You know what would be really cool, and an insanely handy tool for those troubleshooting maxspeed= tags?

Something that could take an .osm file, and create a .gpi to make the Garmin alert on maxspeed restrictions. (ie, if it's not telling you about speed limits periodically, there's no speed limit data for the area).

Practical application: Spot the surprise school zone behind the curve on that rural nowhere highway approaching a nothing town with a bored cop before you get out of the trees. 55mph to 20 with no warning on a curve or hillcrest is a surprisingly common situation on school days in rural Oregon and Washington.

Let Vancouver Transit Police show you how to do it the right way: Friendly, not so Orwellian, with some kind of nod that you understand your public.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Gvta-police-ad_cropped.jpg

I've been trying to emigrate from the US since 1998, and stories like California Assemblyman Anderson claiming that uncensored maps are tantamount to yelling fire in a theater, and thus aren't protected speech simply appall me. I simply can't, in clear conscious, consider him or his constituents, my fellow countrymen. There needs to be an international boundary between me, and people that selfish and stupid.

And I thought impeaching a president on drummed up charges because he had a hummer on-the-clock was bad...

I'm generating routable maps for Garmin devices supporting the gmapsupp.img, I wrote a script to bang out the areas I want and generate 'em. I'm working from planet.osm, and I use these two (Willamette Valley/Vancouver Metro) maps myself. For your convenience, I've also included the .osm files I started with.

I have to kick the script by hand, but I should be able to stay fairly up to date on it since I am eating my own dogfood and using OSM on my Garmin).

You can find the .img files and the originating .osm files at http://ursamundi.org/~baloo/osm/ (Please consider mirroring this if you are able to)

Update: I"ve given up on this since other people are clearly doing this better with less human intervention.

osm.wiki/Relation:route

I noticed that relations appear to be a much better method for tagging routes such as numbered highways, etc.; but these routes do not render in mapnik and T@H yet. Cycleways partially render on the Cycleway map, but do not include symbols.

Could we start rendering route relations with the symbols, so numbered routes are more easily tagged than tagging each member way individually, and so refs appear with the proper symbols instead of the generic squares when available?

Yes, JOSM does have a search function. But it lacks a replace function. If you have a data set containing 1000+ ways whose names include abbreviations (such as any US county initially mapped by TIGER as I'm facing here in Marion County, Oregon), it doesn't actually save you any time. Being able to replace substrings of key values (like bulk changing " Rd " to " Road " or " Blvd " to " Boulevard " in name keys) would be extremely useful, at least to US mappers cleaning up TIGER data.

Plus, there's a lot of data in keys that aren't necessarily a name (note and comment keys come to mind forthright) where a spell checker would be especially helpful. Perhaps a speller implementation would, by default, not check name keys on ways with highway=* tags, and when enabled, warns that blindly trusting the spell checker on street names is probably a bad idea unless you have a dictionary containing the names already. This would be useful for anybody who is training (my|a|i)spell with place names, and useful for catching typos in place names for people who already have place names in their dictionaries.

I'm not suggesting that blind application of a spell checker is a good idea. Heck, it's a bad idea even in a word processor, but still a handy resource. On the other hand, if someone does have local knowledge and has or is building a dictionary of local names, then a word processor becomes extremely valuable.

Failing that, even a global search and replace function would be nice. If nothing else, something that I can search for name keys for Rd and replace it with Road, Ave and replace with Avenue, etc. since it seems the TIGER import completely violated the "never use abbreviations" principal.

Is there a way to check for spelling errors and abbreviations in JOSM, perhaps via the validator? Searching the josm wiki comes up dry.

OK, this was a real pain for me, but I finally figured it out. Turns out you need planetdiff, not osmosis to do this. Argh. The toolchain to go from capturing data to generating maps for my GPS gets one tool longer...

Voodoo Donut, Portland's world famous home of the now FDA-banned Nyquil Donut (really it should be the food or drug administration: Turns out products are not allowed to be both a food and a drug!), legal weddings performed by an Elvis impersonator and various contests usually revolving how many donuts can fit on a particular male customer's member, is no longer missing from the map.

Next time you're in Portland, please help keep Portland weird by visiting this unique and awesome local landmark.

They really know how to pick politicians: They're world-class at picking the only candidate on the list who is both evil and stupid at the same time. Case in point: Apparently the Assemblyman from San Diego has taken it upon himself to try to legislate that map sites should blur public infrastructure so they can't be as easily targetted by terrorists.

Did he ever stop to think that perhaps the blurs would practically be the next best thing to giving ne'er-do-wells widespread access to what the government thinks the juiciest targets are?

