This is now the 5th month since I began mapping schools as something useful to do during this wretched Covid-19 Lockdown period. 1,000s of schools updated with both Address & Contacts tags, and still I’m having problems with the Operator tag (the second item in the Preset).

Shortly after starting the mapping I got (rightly) slapped around the face by someone butt-hurt because I had wrongly mapped a school Operator that he had previously mapped, but he could not tell me the correct operator for that school anymore than I could tell it. Clearly, I should have left it blank rather than guessing. I thought in my innocence that, after some more experience, I would learn to know where to find the school operator. That hasn’t really happened. Hence this Diary entry.

These are the types of schools that I’ve currently come across (below), plus my best estimate of the operator to use. Do not hesitate to pitch in if you believe me to be wrong or know the operator:–

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I maintain each day an ODS (LibreOffice) Spreadsheet of Covid-19 infections for Nottingham (my home town) as reported by ONS (Office of National Statistics) via a BBC webpage.

That page currently (08:45 29 April 2020) reports the same number for Nottingham (488 confirmed cases, from a population of 331,069 people) as it did the previous day (28 April), with a report date of 27 April. So, I went hunting for the source & found it on a .gov.uk site:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK (Open Government Licence v3.0)

…and lo! That page is using leaflet + OSM data (good attribution) to display the data.

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My last Diary was a HowTo on using JOSM to create a Relation to map Heath Mount School. Heath Mount was founded in 1796 & occupies 40 acres of the Woodhall Estate close to Ware in Hertfordshire. Now, just to show that some people & places may be created more equal than others, here is the Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which is also close to Ware & occupies 500 acres. This one has been a little bit more of a challenge to map.

◦ Haileybury College (OSM map)
◦ Haileybury College (OSM relation - 130 members)

The bulk of the mapping is complete for this College (85 different items so far) but lots of buildings still to follow.

First a quick bio, then mapping highlights:

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Was it only yesterday that I finished NG school updates, then started working through schools within SG postcodes? For some reason I hit a couple of complex multi-site schools straight away, each of which gave mighty problems. The most recent was the fabulous Heath Mount School (incongruously the relation looks like a fish swimming to the left). My grandkids were due to attend that school until parental divorce intervened.

I find that documenting stuff helps to cement the lessons learnt, as well as giving me something to refer to if I forget, and hopefully will help other novices as well. So, here are some small techniques to use with JOSM to help get the job done, drawn from very recent experience.

School Layout: Look for an Architect PDF

Heath Mount School: relation/11018342

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March 24: School Work starts
April 2: School Work update

Across the last 23 days of this Covid-19 Lockdown I’ve made 526 changesets, almost all updating schools & colleges in the NG UK-postcode area. I’ve been working my way down the osm.mathmos.net website page for NG from top to bottom, and am about ⅔ of the way down. The last entries added were 11 campuses for Nottingham College. This diary entry is an attempt to synthesise the intelligence gathered so far.

The definitive list of schools, etc is maintained by the UK government & published at School Information Service. Each school is given a unique URN. The OSM reference to relate to this is https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:ref:edubase=URN-Number.

Where you see the word “School” below it also refers inter-changeably to “Colleges” or “Universities”.

1. Use a Roundabout to Align the Imagery

We have a number of different imagery available to use, but all of them both need to be aligned to the ground truth & every time the map location is changed each may need to be re-aligned. The simplest & best way that I have found to do this is to zoom in on a mini-roundabout, and to align the Offset to that roundabout.

The overview is like this:
Satellite view & GPS coordinates need to be aligned to each other based on a vast array of factors: eg angle of view, ground height above sea-level, GPS coordinate system, etc.. It is made more difficult because individual tiles may come from a large range of dates and/or satellites. It would also be wonderful if all of that had been pre-processed between the native image & production of tile-to-view, but we are beggars & not the paymasters & are lucky to have any imagery to use at all. Fortunately, we Brits are obsessed with roundabouts and there is always one close to where we are mapping. Further, OS street-mapping from the government has been imported for all Britain.

