You might like to take note of Mapillary. Open Data from VicRoads is being progressively loaded onto Mapillary: this may really help add details without committing to visit every tram stop.

I cant find an example with trams because many of these sequences have not yet been fully processed by Mapillary and dont yet show up as a blue line on the map.

Some of the aerial imagery, particularly the grey scale MapBox imagery is quite difficult to interpret and in particular I have noticed that ridge lines and valley bottoms are often initially difficult to pick out.

The two ways to check are a) use the OpenCycleMap layer which shows contours and b) zoom out until you have Landsat satellite data. With the latter the overall topography becomes much clearer. (I may put a bit on the wiki in the next day or so now that you’ve raised it).

In areas where this is particularly difficult to interpret I actually crudely map ridge lines (natural=ridge) as well as waterways. This not only provides data, but helps to keep the context of the imagery clearer. I discuss this a little on my blog about mapping Lesotho.

Nice thoughts.

I think the graphs are confusing because of the variable axes. In practice the vast majority of entries are parsable. I’d suggest making the % axis from 0-100, and perhaps adding another line showing total parsable entries using the right axis.

What I dont get a feel of is how many elements might have opening hours tags on them vs those that dont: for instance most shop=* might be expected to be valid elements for opening_hours.

Another thing which one might be able to pick up, in Germany at least, is the local Ruhetag, just from which day typically has different opening hours in an area.

I imagine you used OpenCycleMap as a background layer. This no longer appears in the default layers. I dont know if this was deliberate, or accidental. I imagine you can still create this as a layer for Potlatch2.

I doubt if the things tagged as toilets in Tandale are private toilets, some are probably Open Defecation Areas, others might be communal toilets. Most of the 50k+ inhabitants will not have access to any kind of private toilet facility. An overpass query counts around 550 POIs, so roughly 100 people:1 toilet.

Tandale has been mapped by local people with guidance from experienced OpenStreetMappers.under a Development Seed programme.

I suggest reading some of the following:

• Community Mapping in Tandale
• Gary Gale’s Visit
• Ground Truth blog

And a youtube video of Mark Iliffe and Gary Gale made in Tandale.

@lxbarth This sounds a) a great typology and b) good sense; but it raises one of my long standing tagging concerns. Just what is the best way to tag trailer/mobile home parks over-and-above just using landuse=residential?

@lxbarth This sounds a) a great typology and b) good sense; but it raises one of my long standing tagging concerns. Just what is the best way to tag trailer/mobile home parks over-and-above just using landuse=residential?

Nice post, this has been a personal bugbear for ages. I’d love to see a concerted effort to fix this.

The obvious alternatives are place=suburb & place=neighbourhood (possibly place=locality, but like hamlet I expect that in rural areas). A third was is just to place a landuse polygon of the appropriate type and add the name tag

Many of these are industrial/commericial areas with a low population (hence why they got the hamlet tag), but in some cases it’s just that the naming of areas in the city is at a fine degree of granularity.

And we have really accurate position of the pins on the golf course, which will of course get moved every few days to keep green wear constant.

Fundamentally I agree with this, but I also think that practical surveying experience greatly assists in interpreting images even in unfamiliar places.

I know that my initial mapping in Port-de-Prince was very much informed by how much I had learnt from adding stuff remotely and then discovering that in reality things were rather different. There is always a danger of over-interpreting remote imagery, and exposure to this issue by actual survey experience really helps.

In the short time allotted for a Missing Maps session practical surveying is obviously impossible, but I think there is scope for using things like Mapillary sequences etc., to place remote mapping in a context together with on-the-ground surveys.

Years ago nickw and I spent half a day presenting OSM at a MapAction training weekend. I remember being surprised by how many of those present had edited OSM in their local area. Perhaps this was besides being GIS pros, many wanted a feel for how data was created. After all, they use it in earnest during humanitarian crises.

I dont think it’s quite right, but will do for a start, providing you add some other tag which will enable you to find juice bars. In my case I’ve added cuisine=milkshake as such a start.

