OpenStreetMap logo OpenStreetMap

Post When Comment
OSM Video: 10 Year Anniversary (2014)

There is another version of this that covers 2006-Jan 2018 here.

Simple script to bulk add non redundant tags on boundary=administrative ways

This was extensively discussed on the tagging mail list:

https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg35194.html

and the view was strongly against duplicating tags on the member ways of relations.

Descriptions of OSM tags in any language using Wikidata

Sure @Sam Wilson, why not get into a never ending edit war with a WikiData fan boy? Sounds like a great use of my time ;-)

Descriptions of OSM tags in any language using Wikidata

I’m with @SomeoneElse on this. Just because a user has decided to link a OpenStreetMap wiki page to a Wikipedia page, via WikiData, does not mean that they are the same thing. There are plenty of cases where the Wikipedia definition deviates from the OpenStreetMap concept.

Composite keys in OpenStreetMap: ref:highway, highway:ref or highway_ref?

source_ref and source:ref mean two different things.

source_ref is the reference for the source of data or as taginfo puts it “used to link external source of information:”. If you look at the tag values over 90% of them are from two imports and point to the url describing the source.

source:ref on the other hand tells you where the value of the ref tag came from. So:

name=Something source:name=survey source:name:date=2014-05 ref=256 source:ref=Some dataset source:geometry=bing highway=trunk source:highway=Some other dataset . .

Mapping Center Turn Lanes in the United States

I use The Mail Archive to search the OSM mail lists:

https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00000.html

In fact, something as obscure as centre_turn_lane you can search all their mail lists:

https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=all&q=centre_turn_lane

Using Osmose to fix admin boundary errors

Just ran the JOSM validator on the level 6 boundaries and this way is in two counties. Will need some local knowledge to fix.

Routing — circular junctions

I had thought that once a “roundabout” was big enough to have a name (or has places you might want to find a route to) it stopped being a junction. So you could say:

  1. Continue Petersburger
  2. Right into Bernsarinplatz
  3. Right into Petersburger

You may also want find a route to somewhere on Bernsarinplatz.

  1. Continue Petersburger
  2. Right into Bernsarinplatz
  3. Your destination is on the right.
New data sources available for Western Australian roads

We have had quite a lot of problems in the last couple of years with people starting their own private imports that have ended with differing levels of success. Which means that any time I see talk about copying in data you’ll find a reminder from me that there are guidelines. It was meant as a gentle reminder but if you want to get into the details step 2 is “Community Buy-in” and I don’t recall being asked…. That’s why I was suggesting that as a minimum an email to talk-au, we seem to have a pretty high acceptance of imports so I don’t think any one would object but at least others would know what was going on.

The talk-au mail list is the primary communication tool for the au community. Based on diary entries and comments there on I’d guess that less than 10 Australian users are actually reading the diary. As for the forum it’s pretty much tumble weeds and crickets.

New data sources available for Western Australian roads
  • Great to see that the WA government has finally released something under a real open licence rather than the “public” licence that Landgate uses. The Landgate data has caused a number of problems with users downloading and then dumping various datasets into OSM. The last one has taken more than 4 months to clean up.
  • Shame we didn’t get permission to use the speed limit dataset. Speed limits seem to be popular with end users judging from the number of map notes created about them being missing.
  • Copying other maps is importing. Please read the guidelines.
  • Even if you can’t be bothered following any of the guidelines at least, please, drop an email on the Talk-au mail list to let others know what you are doing. Even if it’s just an announcement that you have obtained permission to use a dataset.
Road Segments, naming streets and Town-land boundries

Please don’t use the ref tag for variations of the name. The ref tag is for the reference code or number. Using the ref tag to get an alternative name to appear on the map is tagging for the renderer and not good practice.

What is the longitude of the Greenwich meridian?

The real story is that there are two groups of people who are interested in where the Prime Meridian is:

  1. Time people
  2. Space people

Turns out the time people were the ones that spent all the effort and money worrying about measuring the rotation of the planet and they wanted their time scales to be constant. By the time the space people found out it was too late (apparently it would have been perfectly feasible to have nudged the time people to line up with the space people but the chance was missed).

There is a journal paper on the subject

[WIP] A new neighborhood, a new mapping quest!

Is that a Pure Fix X-Ray I can see? Guessing that Bangalore is not completely without hipsters…hope that they were artisanal, free-trade, organic coconuts.

Flood Lagoons? What Flood Lagoons?

It’s a detention basin. If it was a infiltration basin you would expect if to be wide and shallow with an outlet that was set up to keep the water ponded while it soaks into the ground. If it was a retention basin then the outlet would be set up so that there would be some water still in the basin after it stops flooding (ie: retained).

Wolgan River and Capertee Valley Canyon

OK after much experimenting I have figured out what the problem is.

There are two inner ways that touched the outer way at a single point:

393301633 393301748

It turns out that if you had either of these in the relation (but not both) then it renders OK.

I have “fixed” the problem by putting a half metre gap between the corners. The boundary should start to reappear but it may take a while to clean up the “Renderer Test” left over from trying to figure out what was wrong.

So as expected its a problem with the rendering software used for the main page map.

Wolgan River and Capertee Valley Canyon

I don’t think that the main body of the park has ever rendered correctly.

It’s a bit odd because Overpass Turbo is quite able to figure out which bits to colour in:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/flP

and JOSM can figure out which bits are inside the boundary but the map rendering software can’t seem to cope. It’s rendering some of the inner ways as if they are on the outside:

way/393301680 way/393301767

By the way, if you want to see the rest the ways that are part of a relation but haven’t been downloaded you can right click on it in JOSM and ask to download members. But if you are going to edit any of the members you need to download the surrounding area first otherwise you’ll end up breaking things.

The other thing to be careful of is that ways can be part of more than one relation. So when you moved the park boundary:

changeset/38131822

you were also moving the boundaries of Upper Nile, Glen Alice and Glen Davis.

OSM Analytic Difference Engine

Nice.

Would it be possible to drive this using the augmented diffs from overpass so you wouldn’t have to hit the API for the history?

Trolltags

So to summarise:

Please use life cycle prefixes in preference to life cycle tags.

Extracting regions from planet.osm ?

You can try downloading by province from here and Osmconvert will let you clip to a bounding box or a polygon.

You can use this website to create the polygons from relations in OSM if you want to clip to a municipality or neighbourhood.

Suburbs or villages?

You could go with the ABS definition of urban centres and call them a suburb if they’re in an urban area. The problem is that this doesn’t cover peri-urban areas but it’s probably better than nothing.