OpenStreetMap
So, Dear Diary, 2021-05-11
I have decided to take on the task of tracing every building in the town where I live, population about 60,000. Currently the coverage of traced buildings are large retail, large industrial, or the hospital. Almost no houses are mapped, and most of the roads are bare minimum information with no cycleway or footway information.
This comes after my previous task, as I have just finished basic tracing and labelling of the local amusement park, which was almost barren (and due to the “roller coaster track” tag not rendering, it still look barren!).
I do plan on trying to get out a bit and visit some of the places, however the area is very sketchy. Since living here there have been a few drive by shootings, and many places are know as “The Stablands” with how much knife crime goes on…. I feel I will get chased out of some areas for wearing a surveying Hi-Vis, and arrested by the police if I don’t wear one!
I am massively impressed so far with the depth of the Wiki, the ease of use of the ID editor, the wide toolset JOSM has to offer, and the incredibly smooth function of StreetComplete (Quite how it hasn’t had 1mil+ downloads is beyond me!)
For now, the Armchair awaits, though mapping some of the clearly inaccurate foot “trails” around the area could be a nice break, and lower the risk of a shankin’
Discussion
Comment from benoitdd on 12 May 2021 at 08:54
Enjoy your task! JOSM commands A and X will be your best friends :)
It’s great to see our own efforts changing the maps.
Comment from spiregrain on 12 May 2021 at 12:03
You might also turn on the new Cadastral Layer to help clarify building boundaries, and to align the aerial imagery from.
I’ll also put in a word for the JOSM Terracer plugin.
Comment from benoitdd on 12 May 2021 at 12:57
thanks Spiregrain for the Cadastral Layer tip! I’m so glad to discover it (and a little sad that I didn’t learn about it sooner…)
It seems that there is a quarterly challenge from OSMUK to map all buildings.
You can add the hashtags #ukqp to your changesets
Comment from spiregrain on 12 May 2021 at 13:04
I’ve noticed that the guidance on the Cadastral images here - https://osmuk.org/cadastral-parcels/ - is a little out of date, because ID now has them built in, under Background Settings / Overlays.
Comment from RAC_UK on 12 May 2021 at 21:42
Which end are you starting? It’s mind numbing doing residential areas and some of areas look very unpleasent.
Comment from 0235 on 12 May 2021 at 22:12
Thanks for the kind words, Maybe I am fortunate that I have so much to do in my area, when many people are struggling to figure out exact lane features on their local roads!
@RAC_UK - Starting from the North where the houses are big and spaced out!
@benoitdd - I will try and remember to tag #UKQP in any of my changesets. That’s a big Quarterly task!
@apiregrain - That Cadastral layer looks FANTASTIC! It will be a life saver for figuring out how many terrace houses are in a row. Strangely though, my property boundaries don’t show up on it, yet some of the parking spaces for nearby flats do :’(
Lets hope having properties to tag will kickstart people in the Area using Streetcomplete?
Comment from SK53 on 14 May 2021 at 12:04
@0235: an ambitious project!
I would also recommend using Robert Whittakers’s UPRN tool: very useful for checking counts of terraces etc. There’s a bit on the wiki too.
Less readily available, but probably useful when you get to places where it is difficult to resolve detail from imagery is the EA Lidar data. You will need to download & process the data to a hillshade format if you want to see it it in an editor. However, you can sort of preview it on the NLS Maps site.
Good luck
Comment from spiregrain on 14 May 2021 at 12:49
@SK53 - you can add the EA LIDAR images to JOSM (and probably ID) via wms:https://environment.data.gov.uk/spatialdata/lidar-composite-digital-terrain-model-dtm-1m-2019/wms?FORMAT=image/png&TRANSPARENT=TRUE&VERSION=1.3.0&SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=1&STYLES=&CRS=EPSG:3857&WIDTH={width}&HEIGHT={height}&BBOX={bbox}
Comment from addresscleaner on 24 April 2022 at 13:29
Hey, thanks for your contributions! I’ve just started using OSM for a personal project while I live in Kettering, and having building shapes was a great start for me to update the maps on my street.