I really like the levels graphic: I’ve been toying with similar ideas for a range of different use-cases (logistics, hiking, solar power) & the graphic expresses this very powerfully.

OSM Ireland used to have a very useful list of polygons which had changed size over a certain percentage, IIRC via Nominatim. Unfortunately it was one of the things which didn’t get restored when servers where switched over (or at least I havent seen it in a while).

As someone who uses both Vespucci & iD on a tablet: I can say that the former has greater & more accessible functionality, so I think this is a shame. On the plus side I have not particularly noticed things which I would have regarded as obvious & necessary improvements to Vespucci on a tablet.

I think there are a fair few commenters missing one of the important philosophies of OSM “Perfect is the enemy of the good”. IpswichMapper not only provides a nice detailed account of how to do things, but also provides cogent reasons for why they choose not to map returns (the correct name for extensions on terraced houses) in the first instance.

Rather than focusing on what individual mappers may prefer (and these are personal preferences) in terms of detail, let’s look at how mappers actually behave. In Great Britain of around 124k elements tagged with building=terrace, 75k are mapped as plain rectangles (5 way nodes), with around 16k having 6 vertices (7 points) so probably mapped with a return:

• 4 2
  
• 5 75862 Rectangle
  
• 6 7050
  
• 7 16448 Terrace with return
  
• 8 5082
  
• 9 7961
  
• 10 1137
  
• 11 2268
  
• 12 484
  
• 13 2427
  
• 14 292
  
• 15 909
  
• 16 196
  
• 17 1043
  
• 18 149
  
• 19 482
  
• 20 132
  

• 20 2918

Therefore simple rectangles have been preferred by a ration of roughly 9:2 in Great Britain. This suggests that “always mapping in as much detail as you can” is not a consensus position. By all means advocate for it, but don’t tell people they are wrong if they don’t do it because such a position is just not supported by any evidence.

@Sanderd17 : Ordnance Survey are on record as to not having easter eggs in their map & data products. They have used ‘signatures’ in legal cases (notably vs. AA) based on a collection of features which it would have been unlikely to duplicate by chance.

The original OS Locator & associated products had a significant number of errors: some minor, but others with names completely wrong. Some examples:

• Forest Green Road, Ockley. I surveyed this around 6 years ago and filed a bug report to the OS. Consequently Google, Bing & Here all have it corrected as well as OSM.
• Smythson Drive. This was originally named Smithson Drive, but given that a notable Elizabethan architect, Robert Smythson, not only designed the local mansion, Wollaton Hall (aka Wayne Manor), but is buried in the church,it was a good guess that this was a spelling error easily checked by reviewing one of my survey photos.
• Gregory Street. One of many roads where the change of name was inaccurate, see my detailed account of such errors. Incidentally the evidence I used rather goes against the statement by a prominent British politician about old maps.
• Turing Gate. My favourite, because a bit of contextual knowledge strongly suggested that this road was named after Alan Turing and not called Turning Way (not that the OS social media team got this). It’s in Bletchley close to Bletchley Park; other roads have names related to the cryptographic work there during WW2 (Colossus, Ultra, Hinsley, Enigma); and Turning Gate is a daft name.

Virtually all these points just reinforce what nickjohnston says in his post

I’d actually join the boundaries of fields and add fences and hedgerows where relevant as line features. I think it’s a little artificial to assume they aren’t part of the field system, or at least in OSM we can buffer the line elements if we need to for certain purposes.

Field boundaries, as we know from the townlands project, are an equally important part of the cultural heritage. In cases where a hedgerow has existed for hundreds of years they are ecologically very valuable.

I think Welsh Establishment just means it’s a school in Wales funded through the LA/Welsh Assembly, basically demonstrating that the Edubase system was designed for English schools. AFAIK there are no academies in Wales.

In general the primary schools will have Community or Gynradd as part of the name, the English form often abbreviated as CP: name is also often useful hint as to primary language medium.

If you are surveys & talking to people it would be very useful to actually make a voice recording of the pronunciation of the field name (obviously with their permission). This is valuable in English, but much more so if it is an Irish name. Field names tend to get passed down in the same family for generations and therefore tend to keep older forms of pronunciation, dialect terms and vocabulary. As such they are an invaluable resource for dialectologists studying the language. (Note, my cousin & uncle are such people specialising in Celtic languages, which is how I know).