For that matter, did anybody in San Diego stop and think before electing this clown? (given that driving the wrong direction on one-way streets is almost the norm and red lights are purely suggestions by local practice, I would hazard to guess the answer is no)

First, thanks to all who responded to my previous posts.

I know I can record one really long file and use GPX waypoints for this purpose already. That's what I'm doing now, though it's really suboptimal as it requires me to enter a waypoint on the GPS, which takes (at minimum) 3 keypresses. If I'm mapping by bicycle, this means I need to stop and get off to grab the unit from the pannier to enter the waypoint.

What I would like to do instead is what is already being done with photos, and is described here , so all I have to do is make sure my dictaphone's clock is set within a couple seconds of GPS time. With this method, I could easily leave my dictaphone in a handy location and simply tap the record/stop button without necessarily having to stop a bicycle or futz with the gps while moving (granted, I can do it without looking at it at this point despite the complete lack of tactile buttons, but it's kind of a reach and it's a pain to go through and delete all the waypoints I don't need out of it again).

I think this would be the easiest method for me since it only depends on my voice recorder's clock being accurate. The question is, how in the world do you do this with audio and not pictures? I know I need the GPX file to reference the audio files as it stands now, but that puts me in a bind of needing to read the GPX file, read the mtimes on all the wav files, then add the links to the waypoints in the track made on their respective seconds with the wav files. I'm not sure how to script it (only thing that seems to be GPX aware is python, and I'm more or less clueless there).

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What's the fastest way to take a directory of wav files and read the timestamps, adding the appropriate link tags to the gpx file for JOSM to use?

I'd like to do audio mapping as described at , but I do not know how to convert the WMA files my to WAV en masse on Linux while preserving the mtime (that is, timestamps cannot change: They MUST remain as the audio logger set them).

What's the best way to accomplish this? Alternatively, am I overengineering this? Is there a plugin that lets JOSM make use of WMA files that I'm missing?

Update: I figured out preserving the timestamps while converting with a script.

---begin code snippet---

#!/bin/bash

for i in *.WMA; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader:file="${i%.WMA}.wav" "$i" ; done
for i in *.WMA; do touch -r "$i" "$(basename "$i" .WMA).wav"; done

---begin code snippet---

Now, it's just a matter of getting the sound into JOSM.

I discovered with my Nüvi 200 that when you turn it off, it's not really "off" if it's still receiving external power, even if you've turned it off. It just shuts the screen and speaker off. Tracks still record.

This is a little frustrating: The cleanest spot to plug a GPS into a PT Cruiser is in the center console on the unswitched 12vDC plug in the console box. Fortunately, there is a keyed one on the floorboard behind the cupholders. It's too bad there's not some kind of switch I can flip hidden off in an electrical panel that controls whether or not a circuit is keyed or always-powered. My better half doesn't want me rooting around in the car's wiring, so just gonna have to live with the keyed outlet on the floorboard until it's not under warranty anymore (or Chrysler finally goes under and makes it a moot point).

How does this relate to the project? Well, my GPX files were the size of solar systems systems. I was creating tracks hundreds of kilometers long, without leaving my parking space! Just a snarled pile of GPS points around my college and home parking lots.

So, earlier this weekend, while doing research on a couple papers I'm doing on OSM, I hacked off the extra 270,000 or so data points around Salem that were just complete garbage. I deleted all my traces from OSM, and went through with the EditGPX plugin on JOSM and hacked out obviously crap data from my GPXs. Pretty much anytime I noticed a big pile of track points in one spot, or tracks from when I was on foot or bicycle that drifted into an inaccurate mess due to buildings or plain dumb GPS placement, cut out the useless data and re-uploaded it.

Lessons I'd like to pass on to others from this experience:

1) Learn JOSM and get the EditGPX plugin. Delete bad data from your GPX files prior to uploading them.

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After some footwork on SL, I get the impression other mapping efforts have been tried, though some mainland residents have their reservations. Previous efforts appear to have attempted the lazy route of sending automated bots to do the mapping, which tends to unnerve people. That's understandable: Robots don't understand property lines, miss a lot of detail, tend to run into things and people, don't respect the defacto rules of the road, etc. Not to mention, people get a little bit creeped out when a robot does actually stop and start asking questions about where it wound up (if Number 5 rolled up on you in first life, and you weren't intoxicated or walking in Portland's Little Bohemia, would /you/ tell it what street it was on?).

I've been turning this over in my head for a few days and I just need to throw it out there at this point. Is mapping worlds other than Earth beyond the scope of OSM? Is there much interest in mapping Agni?

