The GPS trace does not say what it is - motorway, footpath, cycleway, etc. You can also add things like surface=paved/unpaved, maxspeed=* A beginners guide? osm.wiki/Beginners%27_guide Or straight to the deep end? highway=*

Personally I prefer not to use presets. I like to think.

Many localities (villages, towns) have no local OSM community .. are these to be left off the map?

‘Country rules’? If you mean the local legal/administrative rules then they can be politically influenced resulting in a false impression of the relative size/importance between adjacent places.

The present OSM wiki wording on places is the result of lots of though, it does not fit well in some countries, it does not fit well with legal/administrative designations.. but it does allow for a reasoned map to be made.

Hi @Polyglot, Thanks for your help on that Katoomba bus route. I have not applied it yet to others .. too much to do!

On keeping it simple… Yes Please. The simpler the easier it is to understand, see where I have gone wrong and correct it. The easier it would be to translate too. However .. it is not just simply mapping bus stops .. the route/s are needed too so it can be seen where they go.

On sticking with editor presets… err no. Not everything is in presets. I use the OSMwik to guide me .. if I cannot understand it I simply leave it while my mind thinks on it. I may well read some more on the OSMwiki for similar things and look at what is on the map and see how that was done. I’d much rather think about what I’m doing that follow a preset or the OSMwiki.. particularly when some of them in the past have been, or are now, ridiculous (IMO). If I still cannot see how something is to be done then I ask for help, usually this works well.

On my Garmin GPS 60Cx there is a setting - ‘lock on road’ .. if you turn that off the GPX track will record where it thinks it is - rather than follow any map that is loaded to the GPS. There are also setting for the rate at which it collects points - I usually leave this on ‘automatic’ + ‘most detailed’. However when I want the most detail I set it to collect points every 10 seconds.

My view;

Fixmes are things that need to be done … and need fixing soon.

Notes are things that need to be done - not high priority. Notes can be made by ‘armchair’ mappers who cannot identify what is on the ground to correctly map a feature detail.

Comments are things that don’t ‘need to be done’ but are information that help fellow mappers to understand the mapping.

The orientation of a sports pitch might be usefull to determine if the court faces sunrise/sunset or prevailing winds. For that reason I tag the individual pitches of a group of tennis courts rather than a collective way for them all. I see no point in tagging the lines on the ground .. the shape of the court has enough information.

The sport= tag gives the type of sport played, with at least 3 exceptions; ‘football’ (soccer, australian_football, american_football, rugby?), ‘hockey’ (field_hockey, ice_hockey) and ‘multi’ (just list the sports semicolon separated). There are enough of these to fix to keep someone busy for quite a while.

Barrier=* is usefull … some of the ones I tag restrict pedestrians from crossing at dangerous places.

JOSM can only check what it has. If I don’t download everything in an area I’m working on I can break relations and not get any warning from JOSMs validator.

OSMinspector is one of the QA tools .. there are others too. I do use OSMinspector (keeping track of my own errors!) .. and I fix some errors there (mine + other peoples).. sometimes I make changeset comments to try and inform others of the problem so they might be more aware. Some times contributors are not aware of these QA tools, beginners don’t get to ‘see’ them. Osmose tends to have things that I cannot fix without a lot of on ground work. So many of these have to wait.

Open Street Map (OSM) is in xml format. You can convert it to csv format that excell will read. Not touched matlab for years, don’t recall.

Your next quest will be how to get the OSM data .. for a simple path? Then I’d use JOSM to download the OSM ‘way’ (a string of nodes connected together to from a line) save the file .. it will have a ,osm extent but will be in xml format. Sounds like homework.

Humans make mistakes. Most of the time these are unintentional and a simple courteous contact would resolve the situation. The quickest thing to do is to fix it yourself, but the original mapper may continue to make the same kind of errors so contacting them can be useful.

Ok, Now on the editing thing .. multipolygons etc.

Firstly using JOSM you can save your work locally to your hard drive and work on it later without uploading it to OSM. This means you don’t have to save the rough work with those errors.

JOSM also has a layer feature - you can merge a small area to another layer .. so you could work on the north east corner of your area - merge the correct bits off to a new layer and then up load that layer with the correct bits to OSM. Save the working layer back to your local hard drive and you can come back to do the rest later.

Does that help?

Hi,

There are 2 things here,

Land COVER. This is what natural=wood is, a land cover .. it does not signify what the lands is used for but by what is covering the land.

Land USE. Landuse=forest is a use of the land, usually to produce lumber/wood. The land is usually covered by trees, however when harvesting takes place the trees are thinned if not removed and so the land cover may well change as part of the harvesting.

It is unfortunate that the key ‘natural’ exists at all .. it could be better divided up into the keys landcover (trees, grass etc) and landform (peak, valley etc). But OSM is slow to change. I do use the landcover and landform tags in conjunction with the natural keys to give, I hope, future usefulness to hte map.

Hi,

Take a look at osm.org/diary you’ll get the idea of this ‘dairy’ thing.

Catch 22. The web site https://www.ccc.govt.nz/ has copyright that excludes its use in OSM .. https://www.ccc.govt.nz/contact-us/about-this-site/terms-of-use/#Copyright “non-commercial purposes”.. OSM copyright provides for commercial use.

You can still use their data personally to go no the route, then having been on the route and having personal knowledge of it, you can than include your personal knowledge in OSM.

Nice Idea. Unfortunately it would still need buckets for properties like name, elevation, width, height, access.

Then you would need more buckets to separate things like post codes from council boundaries. Country boundaries from state boundaries.

Then you would need to be able to identify what the value ‘trees’ might mean .. is this just a ground cover or is it a forestry land use?

While the present OSM bucket brigade is full of contradictions, most developed by the never ending additions of both keys and values, hopefully OSM will evolve to resolve them.

There are other religions too. Jews usually have a separate section … arr Star of David IIRC. Then Buddhists … and so on.

I’d think that there would be a government Health department that has responsibility for public heath and they would have authority over drinking water. If you don’t get a response from them then contact your local politician ..

The decorative .ornamental type fountains Have different tags from those for drinking water. I’d be tempted to use the ornamental type if I could not be certain of the water quality.

There are vast area of the map that are ‘blank’, for both landuse and landcover. It would be nice to have complete coverage, but too few hands.

Given the amount of work to do, I map residential areas as large areas .. possibly several suburbs. Certainly not at a block level, that would be nice but given the amount of work not practical here. So roads, parks and some commercial/industrial areas get included within the residential area too. As noted on the wiki .. this seams to render ok.

I see nothing wrong with using landcover=scrub. I try to ‘dual tag’ using both landcover (to get the factual information) and other tags (to get the rendering), so landcovder=scrub and natural=scrub would get included on the one polygon.

Some seek dirt roads, others avoid them. Same thing with toll roads. I have detailed some inclines too .. under 15% is my cut off point.

Those might be some of the ‘details’ you regard as ‘practically not needed’?

The present wiki on highway=unclassified is very confused. It comes from the UK use of taking the OS mapped road types into OSM . in this case ‘unclassified’. Works well in the UK. But is not well defined for elsewhere in the world! People have been grappling with it for many years.

I take a ‘guide’ not a ‘rule’ from the wiki. In this case I take highway=tertiary to be a connection between villages. A connection from a village through to several homes is highway=unclassified., a connection to a single home .. usually highway=service. Do remember the word ‘guide’.

Adding another road type into OSM? where do they fit between the present road types? will there definition be significantly different from the present road types? … how will they be rendered differently from the present OSM road types? Is there not already enough road variety within OSM?