There is a (small ?) chain called Shakeaway in the UK and elsewhere selling Milkshakes. These have been tagged in several different ways: amenity=cafe, amenity=fastfood, shop=yes, shop=beverages. So we could do with an answer too. There are close analogies to ice cream places (not exactly food, can consume in or take away).

Certainly noticed several in Parque Centenario in Buenos Aires. There is also a very little used tag covering several of these leisure=outdoor_gym. In Switzerland and nearby there are specific trails with fitness stations located along the trail. There has been an ongoing project to map them for several years: ParscoursVita.

Agree this is a nice idea, useful info, and simpler to execute than the old project of the week.

Great sequence, nice clear pictures. I’ve used them to add a couple of petrol (gas) stations to the W of Chotila, but couldnt locate the power line on aerial imagery.

Interesting that the common tag is leisure=sports_centre.

I think this was originally meant for a centre offering a wide range of sports activities, rather than the building housing one or two sports, but I know the second meaning is very common. Perhaps we need another tag for places which host multiple sports (e.g., swimming pool, fitness centre, hall for racquet games, basketball or 5-a-side, plus changing facilities and outdoor pitches).

Second question, I recently mapped the Buenos Aires Rowing Club (sic) at Tigre. They have another large place which is clearly more a social than sporting facility. Does this apply to any of your Rowing Clubs, as it most certainly applies to some clubs in the UK.

If I found people mapping from notes for a bounty in the local area I’d be pretty cross.

In general we have little evidence that remote mappers really improve places which are well mapped, by ground survey and the data available to them (mainly aerial imagery) is often out-of-date or inadequate to resolve issues. I have certainly noticed people have made decisions about how something is likely to be when local folk have already determined that a place requires a ground survey.

I have from time to time added extra detail because remote mappers have started fiddling with data which is reported through tools such as KeepRight. I have done this vaguely under duress so as to stop well-meaning, but usually pointless, tweaking of the map data.

If it was to happen on a regular on-going scale, I suspect it would deter me from continuing to contribute.

@Vincent de Philly: you have to explain to an inexperienced wiki/OSM user why their new descriptive tag pages gets added to “Tags lacking a proposal” category. There is an approval process & to many in the outside world it looks ‘official’ (see the many articles about sexism in OSM based on one of the Childcare proposal pages, to see this). Whereas you and I know this is something favoured by an active minority, this is not always apparent to non-contributors, or contributors (as Tom’s comments show).

@Tom Morris: Bravo, well said.

I’m not sure that getting rid of the mailing lists will help: take a look at some github pages for CartoCSS, and you’ll see that OSM is adept at creating never-ending ‘angels on pinheads’ discussions in any communication form known to man.

Changing how tags are documented, and eliminating the voting on proposals, on the wiki requires some form of executive decision. I would strongly support moving to purely descriptive pages for key: and tag: spaces. Normative descriptions can be placed on Country and other relevant pages. To be effective this would require quite rigorous policing of the descriptive pages, which I suspect would fail because the most active maintainers of wiki pages also tend to be those most attached to the “Proposal/Voting” mechanism.

This is a great little project. Only stopped at Squamish for lunch & a beer so don’t really know what the forest trails are like.

I think as others have said you are pushing the limits of what consumer-grade GPS might deliver. Here’s a local open space where I regularly get 4 m accuracy on my etrex display (also used by the local geo-specialists to test their fancy pro-GPSes), you can see the variability of the tracks ((1) from OSM; (2) from Strava)

I think part of what you should be doing as the next steps are detailed micro-mapping of features along the trails. I don’t know exactly what things will be useful, but anything which helps refine precise location and most importantly gets the relative topology of everything correct. In your situation I’d probably try to grab pictures along the trails: Mapillary provides a good way to review such image sequences.

You can make a request on github for the CartoCSS style, but I suspect that this is a fairly specialised rendering need. Given that CartoCSS doesn’t render features like amenity=doctors it might only receive a low priority.

In the short term I would suggest making use of either umap or OverpassTurbo. I have built a simple Overpass query and added a naive style using the windmill icon (in lieu of a proper kiln icon). It is here. I hope this gives some ideas of what is possible with these tools

If you want some more help I can be reached by email SK53 dot osm at gmail dot com.