Here is the process step-by-step:-

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March 24: School Work starts

As best as I can tell I’ve only worked my way through 69 schools. It seems far more. There are more than 223 changesets made by myself under this banner, and I was trying to do one changeset for each school or set-of-schools in the same immediate area. I think that what has happened is that the number of schools listed on the section of the page that I’ve worked on have shrunk as I have mapped them.

I began using https://osm.mathmos.net/schools/progress/NG to update all school info within OSM in the NG (Nottinghamshire) postcode on March 24. You can see all postcode links at https://osm.mathmos.net/schools/progress/.

osm.mathmos.net

The osm.mathmos.net site was promoted by a diary post by CjMalone. It gathers info from the get-information-schools.service.gov.uk site on current schools and cross-references those against UK schools mapped within OSM. Each top-level postcode gets it’s own page, and within that page the site lists (in order):-

1. Schools apparently not mapped in OSM
2. Schools in OSM not matched against the official list
3. Schools matched in OSM by location but not edubase ID
4. Schools matched in OSM by edubase ID

School Cadastre

In the last 9 days I’ve worked my way through all the first 3 sets of schools in the lists above. I’ve entered missing Cadastre (the perimeter of the school land parcel), and fixed them where they were wrong.

I also tried but failed to find the govt opensource download for those cadastre. Finally, Christian Ledermann mailed me with the link to his github for his App that contains those Cadastre. Unfortunately his site is broken (logging into OSM gives a Status 500 error back from his site), but it originally did work and put all necessary info on the OSM way. Bugger! Just when I needed it, it is not working.

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Obtain UK Schools info

Above is the link to a recent Diary from CjMalone with info on using osm.mathmos.net to obtain a list of all the UK schools mapped in OSM within a particular Postcode, ordered by how well they correspond to the UK gov.uk site.

I’m a pensioner and am supposed to slowly rot within my home without any socialisation with any other human. So, no change there. However, whilst we are in that Lockdown state — I’m over 70, and therefore have been instructed by the government to stay isolated at home — I may as well do something useful. I’m currently working my way through NG, and have just completed the 28 Nottinghamshire schools that osm.mathmos.net could not match up with a school at all. That has taken me 3 days. Phew! I’m either superb in my coverage or (far more likely) just very slow.

f12|Remote Control:

If using JOSM, then a useful shortcut is to enable Remote Control (Preferences: f12|Remote Control (LHS vertical column icon)|click in tick-box for 'Enable Remote Control'). Within your Web Browser, be sure to disable all Script restrictions for OSM, else there can be no inter-connection. Then, with JOSM launched, and whilst logged in to your OSM account in a browser, and with the relevant part of the map active (for me at this instance: way/55316126), click on the browser Edit drop-down and choose Edit with Remote Control. You can now switch to JOSM and that Way is waiting for you to edit it. Be sure to disconnect the Remote Control facility after use unless you want your computer to (possibly) be open to the internet.

ref:edubase:

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Before

This was originally posted by myself on 12 May 2019 as a response to the then–current astonishing volumes of “wfgz spam” & “vip spam” affecting these Diary pages (upto 30,000 spam-posts each day, starting 25 April). That existential threat appears to have receded (see the first part of the Bot-Flood Stats page), but the continual background trickle of spam– & nonsense–posts (upto 10 a day) continues.

It should be possible to easily shut off that vile flow without badly affecting valid OSM users. This post reflects on the current situation, and seeks to present my own suggestions and to provoke comments to perhaps obtain even better methods.

Institute a “No-edit, No-diary” rule.

All current spam & abuse would stop the instant that the privilege of posting to this Diary was restricted to those that have added to the map. My suggestion would be a parameter of ‘10 changesets’ to relax that rule.

There are further steps that would need to be taken to make sure that such a rule would not cause collateral damage to the map:

1. Moderate New-User Map Edits
   Map edits by new users should be human-moderated by being placed into a hidden queue. A team of volunteers that are seasoned mappers can then be assigned Moderator rights to accept/reject map-edits within the hidden queue. Such moderation should only be lifted once the user has shown themselves to be a human with (say) 10 useful map edits. Diary posts would be auto-prevented until the statutory number of Map edits was completed. Once completed that restriction would be auto-removed.

2. Auto-remove Unused Accounts
   Auto-remove all those that acquire an OSM account but never update the map within (say) 2 weeks.

