Good luck on sorting it out! We have some older building imports that suffer offsets and I’ve been tidying up bits as I move through the map.

Thanks for putting in so much effort! What a great set of stuff to get onto the map.

Thanks for adding these details!

@MapAwayThePain Thanks for the kind words. I am glad folks find this helpful! Let me know if you have issues/concerns/successes. I love hearing about that stuff.

@citzenprime, great question. Sorry for missing it months ago! My understanding is that the line between “import” and not is whether you have “reviewed each element”. It turns out that you can do a pretty quick scan over a reasonable dataset and “review” things for sanity. This one uses the National Address Database layer which is documented and well understood. If you are bringing another dataset, say one from your local county, I do suggest discussing it with folks (Discord, community forum, OSM US Slack etc) just to make sure it’s tidied up and converted to a reasonable OSM format.

@catsparrow, sorry for the delay in my reply. There’s a setting you can adjust to increase the selection limit. Edit > Preferences > Advanced Preferences > “MapWithAI.maximumselection”. You can set that up to 1000, or set it to 0 to say “no maximum”.

It’s been a while since I have fiddled with it. It may reject setting it to zero in the UI. If that’s the case you can set it in saved JOSM preferences file that lives next to your JOSM install.

In that case I would say the street’s name is “North Octavia Avenue”. Directional prefixes are often omited from older or cheaper street signage but now we have a datapoint that show what the “real” full name of the roadway is meant to be. OSM isn’t constrained by signage budgets (and the inclusion doesn’t, generally, create confusion) so we can safely include the full name.

Sometimes the disagreement is more stark and you’ll need a tiebreaker datapoint such as street level imagery or county roadway dataset. If it’s a complete mess (ex: disagreement between TIGER, road signage, imported addresses) I find it extremely useful to mail the local GIS or transport folks and explain that there’s a bit of a mess that needs working out. I’ve did this a few times during the Phoenix area address import.. mostly when a roadway had signs on each end that meaningfully disagreed about the name.

This is lovely. Cheers to 10,000 more!

Very cool!! I look forward to whatever fun things you come up with next.

Lovely! Keep it up and thank for sharing.

Incredible work! Always inspiring. Thanks for writing/mapping/sharing your love of this with us all.

In case folks who find this are similarly gob smacked, here’s the two talks ottwiz gave about the project (maybe there are more??)

2024 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqOkEq9eVw&t 2025 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBInS8hcGhU

Thanks! I’ll be sharing this with some folks for a mapping party. Really really nice.

Hello!

A general first point, and I know it’s a bit squishy of a term, “get community buy in” is both “local folks know what is happening” and also “find folks who have done this kind of import before”. The first so we don’t have surprises and the second so that we won’t repeat mistakes over and over ha.

I would love to get more waterway data into OSM. I think that’s a great impulse. Unfortunately, I’ve found NHD to be of suspect quality (OSM has a quite high quality bar) in the lower 48 and I suspect the AK datasets are quite suspect. My preference would be to use the better/newer 3DHP dataset. Have you looked at it? https://www.usgs.gov/3d-hydrography-program

That said, partial imports may provide immediately short term value without getting EVERYTHING from NHD. Investigating “named waterways in NHD” may be a reasonably smaller slice that is easier to correlate/cleanup later when we do manage to get a full 3DHP dataset.

You should consider posting about this on the community forum. I’ve found folks over there super helpful with lots of good ideas. There’s also the OSM-US Slack where US mappers are pretty chatty.

I hope some of this is helpful. Always happy to chat more. Excited to see what you get up to.

Lovely work!

What do you think of the other common “name” fields? Doing something like this seems sensible:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:name=I ♥ Teriyaki
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:alt_name=I Heart Teriyaki

It could definitely be adjusted for other areas. If the place= categorization is a decent proxy, that may be enough. You could also decide that “any place node without X feature” is worth posting about.

I would need to do a bit of work to get the bot to run with multiple accounts but that’s not a huge hurdle. I am busy this week with State of the Map US planning but should have more time in the rest of June to investigate ideas.

Very clean. For the US, I have a mastodon bot that posts a town a day in similar fashion. We have okay enough population data on place nodes that I use that as my “village” proxy (population < 1000). It also runs a few Overpass queries before posting so it will only show things with 10 or fewer buildings nearby.

I am excited to hear more about your challenge and how it goes! Keep it up!

Delightful! Would love to know more about the overpass query and python you’re using.

Great write up!

ANOTHER UPDATE.

It’s now much much easier to deploy an entire dedicated site for things like this. I have built TIGERMap which has an OSM layer as well as a National Address Database heatmap which makes is super easy to see these things with a superior user experience.

Details here: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/announcing-tigermap-tiger-reviewed-no/110004

Oh that’s very cool! Thanks for sharing.