We have a small number of locations in England where field names have been mapped (e.g. Gedling, Middle Weald and Cambourne). I have seen a detailed map of field names for the village of Hope in Derbyshire, but not an admissible source.

Elsewhere alpine meadows in Sankt Anton-am-Arlberg usually have names. They are perhaps better known as the names of ski runs, but for the most part are derived from names of pastures (Gampen from Ladin/Romansch Gampli; Mattun also from Ladin, a cabbage family plant; Arlenmähder etc.) Again I saw a detailed map of the commune with these as locality names.

Definitely need a copy. The Soviet’s weren’t completely wrong about Mechanics Institutes, several universities in the UK have their antecedents in such institutions, although certainly today they are fulfil primarily social purposes (and probably not for the working class).

Of course there are many other detailed maps of various parts of the world which remain protected by official secrets. One aspect of getting involved in OSM is how many people turn out to have some involvement with formal map surveying or cartography (a naturalist friend, my cousin’s husband, a couple of friends of my father), so it wasn’t just the Soviets who had lots of them.

Reminds me that I never bought a copy.

I think you can still use hstore & have the best of both worlds. Another trick I use is to load into tables not using planet_osm_ and create views with the default names which allows a fair amount of additional jiggery-pokery (but I more of less learnt SQL by writing huge views because the software I worked with could only cope with 1 SQL statement at a time & DBAs were OK with views but more or less nothing else).

It may be worth looking at SomeoneElse’s LUA script for inspiration: it’s a very rich source for ways to process a wide range of things using LUA & osm2pgsql. I suspect that pre-processing names in LUA might be easier than writing stored procedures. There is also the use of a relatively simple polygon to process specific name rules (in this case preferring name:cy in areas with >40% Welsh speakers), which may be relevant to Nepal.

This is a very useful post. I get the feel that you are describing issues which are quite common. Of the top of my head, here are a few folk worth talking to (there may be many others, e.g., using OTP):

• Johan at Entur gave a talk at State of the Map 2019 on how Entur uses OSM in public transport information in Norway.
• Stuart Reynolds of traveline has been a long-standing OSM contributor. Traveline sites provide multi-modal transport routing across Britain. OSM is mainly used for pedestrian and cycling modes, but is very significant for connections. When this data first started being used in 2013 I happened to be planning a journey to an unfamiliar place, and on a Sunday morning too, the route planning gave me far more choices of bus than I might otherwise have expected. Stuart has been of the opinion that these days the national bus stop database is very good. Locations have been improved significantly since it was first imported to OSM. Of course your point about facilities is very true, and of importance for many travellers, especially those with mobility limitations.
• Ed Loach has written a small app in C# using NET which compares OSM data on bus stops & routes with information in a massive XML file (not GTFS) for Britain. Although the data format and software are different there may be commonality in uses.
• Stereo also gave a short talk on creating bus route relations quickly at State of the Map.
• JungleBus I mainly associate with the creation of transport maps for cities which don’t have them, but I think they also work with GTFS.

I think the general experience of all OSMers is that maintaining public transport routes and changes to stops is hard. One may need to focus on that aspect alone. The public transport relations in various forms are often seen as too complex to implement and maintain: certainly when I had to modify a local route which had been shortened at one end I found it required editing at least 6 relations.

As a user the most important thing that OSM bus routes do is show where places MIGHT be accessible by bus, rather than which place are accessible in a particular time window on date X. I can often plan a visit somewhere in light of the public transport timetable rather than vice versa.

There are quite a number of articles from Sheetlines, the journal of the Charles Close Society (Ordnance Survey fan club). available on-line about Soviet military maps of Great Britain. All worth a read.

The Ordnance Survey have no doubts that their copyrights were violated, although I cant find the official statement off hand. On the other hand the Soviet maps include features which were excluded on national security grounds from OS Maps (Aldermaston, Fylingdales, Menwith Hill etc).

John Davies, who wrote a book about them, has a useful website called Soviet Maps.

10 years ago many more were online. I remember downloading one for the area S of the Matterhorn, not realising I already had coverage with my collection of Swiss Topo maps.

Osmfllter also provides a fairly lightweight way to change tags. I haven’t used this myself, but syntactically it may be a fit easier than the Osmosis ones.

