Hi, welcome to OpenStreetMap and thanks for your edits!

It looks like the MBP are doing some coordinated editing on OSM? I’ve seen some local edits from a Jo@MBP too.

If so, that’s great! Please message me if there’s anything I can help with (I’m local).

No problem, there wasn’t much wrong and it’s a learning process!

If you haven’t found it already, if you hold Alt while dragging a node around, it won’t automatically snap to other lines or nodes.

Similarly if you press Q while a building is selected, the editor will automatically square the building’s corners, which can help sometimes (although perhaps not in Orton since a lot of the buildings aren’t really square!)

It’s not an entirely clear-cut issue, but given recent discussions on the mailing list (https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2022-February/028604.html, but it’s a long thread), I think the consensus is to map things like this using addr:parentstreet.

You can find some more documentation about it here: osm.wiki/Addresses_in_the_United_Kingdom#addr:substreet,_addr:street_&_addr:parentstreet

The gist of the argument is that the house name isn’t “1 Beech View” because that’s a number and a name. It’s not “Beech View” because then two buildings would exist with the same house name. So it has to be treated as a kind of street. But there’s no road called “Beech View”, so addr:parentstreet needs to be used to say which road the buildings are on.

I’ve taken a look, and it looks great to me. Thanks for taking the time to update it :)

(For anyone else reading this afterwards, the followup changeset is changeset/121556807)

Great! Before you start moving a lot of buildings around, you may also want to turn on the OSMUK Cadastral Parcels layer in the Background Settings of the editor.

It shows cadastral parcels from the Land Registry, and is the only source of ground truth for making sure that satellite imagery is properly aligned before drawing things against it. Unfortunately satellite imagery varies in its offsets by up to 5m across the country (and between updates to the imagery), which means that drawing buildings accurately against it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in the right place!

I think the imagery offsets in Orton for Bing aerial imagery against the Cadastral Parcels are 0.55,-0.87.

See https://osmuk.org/cadastral-parcels/ for a bit more information

Sorry for the dump of information — but I thought it best to let you know about this before you move a number of buildings :)

Hi, welcome to OpenStreetMap, and thanks for your recent edits around Orton. It looks like you’re adding a lot of useful local knowledge :)

One pointer: if houses are joined together in a terrace in real life, you should join the nodes of the houses together in OpenStreetMap so that their areas are joined. This correctly represents the terrace, and allows consumers of OpenStreetMap data to infer that the houses are terraced and which wall is the party wall.

So to give a local example, the southmost nodes of Arthura Cottage should be joined to the northmost nodes of Stone End, and the southmost nodes of Stone End should be joined to the northmost nodes of Westmorland House. (Assuming I’ve remembered correctly that those three houses are terraced, from when I last visited.)

Thanks! If you have any questions about OpenStreetMap things, just drop me (or any other local mapper) a message :)

OK, no problem. I’ve gone ahead and restored the track in changeset/121536251, and then connected it to the main road and fixed its access tagging in changeset/121536369

So I think this is all resolved now. Thanks for your help :)

Ah, I didn’t realise the tagging came from a way which was already there. What you did makes sense in that context. Thanks for the clarification :)

I’ve removed the golfcart tagging in changeset/121536141, so I think this is all resolved now

Thanks for your help! :)

And Portsmouth too by the look of it.

Please try and keep changesets limited to one city or geographical area, as it helps others review edits.

See osm.wiki/Changeset#Geographical_size_of_changesets

Thanks!

Hi, why have you changed this to a footway? From the satellite imagery it’s almost certainly a service road so that people can access the caravans. I can see a car parked half way round it.

Hi, I don’t think removing the tagging entirely was the correct thing to do here. It looks like this area is for tagging the highway extent, so it should be tagged as area:highway=yes. I’ve fixed that in changeset/121416900

Hi, why did you tag this as a golf cart path when it’s not on a golf course?

Hi, why have you removed this? The satellite imagery shows a track is present. Even if it’s faint higher up, it looks a lot like a typical green lane walled track near the A595.

