Harriman State Park was one of my hiking ground when I was living on the East Coast. :-)

Use tracks for dirt or gravel roads that can be done by a car or 4x4.

For hiking and biking trails, there isn't general agreement. Either use 'footway'/'cycleway' or 'path'. I'm using the latter for very narrow trails like the A.T. and add additional tags such as 'foot=yes', 'bicycle=no', but others would mark that footway instead.

The important part is that, at least, it's on the map. :-)

I never write anything down, but just take tons of pictures that are either geotagged by the device itself (in case I take them with the standard app of the iPhone) or geotagged by using the timestamp and correlating it with the recorded track (when I take them with a digital camera and use a garmin GPS).

When I'm driving, I obviously can't write anything down or take pictures, so I use the iPhone voice recorder app to make notes.

Geotagging those currently doesn't work very well, so I do it like this:
"Intersection of Market street and route XYZ, left side, Texaco gas station".

Ideally, I want an iPhone app that does 3 things:
- record GPS track
- take pictures at full resolution that are geotagged
- record voice notes that are also geotagged

I'm currently writing one that does exactly that.

They don't. :-)

Which is why it's so important to fix keepright errors!

Maybe you should first explain what problem you're trying to solve?

2) It's private land but you're allowed to park there -> permissive

I think Google is a great company and I've got a number of friends working there. Just thought it was funny that their backyard was currently mapped incorrectly. :-)

Joel,

You can download the OSM data as XML files here: http://downloads.cloudmade.com/north_america/united_states

From there you can either process the XML data yourself and just extract the name fields.

Or you could import the OSM file into a Postgres database with the osm2pgsql script and then suse the database for further processing and write it out as a comma separate file. The osm wikipages describe the osm2pgsql script.

In your case, the first option is probably sufficient. The parser should be very easy to write.

Tom

The key with Linux is that I know up front what will work and what won't. If I place the right icons at the right place on the desktop, my mother could switch with little or no disruption.

When you buy a US version of a Garmin navigator, you don't expect it to work great in Sydney. OSM doesn't have to be perfect for the whole world, but there should be some kind of expectation management. A way to indicate that data in a certain region is just to low quality to bother using it for turn-by-turn routing.

Now there is an important difference between the US and the rest of the world. We have TIGER data, so in terms of street graph, OSM is almost complete. All that needs to be done is to verify that the coordinate, intersections and one-ways are correct. The good thing is that one can now correct major parts of a city without ever being there, but it's even less obvious when quality is bad so you don't depend as much on whether or not somebody local lives there.

Seeing how OSM has changed in just the short 10 months since I joined, there is no reason to be defeatist about the current state of affairs. My diary post was a call to action, not one to give up. The beauty of maps is that the data is that they are so very static, so time is in our favor.

I know this is the Internet and all that, where emotional reactions are the norm, but, dude, relax.

If you say "most of the south of England does too" may I conclude that some part of England don't work so well?

I'd like to refer to one reactions to a presentation that was made at the State of the Map conference: the problem with OSM data is not that the quality is always better worse that, e.g., the one you can license from the Ordnance Survey. (It is, in fact, in some place quite a bit better.) It's that you don't know where it's good and where it's bad.

If I'm a technology luddite who lives in Silicon Valley or San Francisco and buy an OSM based navigation app, my experience when driving around locally will be almost stellar. But when I then hop on a plane to use the same app in, say, Philadelphia, my experience will be horrible.

The same thing is true for Belgium, where I've correct tons of errors around my previous stomping grounds. Top notch quality in Antwerp, Louvain and Brussels. Pretty much nothing wrt local street the moment you dare to take a 30 minute drive. Correlation with the presence of high quality Yahoo Aerial images is 99%, of course.

Replace "Silicon Valley" with "South of England" and "Philadelphia" with "some other place in England where coverage is bad" if a US experience hurts your sensibilities, but surely you get my point.

s/not to avoid depression/to avoid depression/

According to the wiki, oneway=yes is implied. IOW, it's not necessary, but it also doesn't hurt, so I wouldn't worry about it.

It's a fact of life that most people only tag ways with a highway type, a name and, if necessary, oneway. Anything beyond that is gravy but unlikely.

I've mapped many thousands of ways and I'm aware of many additional tags, but I didn't know that the junction=roundabout has to be assigned. (In the US, roundabouts are very rare, so there's no real need to know about them anyway.) It's unrealistic to expect that everyone knows about all tags.

As for being depressed about shoddy mapping: someone contributed some of his spare time to create an account and enter a feature in a shared database for the greater good. Even if shoddy, it gives other the opportunity to improve on it. That's better than no feature at all, right? Looking at it this way makes it easier not to avoid depression. :-)

Yes, I know about those.

But they are insufferably slow. The image quality is much inferior compared to the originals and they are completely broken in the High Sierra's. (For a nice example, you just have a look at Yosemite Village.)

They also don't work with Potlatch...

No, they're just .png.

Also: localhost works fine... I just needed to add http:// in front.

It looks like Potlatch is requesting all tiles just fine, but it doesn't display them. However, I didn't mention in my little write-up that I created a script that runs gdal2tiles on individual geotiff files first and then merges them together after the fact. It's always tiles that are created from multiple tiles that have this problem.

Could it be an issue with alpha not being 255 for tiles on the boundary? Just guessing here.

I'll file a bug an attach a number of tiles (when I get back from work...)

Thanks for the potlatch tip: it's now displaying tiles.

However, it doesn't display all of them: there are vertical and horizontal white bands where no tiles are displayed. This must be a bug in Potlatch. They display fine in Merkaartor.

In Potlatch: just specify a few points of your roundabout. Make sure it's a single way that's closed.

Then press 'T'.

A thing of beauty.

Could you provide some insight in the process of getting this done? Especially wrt preventing overlap with data that's already in the database?

Thanks!

Absolutely gorgeous. Without a doubt the best map tile set that's out there.

I can't believe I didn't stumble on this before. A .shp file with all the trails of Yosemite can be found here:
http://science.nature.nps.gov/nrdata/datastore.cfm?ID=47797

Thanks for letting me know!