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.

We love it when a long con comes together.

I know it’s very common for new mappers to look at their local area (usually very urban) and wonder “so what’s left”? I originally wanted to help folks find places off the beaten path and I’m so happy to see you’ve found lots of good mapping opportunities!

I am very excited to hear how other ways of presenting this information help drive engagement and help us get to a more complete map.

I am glad you found it useful. I wonder if there’s a place (the wiki?) to keep links to things like this. Discoverability is a huge issue for sure.

I would be happy to help lend a hand! I’ve written some about my experience adding addresses in various diary entries (@watmildon/diary). Always happy to help out.

Wonderful! It reminds me a of the very engaging water basins map that Amanda has: https://amandasaurus.github.io/osm-river-basins/#map=2%2F0%2F0. Except, in this case, the urge is to break these big blobs up!

The original points were almost certainly from an import from GNIS long ago. The precision on many features back then was… not optimal. Cleanup continues.

It turns out that Rowe Lake is also not correctly named in the NHD dataset (!!) so I’m sure the GNIS folks will be very happy to get this corrected for everyone.

Great sleuthing!!

Sounds like a wonderful project. I look forward to seeing the results!

Oh absolutely! Definitely meant as a demonstration of “there’s work out there that’s easy to go get at” than a recommendation to “go mass retag things”. As always, the tools are powerful but must be used cautiously.

We have an infinite sea of work, just need to find the right little inspirations for folks to go to it. (in a collaborative and cooperative manner of course!)

If I wanted to do some review in my area, is it enough to do alignment and then removed the “tiger:reviewed” tag? I’ve done quite a bit of TIGER fixup for highway=track and in various cities but never any rail. Any tips/pointers would be great.