Although the thing about the Ruskin library in particular might just be a parallax error on the satellite imagery: often the imagery is actually from planes or drones, and parallax is noticeable on taller buildings.

Regarding your other tweets about building positions on OSM recently, are you aware of the OSMUK Cadastral Parcels layer? If you do, please ignore the rest of this comment :)

If not, see https://osmuk.org/cadastral-parcels/ before you think about starting to realign buildings.

Basically the satellite imagery is not guaranteed to be perfectly aligned to any source of ground truth. In particular, the alignment can change when the imagery is updated, or across different parts of the country, by up to about 5m.

Previously there wasn’t a solution for this in OSM apart from taking accurate GPS traces and aligning to those. Now there’s the OSMUK Cadastral Parcels layer, which uses surveyed property boundary data from the government as a source of ground truth.

So before you start realigning buildings, please enable the cadastral parcels layer and align your satellite imagery to it.

That’s a little tricky in the uni as it’s one big land parcel, but it’s possible to align using the houses on Five Ashes Lane. It’s generally best to check alignment in a few places, as not all parcels are perfectly surveyed.

Sorry for the long-winded comment (which you probably knew all about already). I just wanted to double-check you were aware of it before you potentially embarked on a big spree of realigning buildings! :)

I’ve made part of it a bridge in changeset/121388109. Does that look more correct? Feel free to edit it further if I’ve misinterpreted the photo :)

Do the steps cross over the top of each other (and the footpath) with a bridge?

Heya, when you’re adding buildings (like I see you’ve been doing a lot recently!) could you please make sure that your background imagery is aligned to the OSMUK Cadastral Parcels layer before starting to edit. Otherwise the buildings will not be correctly lined up with the coordinate system, and it’s very hard to ensure that different bits of mapping remain lined up with each other as satellite imagery is updated.

The OSMUK Cadastral Parcels layer is the main source of truth in the UK for aligning imagery.

To use the parcels:
1. Open the Background Settings in ID and tick the OSMUK Cadastral Parcels layer
2. Scroll down to the Imagery Offset settings
3. Adjust the offset of the satellite imagery until it matches the cadastral parcels. You might need to zoom in, as the parcels (blue lines) are only visible at higher zoom levels.
4. It’s generally easy to align to a hedge junction or corner. Aligning to a building corner doesn’t work due to parallax error from the height of the building.
5. You might need to check alignment in a few places around an area, as some of the parcels are incomplete due to missing land registry data.
6. The offsets for Bing imagery for this area of Lancaster are about 2.42, -0.28. They will differ between different areas of town and between different satellite imagery providers.

Unfortunately you can’t rely on all of Lancaster to be correctly aligned already. I’m making sure that anything I map from now on (since a few months ago) is aligned to the cadastral parcels, and slowly updating alignments that way. The goal is to have everything aligned to them.

I hope this makes sense; please say if there’s anything I can clarify. Thanks.

Hi, welcome to OpenStreetMap!

A couple of suggestions based on this edit:

1. Please keep edits geographically localised. This edit touches objects in Derry and in Alexandra. Different OSM editors in different parts of the world have different conventions, so changesets which cross country boundaries are a bit disruptive.

So this change should probably have been one changeset to add the new houses in Derry, and another to change the playground in Alexandra.

See osm.wiki/Changeset#Geographical_size_of_changesets

2. You can use the ‘Q’ key to automatically square the corners of selected buildings. This makes it a lot easier to draw regular houses!

Happy editing :)

Hi, please consider limiting the size of your changesets to smaller geographical areas.

Wide-ranging changesets are hard for other contributors to review, especially when they cross country boundaries as different local OSM groups may have different approaches to mapping.

See osm.wiki/Changeset#Geographical_size_of_changesets

Please also use more informative changeset descriptions than a single word, otherwise it’s hard to work out what you were intending to change.

See osm.wiki/Good_changeset_comments