I was a bit puzzled why Scafell Pikes had disappeared entirely and Sca Fell had popped up in its place, but it turns out that the trig pillar has been added with an erroneous name. Not sure why you are picking it up though.

The actual sac_scale grading of paths in the area is somewhat overwrought (e.g. from Mickledore to Scafell Pike is not hard).

Incidentally, Scafell Pikes is the only British peak where a companion has said “Bergheil!” at the top. It was a particularly fine day with good quality snow down to 2000 ft which emphasised its character.

Yes, anonymous notes are often seriously misplaced, and people use them for all sorts of things.

The kind of issue I see is like with this note. It was closed a few days ago by someone with no edits, but the actual walking trail still has a gap in the village, as can be seen here. In the ideal world the note remaining open would encourage someone to look for signs to resolve it. However, it’s not that important as : 1) the route relation has a gap; and 2) the likely correct route is fairly obvious and does go past the church.

Some communities try and close notes fairly quickly, others are quite happy to let them be used to track developments over several years, or to draw other mappers attention to things missing or needing to be checked. There is something to be said for closing anonymous notes if they cannot be resolved fairly easily.

This is surprisingly common: a new user with no edits closes notes. I’ve never really worked out why. Your suggestion that this is because the feature is present on other maps is an intriguing one.

There are some quirks in the earliest OSM history, some, perhaps, as a result of changes in the data model.

@LostMonkey: I did create some SVG files based on scans of different kinds of trees, and I think I also at some stage created icons from these.

This is a good idea & I believe Pl@ntNet is associated with TelaBotanica a French botany project with a good deal of folk in common with OpenStreetMap France.

Always take these ML identifications with a pinch of salt, and ideally retain pictures somewhere so that someone else can verify them (unless MapComplete uploads to Pl@ntNet itself). This is particularly true of trees in parks, gardens & other plantings as some may be fairly exotic with few representatives in the ML database. A good example is that I came across a Wollemi Pine recently planted local to me. Despite the considerable interest in this tree (and the presence of another one in the city) there were only 5 examples on the iNaturalist database. Often these unusual trees are the ones which are most deserving of being mapped!

Derick has been using the API for a while, and it’s certainly given decent identifications for plants on his twitter stream.

There are plenty of other apps which do the same thing, and can be used in association with OSM. I personally use iNaturalist, mainly because it works across plants and animals. In Belgium & The Netherlands the app produced on behalf of Waarneming has a very large database, but only applies ML to those two countries. There’s also a plant identification app fairly specific to DACH countries which is good: Flora Incognita.

One other thing to watch is how much personal info these apps may leak. Collections of observations around one’s home may enable people to identify where you live with a high degree of certainty. Not all observation apps automatically obscure or degrade geolocation data of observations.

I think we’re pretty sure the stile=hipsters are squeezers, as I think several people have wondered about them over the years.

I’ve now posted a picture on the wiki of a stile with “insulated_section”. Wonder if @SomeoneElse is also thinking of insulated sections with a hook which can be detached, which would be closer to a gate than the stepover action required when all there is a metre of insulated wire.

@CJMalone: thanks for this.

I’ll write up the clustering as a separate item as I think it applies to any feature one is searching for in rural areas (things I noted : covered reservoirs, water towers, some missing communication masts, yurts, massive poultry houses). I have tested the idea with places with reasonable imagery & fairly complete building data on OSM: Poland, Switzerland and France. I do it all in QGIS or PostGIS, so currently I don’t know of a way it can be done with a command line.

As LSOAs are fairly arbitrary units, and change from census to census (I think the ones for the 2021 census will be different from the current 2011), they’re not really appropriate for OSM. I suspect we’d need a UK specific instance of Overpass to incorporate them & there would be some issues in inventing osm identifiers for them. The best I can think of is creating an area from a set of co-ordinates, which ought to straightforward if doing it from a command line, rather more fiddly for Overpass-turbo. In practice I run an overpass query & pull it into a QGIS file with the Welsh LSOAs where one can do things like Point-in-Polygon queries. Outside of towns community or civil parish boundaries might be just as suitable for many purposes too.

I think cycle.travel uses DEM data to compute inclines & therefore timings on roads.

I think for this general purpose even a 20-25 m grid DEM might be adequate, and in some places one can compute a much tighter elevation data on a much finer grid (for instance much of England & Wales is now covered by 1 or 2m Lidar data, DEM models are available for the whole of Switzerland, and at a more detailed level for some cantons, LINZ has elevation data for most of NZ, etc., etc.).