Background

OSM Diary pages both share features in common with blogs, forums, etc. and at the same time are different. The features shared in common are:–

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OpenClipArt Twitter Statement

6:53 am - 3 May 2019 — UPDATE: Our plan is to get the site back online early next week. Under DDOS attack from some unknown forces, the simplest thing to protect our beloved Openclipart is to keep offline at present. Your CLIPART is SAFE.

I was trying to obtain an EPS pair of scissors this evening using File | Import Clip Art… under Inkscape (which is setup to use openclipart.org by default) but got zero result, not even an error message. The OCA index page showed a most peculiar message (“Openclipart is PROTECTED.”) which did not help someone in my position that was unaware of the cause. Then finally DuckDuckGo got me there to twitter.

You will see that these OSM Diaries also suffered constant bot attack starting late April which caused the site admin to take them offline from Search-Engines on 24 May (and again on 23 Jun) as to stop the attacks. It surely cannot be a coincidence that two non-commercial sites run by volunteers both suffered DDOS attacks within a few days of each other, causing both admin to hide their sites from public view as to mitigate the attacks. Of course, the reason for those attacks is still currently unknown.

The nature of these DDOS attacks is also uncertain. OSM used the site-wide robots.txt (see also diary/390115) to stop the bot-flood (OCA does not appear to have a robots.txt). That was physically enacted by two ‘Disallow’ lines in the text-file:

Disallow: /user/*/diary
Disallow: /diary

If you understand that the Robots exclusion standard is advisory, a little bit of thought will make it obvious that the fact that the bots stopped when the above was placed into robots.txt means that they were spam-bots. However, there were zero links or spam within (most of) their posts. Further, DDOS actions are almost always as to extract large amounts of money from the victims (it is effectively a technological mugging). What is the point in mugging non-commercial sites?

Before

This was originally posted by myself on 5 June 2019; it is another Diary as part of mapping Nottingham’s Creative Quarter, this time musing on Points of Interest (PoI) as part of mapping for OSM.

One of many reasons for entering PoIs in the map is that Nominatum (the search facility within OSM) uses PoI to find results including (amongst other items) postcodes. I discovered this when I could not find the Covid-19 Jabbing-centre in the OSM map, yet confirmed afterwards that I had entered the correct postcode.

A conversation with the lady at AST Auto Centre

I could not be certain either from my original visit nor from our Bing imagery whether some central buildings were occupied by the Ashley St. Auto Centre (below) or by a business on the opposite side of the block on Handel Street, so phoned the number on the business card that the lady at AST had given me on 17 May. This was 4 June so I did not expect her to remember me but she did, and mentioned the little leaflet that I had given her.

I quickly sorted the original reason for the call (AST occupies those buildings), but as soon as I mentioned OSM she immediately responded about the number of enquiries that the business gets via Google maps (I had never mentioned Google). I brightly informed her that the updated mapping should be available within the next hour.

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Before

This was originally posted by myself on 6 May 2019. It is an attempt to document the then-recent spam/abuse problem within these Diaries in a scientific manner. The idea was to allow the wider community to get a fuller grasp on the issues and help answer some fundamental questions. After all, nobody knows everything. Here is my attempt to state some of those questions and to try to answer some of them:–

Some Questions:

1. Is this Spam, Abuse, or a mixture of the two?
   (the motivation behind those two are completely different)
2. Are they bot-posts, human-posts, or a mixture of the two?
   (prevention mechanisms for those two differ)
3. What are the best methods to prevent this from continuing?
   (best practices have been evolved across the last 20 years, but OSM is not your typical forum/blog)

Some Answers:

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More on Public Houses, Insane Asylums & Cholera

Another Diary as part of mapping Nottingham’s Creative Quarter.

Continuing the joyful themes of my last Diary, which contemplated the Duke of Devonshire (Public House), the General Lunatic Asylum (Dakeyne Street and now closed, the inmates having transferred in Victorian times to Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum) and, finally, the 1832 Cholera outbreak that lead to both St. Mary’s Rest Garden and the explosion of humanity as it flooded out of Nottingham Town and (initially) into St. Ann’s.

Above is The Vine Public House, and the first in recent times that we have met that is both historic and still trading.

