That looks like some great work, it’s a shame that the default Mapnik stylesheet doesn’t yet support some of the features you’ve added.

Thanks. A few things I noticed:

• my work on SE postcodes is up at number 6, hooray!
• in Runcorn all the buildings are tagged as building=yes, there is no distinction between different building types (house, apartment, etc)
• in Westbury there are no buildings at all, just addresses
• in Coventry all the buildings have at least a postcode stub (e.g. CV3), I wonder how useful that is?

Hello there,

I left a few questions on your list.

My general comment is that with many of your comments you are trying to find a perfect solution for an imperfect, complicated world. You mention the wood/forest tags, which is a classic example where nobody can agree on a definition to clearly distinguish between the two. As you say, how much woodland is there that is really untouched by humans, and how much forest for that matter? The wiki pages do touch on the different ways that people treat them. With our current system of free tagging and consensus emerging from chaos, there is no way to resolve this and proposing new tags only confuses the situation further.

Markus, I’ve been using this app, thanks for the work on it.

One quick request - could you include a feature to add addr:flat values? Currently I just add this into the housenumber value and then have to manually split it out. For example, I enter “15,a-c” which becomes:

addr:housenumber=15 addr:flats=a-c

But it’s quite time consuming doing it this way.

Will, thanks for the responses. I don’t know that I’ll ever match your work ethic, though! It took me five years to complete two London borough wards, and since moving from that area I’ve been much slower in gathering addresses for my new suburb. The numerous flat conversions make data gathering and entry slow, and the many extensions and odd houses on bomb sites even makes tracing to a reasonable quality laborious and boring.

As you say, it’s fiddly, time consuming and complicated. Much less fun than the good old days when I was faced with a blank slate in Reading and got to whizz around on my bike just adding streets, post boxes and pubs!

Wow, that’s some very impressive (and as you say time consuming) work!

I have come across similar problems mapping addresses in my parts of south east London, osm.org/go/euuvCHrp osm.org/go/euuuCCIjO-

On interpolation, I added addr:interpolation=odd where I had buildings such as a block of flats containing numbers 11, 13, 15 and 17 but not the even numbers in between. Somebody came along and removed all of those - nice of them - because apparently that’s not the done thing. But it left the addressing quite ambiguous. Can you clarify what you have done in these situations?

I get a bit stuck on flats. For example, a building with flats 1, 2 and 3 is easy enough (addr:flats=1-3), but what about a building with flats “23, 23a, 23b”?

I have never really got to grips with suburbs, though it has been discussed quite a few times. The main problem I have is that the bounds of different names are very subjective, and infamously dependent on whether you speak to a long-term resident, an aspiring incomer, an estate agent or a ward councillor! So I have just ignored the whole thing, and quietly ignore the hapless attempts of Nominatim to give context to a street’s location.

Could you also explain a bit more clearly what you did for the school, or give a link to the OSM object?

Matt’s tool compares the Land Registry entries to OSM, and lists them as missing (i.e. an object with the address exists in OSM but not with the post code), no match (i.e. no object found in OSM) and perfect match.

You can pretty much copy over every post code in the “missing postcode list” to your OSM objects.

The convention on other sources is that it’s ok to take a post code off an individual business’ web site or in-store literature, but not to start copying them out of a compiled database like the pub listing web sites.

Good work!

From a sometime-visitor to Croydon living a few miles north.

It would be good to get post codes onto all those POIs, such a dense cluster plus all of the post codes in Matt Williams’ tool would be a great asset.

Have fun at the pub.

I have been contacting new users who start contributing around south London. Most never reply, unless I point out something they are doing wrong in a friendly and helpful way.

I don’t check back to see if they’re still contributing a month later, but maybe something like this could be automated with a message inviting them to have another go, or a message congratulating them on their 50th edit?

A lot of people probably just have a little play after the mapping party, but don’t find OSM sufficiently interesting/useful/fun.

If the user database were available as something more like a membership system, available for special people (hint: Harry) to query, such special people could also proactively contact relatively recent active contributors and encourage them to go to a mapping party, as the research suggests this would make them more likely to stick around or even get more involved.

Oh, and I was trying to edit around here:

osm.org/?lat=51.459119&lon=-0.073879&zoom=18&layers=M

It is certainly better when zoomed right in, but it should be able to handle larger areas without almost freezing my browser.

jfire, using that link makes no difference to me. I don’t get any crashes, but it is very slow panning and my CPU usage flies up.

I have tried using Firefox and Chrome (both latest versions) on Ubuntu 12.04 amd64.

What a pain!

I have the same experience.

One UI suggestion based on something I really like in the OWL tool… highlight the objects on the map when you hover over a changeset in the list.

It’s nice to see different attempts to improve the history tab, this one shows promise but the OWL tool is far more developed with nice features like a built-in summary of what has been changed.

That’s really useful work, thanks.

This is all really wonderful work, thank you for sharing.

No problem, thanks for your work so far.

Quick question - is it possible to render features several times dependent on different tags?

For example I was hoping this would result in big fat green lines with thin black ones overlaid on top, but it just rendered the black lines without the green underneath:

way[sidewalk=both] { width:8; color: green; } way[highway=residential] { color:black; width:2; opacity:1; }

You can use this to find out:

http://owl.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.347&lon=-2.1983&zoom=12&layers=M

Click on the ‘History (beta)’ tab at the top.

You can use this to find out:

http://owl.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.347&lon=-2.1983&zoom=12&layers=M

Click on the ‘History (beta)’ tab at the top.