What I think we lack on hiking (& possibly MTB) trails is a good indication of objective hazards, which in my view contribute to this evaluation. Here’s a tentative list:

• paths across tidal areas
• quicksands
• boggy ground. peat hags etc
• unexploded ordnance
• slippery when wet (often signed or remarked in guidebooks for much of the limestone pre-alps: “Heikel bei Nässe”)
• exposure (“nur für schwindelfreie”)
• loose rock (underfoot)
• risk of slipping (associated with exposure, but sometimes not when the rock is very grippy, e.g., Skye gabbro) (“Trittsicherheit”)
• glacier travel (crevasses, bergschrunds, boilerplate ice, serac fall)
• rockfall (from above)
• windthrown trees
• avalanche danger (including cornice collapse)
• cornices (potentially underfoot for the unwary, a common danger on the Scottish hills in the spring)
• unstable ground, especially cliff tops beside the coast
• rivers or stream crossings dangerous in spate or just fast-flowing

Some can be inferred, if the underlying natural feature (glacier, tidal flat etc. is mapped), but probably are best indicated explicitly using tags. Things such as ability to cut a hike/tour short, and overall strenuousness can be calculated.

In the main I think gauging things on a personal level is beyond the capability of a regular scale, and most scales really don’t work very well outside their original intended range (plenty of SAC scale T1 could be differentiated for older infirm walkers, for instance; and tagging every “voie normale” alpine ascent as T6 is equally coarse & uninformative). For instance I have COPD which mean that I avoid a couple of things if I can as they really impair my breathing: runs of steps over about 20 treads, and ploughed fields (200m on a ‘flat’ ploughed field ~ 800 m on an equivalent grassy one).

I had a quick look at an area I drove through a few years ago, and got the impression that speed limits are implicit from much of the tagging. Urban limits are often mapped and within those the speed limit is 50 kph. For single carriageway roads outside of towns most roads will be 80 kph (according to wikipedia only 1 department has 90 kph limits).

Clearly such information is hard to consume as pure speed limits; but urban area signs can be something used as a warning. The existence of implicit limits in the UK (aka national speed limits) is why the maxspeed:type tag came to be used, allowing maxspeed to be a numerical value.

Apparently there are some left on the Shannon.

I have a vague recollection of Marek Strassenburg-Kleciak (perhaps at SotM-Baltics in 2013) talking about how OSM largely mapped not the footprint, but the birds-eye roof profile. I know people have mapped things like flying buttresses of cathedrals as ground level profiles (at least in part because these are available through things like the French cadastre, or OOC maps in Britain), but even if ground-level is the standard many buildings will not be mapped that way.

I know a (retired) thatcher, I’ll ask him about material.

I suspect it’s more about expense than climate change. It’s still described as Norfolk Reed in the UK & there are plenty of reed beds, but I think reed (Phragmites) was always the higher quality thatch, and many would have thatched with straw, or even sedges.

The range of thatching materials is significant because thatch is widely used elsewhere in the world. I’ve always wondered what plants thatch is sourced from in Lesotho, and whether we are mapping such resources & paths/tracks to access them.

One oddity of thatched buildings is that, as you say, from above they have rounded corners (although it may depend a bit on thatching style). Perhaps they could be rendered with a small positive buffer.

Devon is the main place I’ve observed lots of thatched buildings whilst mapping, but I know of a few in East Anglia, and a pub in Devon with thatched ‘umbrellas’ for outdoor seating.

The UK community has done a fair bit of similar work: mainly because we have a great open dataset on Food Hygiene Ratings.

There’s a tool which does matching, which is integrated with some editors (code on GitHub).

I also tried to categorise, the wide range of, matching approaches one might want to use with such data. Although I experimented with these I never moved on to integrate them.

I’d be interested to learn what you discover.

Hi 快乐的老鼠宝宝

Thanks for this most useful comment. I’ve added a link to it on the (relevant issue)[https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/7787] on the iD github project.

Jerry aka SK53

Also this info is shown on OpenInfraMap, and in your area the open data from Western Power Distribution is also available. Both courtesy of Russ Garrett.

It’s quite likely that the recently felled areas will either not be re-planted or planted with a rather different mix of species.

There has been discussion in various places about how to tag felled areas of forestry plantation (also relevant to burnt forests in less damp places than S. Scotland), but probably the tag which is used most widely is https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made=clearcut. It really helps if one can estimate when the forest was cut as they might scrub up, or regenerate (unlikely for UK conifer plantations) and this helps keep these areas under review.

Worth noting that high house numbers are not uncommon in parts of rural Northern Ireland: the numbers seem to relate to distance along the road rather than straightforward sequential numbering. Picked up from open data on schools, food hygiene & solar farm locations.

The area of Tierra del Fuego near Ushuaia has seen a similar amount of attention, and I think Bird Island in South Georgia (although I’m distinctly uncertain about the value of natural=grassland for tussac : take a look at the aerial images).

@ConsEbt: I plan to write a little about my search strategy which I think can be applied to things other than solar panels. I’ll name check you when I do it.

Hi Clifford & Enock,

It’s a shame that the possibility to add both tags and hashtags to changeset comments is not more widely used: structured interactions such as those facilitated via TM lend themselves well to structured tags rather than hashtags (project-id, task-id, etc).

Both iD and JOSM provide explicit parameters to set hashtags as well as the comment value. iD even identifies words prefixed with “#” and adds them to the hashtags, but appears to keep them in the comment as well. Additionally JOSM allows direct setting of key-value pairs.

I presume at the moment there are no convenient ways to consume this data, whereas Pascal Neis’ site allows rapid search of comments.

Jerry