The following post is best viewed at osmly.com full text is posted below for posterity.

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OSMLY is a simple browser based importer for OpenStreetMap. It makes importing easy by presenting each feature one at a time, allowing users to manually review the item, make any needed adjustments to positions or tags, and upload directly to OSM. It also allows for reporting problems that other users can look over and a quality assurance mode where administrative users can confirm everything that has been uploaded. The aim is to make simple imports easier, more cooperative, and less error prone.

Try the demo: http://osmly.com/la-parks.html

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When using OpenStreetMap data there’s a frustrating divide in the representation of a place. Something like a supermarket, a school, or a park. It can be as simple as querying [leisure=park] from an API but what are you going to get back? Probably a way (polygon) or a node (point) and depending on which one it is you have to do things a bit differently to get where you want. You can specify to only return nodes but you’re going to miss things, it’s going to be incomplete because some of them have been mapped as ways, some as nodes. Because of this mixed bag it can be frustrating to try and do even basic things with the data. I just want points of interest.

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I’ve been resolving OSM notes this past week and it’s been surprisingly engaging editing. I might try and sum up my pros/cons of the notes feature later but there was one particular problem that became a little project of its own that I want to explain a little more in depth here.

I came across notes by users didier2020 and jfire about parking lot duplicates in Washington DC. The problem was that some parking areas had multiple duplicate ways stacked on top of each other and shared the same nodes to define a single area. Because these areas were sharing the exact same features it’s pretty hard to spot the problem without specifically looking for it. Here’s what it looks like in JSOM:

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