Hi Utopiaboy,

You have commented on an individual’s diary and was out of context with the original entry and follow up discussion which is part of the reason your question made no sense.

In the OpenStreetMap data I see a “Utopia Circle” in Berrien County near Nashville, Georgia. Is that the area that needs mapping? It certainly looks under mapped with only old, inaccurate TIGER data. Using the publicly available aerial imagery, I am tempted to correct the alignment of the roads I see there and add the buildings. But that would be “arm chair mapping” which I generally do not like to do as I cannot verify street names and other details which I could see if I was visiting in person.

Since this is a comment area for a single person’s project diary there is no easy way to attach your map data directly. You could do that on one of the more general forums like that at https://community.openstreetmap.org/ or you could even just add/correct the data in OpenStreetMap yourself, there are a number of tutorials for that.

If adding and correcting our existing data is too daunting for you, you can leave a message on my account with your email and I can get back to you to see if I can use your local knowledge to update your Utopia location.

In the rare case where I put an access tag on a residential driveway, I use access=destination

My reasoning is that access tag values are typically used by routing engines and most driveways cannot be used for through traffic. So it is very unusual for a routing engine to select a driveway when routing a driver through the area. So access=private is not needed to avoid routing issues. But a long rural driveway is something that a delivery driver or visitor probably needs to use if actually going to the destination.

I ran into similar issues with descriptions instead of names in the name field of relations in California about 4 years ago. I am not sure what the long term solution is to nudge mappers to make names on hiking routes match the signage on the ground.

Maybe if more renderers actually processed the information on hiking route relations and just displayed what was there the visual noise would get mappers to clean up their areas.

But I’d rather my maps be clean now, so I punted and preprocess away most of the stuff that annoys me before actually rendering my maps.

There are ways to keep things local if you do your own rendering. And there might be sites that allow fictional data. But if you want an informed answer to this question then I believe you should ask on the OSM forums at https://community.openstreetmap.org as you will get a lot more eyes on the question than here in the diary area.

The Americana map project at https://americanamap.org attempts to display the map in the language of both your browser and of the language of the place. Not all locations have foreign names in addition to local language names but many do.

To verify that the browser language is used, I configured a browser to have German as my first choice language and pulled up the Americana Map and the place names for countries and major cities showed up in German.

I think this capability may come to the main map at osm.org/ when it transitions from raster tiles to vector tiles. You pretty much need vector tiles with the map data being rendered by the browser for this to work well.

Thank you for the time and effort this took. Looks like a good job of mapping to me!

I don’t know how may projects render camping data or how often they update their copy of OSM data, but one of them is Open Camping Map