Lua with osm2pgsql & mkmap are great, but more tools to transform within OSM formats so that rules don’t have to re-written for each consumer would be nice. I’ve used osmosis tag transforms for what Robert Whittaker calls “Ghosts” (shops which have closed but are still present on OSM & need surveying)., but the idea of doing writing 10s of such transforms in the XML syntax is rather daunting.

Minor point, but even using OSM is fraught. As a search term as it often brings up “Online Soccer Manager” : this was mentioned by people unfamiliar with OSM at an event the other day. So we need to be careful about assuming that everyone knows what we mean by OSM, and in general use OpenStreetMap for general communication.

@nonoon: this is a fairly extraordinary assertion, people active in OSM have had commercial interests in it from the earliest days. They tend to be just as enthusiastic about it as any other OSMer.

Steve Coast founder of OSM set-up a company, CloudMade, based on OSM. Several well-known OSMers worked for CloudMade. Most of the outgoing OSMF Board members & candidates for the current board election either work for or have businesses which are OSM-based.

Many people in less-developed countries can only contribute to OSM if they are financially compensated. Furthermore because OSM often provides a platform which enables people to do their jobs better they contribute to OSM for that reason.

We have lots of universities, local government bodies, railway companies, bus companies etc, who use OSM and employ people to contribute to OSM.

Following up on SomeoneElse’s comment 10% response rate on a cold marketing email is pretty good! It’s also a useful data point. When direct marketing was by post I think anything getting over 3% was regarded as highly targeted, and I’d assume with email its usually much lower.

I think if you want to sell something it has to be more than the point on OSM: but I’d thought there was scope for value-added services around this: for instance customised maps of their location.

Ages ago I had a very interesting conversation with the owner of Chinese fast food takeaway: he knew his customers, they were local & knew his store. He saw little advantage of being on Google or OSM. The ones doing regular door drop leaflets with maps on the back tend to competing for much less loyal customers wanting delivery. Given their higher marketing costs, greater competition pressures on price and low customer loyalty something has to give. My guess is quality.

This issue has been discussed really extensively since the start of OSM, which is now over 15 years ago. OSMs initial growth was very much with the cycling community: there were no real alternative maps suitable for cyclists. Although there were some early thoughts on something called “cycling suitability”, see for example the discussion of the Cheltenham Standard.

The problem is as stated one of subjectivity: the view of a fit cycle courier as what is suitable to cycle will be very different from a casual cyclists. Furthermore, the single most important factor — traffic volume — is not suitable for OSM tagging. As other critical information for generating cycle routes is also not available in OSM, such as elevation profiles, most routers enhance OSM from other (usually open) data sources.

I’ve checked with Richard Fairhurst’s cycle.travel and this will select routes which avoid Atherton St in State College for N-S routes. cycle.travel is optimised for longer routes rather than cycle commutes, but it makes use of elevation, and traffic data (when available), and is a useful reference implementation of a cycle router using OSM data.

Cyclestreets routing is only available in the UK, but this is another very long-standing cycle routing implementation using OSM, and will usually create similar routes avoiding busy roads. There are numerous other cycle routers, but it happens I’m most familiar with these, and also they are both very mature. Most important in this context is that they show that subjective type tags are not necessary.

TLDR; cycling suitability tagging was considered in OSM’s early days, but experience in implementing sophisticated cycle routing apps shows that it is not needed.

There is clearly some use of village green by specific mappers for patches of green space within towns & cities, rather than for true village greens. Personally I use landuse=grass for this, but that has it’s own problems (or worse), so these days I try to subtag it with grass=amenity_grassland. It’s clearly useful to be able to delineate and show these, not just because they add detail to the map, but because they have explanatory information about why buildings are distributed in a particular way.

Village green itself is an example of a tag which was too closely drawn (i.e., to a very specific British thing), whereas shared public spaces are widespread across the world. Also the name & inferred characteristics (grass) promote(d) a style of rendering inconsistent with places with a similar function elsewhere. Village Green nowadays is a legal designation which may apply to places which don’t look like village greens (e.g., Attenborough Cricket & Football Clubs)

Fairly recently I came across the phrase “urban commons” to refer to the difficult to categorise grass and other open spaces in urban areas.

Finding a broader scoped term to replace true “shared community spaces” in built-up areas would be a good way to progressively replace things which are true village greens. Another suitable tag is then needed for the ragbag of things which are left: urban_commons may have scope in this regard.