All other apps that want to use it have to do so via logging in by a unique to that app username (silently in the background). If there app/user is not on the list they cannot get in. Or too much abuse then the user (therefore app) access rights is removed.

True, it sounds more like a commercial (and controlling) model for this but something you need to consider when a web project goes from a hobby site to a bigger used setup....and once you have that then you can consider different charging options for different apps..but for a open source project that far too capitalist for many here. :)

From what I understand this is to do with the mass downloads from these apps.
They download thousands of times a normal user from the servers, all in one go.

Why not just have flood protection on the servers? Many sites have similar problems and I have had architect solutions to this before.

Also maybe we should actually look at some other hosting environments and getting donations for this (hosting companies, cloud providers to individual monetary donations to pay for more bandwidth/capacity,etc).

Should we also consider more that for many OSM is the rendered map rather than just the db and work out how to do better provision.

It noticed this a few weeks ago, Yeah looks good, top job there. I was going to start doing Hyde Park for some time as I have completed a few parks now elsewhere in the country and London parks look so barren often but never got around to it....I have always liked Regents Park...maybe that one then.

I haven't seen landuse to a road. I don't consider this to be normal practice.

I have seen and use block of the same land use together but when if the land use is named.

However I do see and use larger areas to residential use (i.e not just block and with roads running through it)

Excellent, good job, I added some things for the area when I went this year with my little nephews. Went for years as a kid must be a Derby thing.:)

Yes, a lot has changed over the years, amazing really. You do know that we can use Microsoft Bing imagery to trace the detail? It is a recent addition in the last year or so and used in conjuction with the GPS can make very accurate maps.

I just look in your area and saw the neighbour you mapped.

osm.org/?lat=30.39221&lon=-84.2279&zoom=17&layers=M

Excellent work there. Sorry from you post I thought you where are a novice mapper and just started, you are more then ready for the rest of city. I also see you have a lot to do but on the bright side large areas like a forest south seem to be near you to map for big easy wins.

The is pretty much the same way I got more serious into mapping. Local area first and the major roads with Bing. Some were terrible for the major trunk roads and trunk/motorways.

Many armchair mappers do it this way. My phone GPS is not good enough really for accuracy. I find now just having the Bing imagery is the best for the structure/ratios/fell that GPS cannot. A sweeping curved traffic island motorway is difficult to map accurately anyway.

As to where to spend your resources next I look for 'big wins' on the map. Noticeable area covered for little work ratio . Parks, Bodies of water, School areas (then the school buildings), Shopping Centers/Malls (not all the shops initials just the area plot and then building), Supermarkets, Quarries, Sports Centres, Large points of interest to someone, Stadiums, Opera Houses, Prisons, Cemeteries, Railway Station (or even tracks.), etc
also Zoning in areas (commercial/retail/residential)

I feel then the map starts to look alive.

I cannot claim at all for all the mapping of my city, Derby, UK, there are some more dedicated than me, nor is it the best example of a City as there are much better mapped cities and a lot to do...

But it it wasn't that long ago it looked that Tallahassee does at the moment.

osm.org/?lat=52.92126&lon=-1.47615&zoom=15&layers=M

It can transform quicker than you think. Keep us updated on your progress.

Thank you for the time in producing this updates of London mapping Harry. Always an interesting read.

Maybe one day I will come along to one often in London.

Recently finished of the City mapping so all the OS/itoworld roads are 100% now. And started doing the land use zoning there (well it is nearly the entire city area is bright pink:commerical) together with building mappings...London in general doesn't seem to have too much land use assigned......

Deleted