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Posted by crschmidt on 13 October 2007 in English.

I just got pointed (Thanks, TomH!) To Ackman's diary entry complaining about the MassGIS import blowing away data. This is a very bad thing :/ The MassGIS import was never meant to make someone else's mapping efforts go away. Before starting the import, we had explored any part of the state that seemed to have existing data, and (due to timing, it looks like) missed some new efforts in the past couple weeks.

For the record, we have full records of all the uploads, and each upload has a specific tag that will allow us to remove all elements uploaded by a specific upload. All you have to do is send the town IDs from:

http://www.mass.gov/mgis/townlis.htm

to me (crschmidt@crschmidt.net) and we'll either pull it off the list of things to be uploaded, or we'll remove it if it's already imported and causing problems.

Again, apologies to Ackman for making his mapping efforts more difficult: hopefully he sees either the private message or this and lets me know how I can help clean up the area he's working in so it's easy to work in again.

Posted by chillly on 11 October 2007 in English.

I've been continuing to work on the East Riding of Yorkshire, with plenty still to do. The new API has speeded up the uploads and downloads - I guess segments nearly doubled the data. Rendering is clearly now struggling. Blue tiles and blank tiles are appearing and renders are sometimes taking a few minutes and sometimes a couple of DAYS. I don't have the resources to run tiles@home so it's hard for me to complain, but it is off-putting to see your work disappear under a blank or blue tile, or to wait days to see what mistakes you've made, even though the data is safe.

On the upside, more villages are complete and Hull has a little more detail, and I'm enjoying the experience.

Posted by Richard on 8 October 2007 in English.

Put the date for next year's State of the Map conference in your diaries: July 12th-13th, 2008.

The location? Well, that's where you can help.

We have not yet settled on a location. It doesn't have to be in the UK again - but it could be. It doesn't have to be 'terra incognita' for OSM (not much mapping was done at Manchester) - but, again, it could be.

But here's what it does need to have:


  • Enthusiastic local OSMers who can help organise it, and who have good contacts with potential venue. Manchester worked so well because there were people on the ground prepared to put the hours in.
  • Good transport links. We want to encourage at least as good a turn-out as this year, hopefully better.
  • A site equally suitable for learning, discussing and socialising.
  • A technology-aware venue - obviously, we need projectors, Internet connectivity, etc.

Like everything else in OSM, this is a call for volunteers - but the OpenStreetMap Foundation will, of course, pay reasonable expenses involved in arranging the venue. If you're prepared to help OSM by putting the time in, you won't be out of pocket.

SOTM 2007 was a huge success. Let's make 2008 better still.

(Please feel free to circulate this to your national mailing list if you'd like to host SOTM in your country.)

Richard
on behalf of the OpenStreetMap Foundation

Posted by dankarran on 8 October 2007 in English.

I've spent some time this evening improving the friends feature here on openstreetmap.org, so you will soon be able to add and remove friends (they'll get a notification by email when you add them) and view that list of friends from your profile page. Hopefully soon we'll be able to do some more things like filtering diary entries by your friends, etc.

Posted by Teaandkale on 8 October 2007 in English.

Segments are no more!

I've been waiting for this change for a while. Ever since I started trying to do stuff with the data. Segments always seemed like an extra hoop to jump through. So in theory I should be able to get on with some of the things I've been wanting to do for a while. I shall see...

Just trying out the segmentless JOSM. There's a few residential streets I mapped once but never properly tagged. It was the mass of cul-de-sacs that got me. Having failed to photograph the time from my GPS for the purposes of syncing with the camera, I couldn't work out what any particular road was meant to me. I've now gone back to it and by trial and error have got most of it done properly.

I expect I'll have to check this area when I go out that way again. For now, though, the longer single roads towards the city centre seem a little more appealing.

Location: Harborne, Metchley, Birmingham, West Midlands, England, B17 9PN, United Kingdom
Posted by Richard on 7 October 2007 in English.

To accompany the move to the new API, there's also a new Potlatch (version 0.4). Of course, Potlatch has always been based around segment-free editing, so this has been a fairly happy transition. But there are plenty of changes, and here are the main ones:


  • Works with the new database!
  • You can now merge two adjacent ways (i.e. ones which share an end-point) by clicking one, then shift-clicking the other.
  • You can reverse the order of a way by clicking the arrow icon.
  • When drawing a way (i.e. elastic band), pressing Delete will act as "backspace" - i.e. remove the point you added last.
  • The age-old problem of : in keys has been kludged, for now. They appear as | (bar), and you can edit them as long as you too type | instead of :.
  • Lots and lots of bugfixes, efficiency improvements, etc.

Potlatch doesn't yet let you create relations. However, it's fairly well behaved in that, if you delete a way or node, Potlatch will remove it from any relations of which it's a member. As usual, if (when) you find bugs, either e-mail details to me, or use trac, or edit Potlatch/Bugs on the wiki.

Posted by jcomeau_ictx on 7 October 2007 in English.

i know, most of my "diary" posts have been grouching about something or another, but i'm finally seeing good results in my local area. thanks to everyone at OSM for a great job. using the 'search' box for 'pubs near columbus' actually brings up only the two i mapped, including my shebeen! and there are umpteen other towns in the US named Columbus, including a rather large city in Ohio, but i guess nobody has mapped them yet...

Location: Luna County, New Mexico, United States