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Above is a small panaroma of some of the buildings that currently front part of Carlton Road close to Nottingham town centre. Behind the camera is the ancient ecclesiastical parish of Sneinton whilst in front of the camera is the (relatively recent) ecclesiastical parish of St Luke, which is within the Civil Parish of St. Ann’s (which, for the sake of accuracy no longer exists, since it is subsumed into the Unitary Authority City of Nottingham, but does still exist as the political St. Ann’s Ward).

I live in St. Ann’s (although my neighbours call it Thorneywood) and was amazed moving here at the number of:

1. Religious places (churches, mosques, temples)
2. Public Houses (‘pubs’ — drinking establishments)
3. Psychiatric Institutions

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Moderators refuse to remove a spammer selling pot

Early this morning there were so many spammers from China trying to flog devices to crack ATMs that it filled up an entire page + half of the next page (~30 posts, multiple usernames, but likely same/small cadre of spammers). At the end of a bunch of reports I reverted to “just look for the entry ‘wftg’ at the end of each diary”.

About 10 hours later I reported a spammer for the third (or possibly the fourth) time for trying to sell pot. The diary moderators have refused to remove him. I’m afraid that I lost my rag with this one:–

Why has this spammer been left in place; is he related to you?

There is a spam-link in his profile. His a/c was created on the same day that he created the profile spam-link + diary so that the SEs will also list his profile. Are you in his pay? That is the only reason that I can think of for not removing this user.

Autopsy

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Useful Links:

• 2019 Ward Boundaries (Nottingham Open Data)
• Nottingham Polling Stations datasets
• All Nottingham Open Data datasets
• HowTo map Ward Boundaries
• Wiki page on OGR

1. Aspley Ward
2. Basford Ward
3. Berridge Ward
4. Bestwood Ward
5. Bilborough Ward
6. Bulwell Ward
7. Bullwell Forest Ward
8. Castle Ward
9. Clifton East Ward
10. Clifton West Ward
11. Dales Ward
12. Hyson Green & Arboretum Ward
13. Leen Valley Ward
14. Lenton & Wollaton East Ward
15. Mapperley Ward
16. Meadows Ward
17. Radford Ward
18. Sherwood Ward
19. St Ann’s Ward
20. Wollaton West Ward

A useful call-back for me today from Wendy Conibear at the GIS Team in Nottingham City Council (many thanks, Wendy).

Like most cities in the UK, the City of Nottingham is a Unitary Authority (a government measure enacted in 1992 which removed the former multi-tier arrangement of Parish/District/County Councils and which in OSM has led to multiple holes in the administrative map, since no-one can agree how to drag UK admin mapping into the 21st Century) (40% of all UK parishes are Unitary Authorities, which means that they do not appear on the map as there is no accepted mapping for them; that is a dumb position to allow to occur).

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3 x Recording Studios, Hipster Art Galleries inside an old warehouse, a hack-space (3d-printing, computers, carpentry + lathes, available for all but oh! so secret, invitation only) and so on & on, all in one day - you will perhaps understand why I've the Council has coined the name The Creative Quarter†.

After a little backfill the day began with a single block, in which the first buildings were (what appears to be) a closed-down Persian-cuisine restaurant + the first Recording Studio.

Aberdeen Street + Carlton Road

Pistachio seems to be closed, and I suspect that the 5 flats above it are unused as well.

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On the other side of Longden Street to Allan Joyce Architects, the subject of my previous Diary, is H3 Performance, a Fitness Centre ensconced within a large former warehouse:–

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Allan Joyce Architects occupies the former Midland Bank on Bath Street and, in recent times, has purchased property adjacent to that building and then both developed & built an impressive set of apartment blocks at 22-26 Bath Street.

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The “largest Rolls-Royce funeral fleet in the world”

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This used to be the 1869 William Bancroft Building, pictured above showing the former main entrance on the corner of Robin Hood Street and Roden Street.

The building is close enough to Nottingham City Centre that the legendary Robin Hood would have been able to easily hit the walls of the town with his arrow whilst standing on the steps of the building. Of course, when those steps were built those city walls no longer existed, but then neither did Robin Hood, so let’s just pass on.

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