First, an explaination for the people who don't know what I'm talking about. Agni is the main grid on the virtual reality environment Second Life. It has a population of 1,440,530 as of this writing, and averages about 540,000 tourists per year (ie, 1.4 million users have logged in within the last 60 days, out of 4.1 million total users ever over 5 years of existence), with about 70,000 people awake (connected to that grid) at any given time. If you don't know what grid you're connecting to and you're over 18, you're on Agni. It has over a dozen continents and about 50 or so established countries (the largest being Lindenland, spanning the 8 continents generally referred to collectively as the mainland) and thousands of islands not associated with any particular continent. If you're not sure what Second Life is in general, it's not far off from Snow Crash if Snow Crash wasn't a dystopia.

Now, some challenges I see in pulling this off: Server, for one. Having attempted processing planet.osm so I could give gosmore a whirl, I realized that Earth is a hefty chunk of data. I imagine that Agni will be a substantially smaller chunk of data due to the impossibility of accurately mapping some regions (I'll explain further below), and the fact that the entire grid is maybe 200 km across tops, including voids. If OSM wanted to host it, I have a hard time seeing the resulting dataset for the whole grid being larger than what a major metro area on Earth takes now.

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Some things I noticed while mapping Amtrak Cascades:

1) It's a pain in the butt to live-map when you're screaming along at 102 MPH, as we were for dozens of minutes at a stretch, barely slowing for curves and towns.

2) The existing railroad maps for Cascadia leave much to be desired.

3) Someone else in the region did a really half-assed job at mapping yards in the region. Lots of broken segments, duplicate nodes and just plain wrong turnouts fixed, but lots of updating still needs to be done. Unfortunately, the Amtrak Cascades system lacks wifi service, so OSB tagging was a nonstarter (there really needs to be a way to handle the OSB layer offline like there is with other layers in JOSM). This same someone seems to have the idea that railway=spur is a valid tag (it's not: you really want railway=rail, service=spur, and even then NOT ON THE MAINLINE!). Worst yet, a potlatch user joined completely different railways in a spot they don't connect, which seriously confused tags (mainline as a spur, and railways in identity crisis like Union Pacific lines being labelled as BNSF or vice-versa).

4) I'm surprised with as many tracks as there are in the White Rock/Blaine metroplex, I still had to fix names and insert border crossing gates, which are a major obstacle in that metroplex divided by stupid border placement. It wouldn't surprise me that it's twin just west, Point Roberts/Tsawassen suffers a similar plight, but I haven't been on the ground there in 10 years to know the actual lay...

I-205 in the Portland metro area is now tagged using a relation and has bicycle=yes tags added as appropriate. I-5 from Jantzen Beach to Salem is also updated to use relations and have correct bicycle permissions. Erroneous inclusion of the Interstate Drawbridge as part of I-5 has been fixed (it's actually Oregon 99 across the bridge, the Interstate Bridge being a one-mile gap preventing it from getting Interstate freeway status due to the lack of shoulders and it's operating drawspan: Interstates are required to have wide shoulders and prohibited from having drawspans).

Most of the 40-mile loop has been included (as LCN 40) using a relation.

There's a few spots on Portland-area greenways where I noted a bollard but forgot the bicycle=yes, foot=yes tags. (Hopefully ODOT gets with the program and makes the freeway-bypass cycleways foot=no at somepoint... hard to get out of the way of bicycle traffic between a chainlink fence and a concrete wall at rush hour).

I've begun working on tagging streets in Salem as bicycle=designated and bicycle=destination on routes with bicycle lanes, and with no shoulder and high traffic, respectively so YourNavigation stops stupidly suggesting Fairgrounds Road NE as a viable crosstown bicycle route (it's not... narrow lanes and high traffic volume wouldn't be a problem by themselves if it weren't for inconsiderate Californian drivers being the norm here in the Oregon capitol: Please remember to leave when you're done visiting, people!).

Several GPS traces in Salem, Oregon added.

Amtrak Cascades now has relation, from Albany to Portland. Needs extension to Vancouver, BC and Eugene, Oregon.

TMTC's MAX Blue, Yellow and Red lines now have their own route relations in Portland. System is mapped down to the per-track detail. City of Portland's streetcar system still needs to be mapped, as does about 100 bus routes...

Salem Cherriots 2 Jan Ree mapped inbound from Chemeketa CC to the Salem Bus Station.

Chemeketa Community College now has a better proper map (as opposed to those blowful ones found on the map boards).

The following cycleways now appear to be properly mapped: I-205, I-84, Springwater Corridor, Vera Katz Esplanade.

Willamette River now properly mapped from the Columbia River to Salem.

And if this is of any relevancy to you at all, do you want to meet up? Possible locations include Chemeketa Community College or anyplace with a liquor license (essentially, any place where children under 18 are prohibited).