I'm finally getting around to updating OSM with all the minutia I collected on my trip up north.

I've already updated with the majority of the fleshy edits I took; I've updated Gracemere itself with all of the new estates and a number of roads and the like outside of the Yahoo coverage area. I'm finding Landsat is priceless for getting the gist of roads I didn't bother to trace, and even pricelesser for tracing in the little creeks.

That's right, the pet project on this trip was collecting creek names. I must have taken the name and location of about a hundred different creeks and rivers that intersect the highways and roads on my travels, and now I'm landsat-tracing the ones I can make out. I think it really adds to the map.

I'm also adding in other incidental details. I took a number of fuel stations and phone boxes along the way. It's quite painful editing such a large area in JOSM because not only does it slow down some, but I also have to download each area I want to edit manually.

One of the interesting things I came across in my travels was this shared foot/bikeway which really puts the discussion on the distinction between footway/cycleway/path/track on the OSM-AU mailing list into perspective for me. We're spoiled with our cycle network in Brisbane, even though it's still completely impractical to commute on.

I've linked to Gracemere, which is so almost complete it's painful to see the few little areas I missed on the Geofabrik comparison tool. I'm now going for a second pass through all my collected data to see if there's any more details which I missed the first time around.

A twist of fate sees me heading to Rockhampton later this morning. It's a great opportunity to get some nonames and beef up the surrounding data. It's only got very rudimentary coverage so far, and there's a lot of towns & roads missing.

I would have loved to take my bike with me and survey that way, but it turns out my sister borrowed the bike rack for some reason, and never got around to returning it. I'm disappointed, but not mad.

Anyhow, I've got myself a few Walking Papers of the area I'm staying and the CBD, so hopefully combined with a little set of binoculars I inherited, the vast distances I'd otherwise have to cover will be reduced to a level 14 zoom level.

Anyway, I've got to run. There's a 9 hour drive ahead, and I want to get some standing up in my system before I leave.

Went for a data collection adventure today with a pal of mine who lives in Burpengary. We covered some extraordinary amount of distance, and now the main urban area of Burpengary is looking a lot more complete.

Most of the day consisted of collecting nonames, but on my way home, I took a detour and found a couple of previously un-traced estates. I'm getting pretty good at zooming around streets on my bike, so I'm getting pretty quick with this kind of real-world tracing.

The Osmarender hasn't caught up yet, so I can't tell how complete the road names are, but I imagine there's probably only one or two stragglers I've left behind. There's a few gaps in the landuse coverage, but I'm not too concerned about that.

It's not like I'm anywhere near finished though. There's a few areas to the south-west which still need some serious love, including at least one brand new estate that requires manually tracing.

I'm not sure I could be bothered trekking out so far any more though. There's still so much to do in my own area, and it's a lot cheaper being within cycling distance. I'm sure I'll probably still end up attempting to finish the area, but it's such an open-ended project, and I don't think It'll ever actually feel finished.

Anyway, I'm ruined after the workout today. Excuse any rambling. I'm going to go grab some sleep.

Just quickly, if anyone else is in need of combined maplint + map tiles, I wrote a quick PHP script to download, combine the two, and serve them. Supports rudimentary caching, as well.

I've been missing the noname maps since they stopped updating minutely, and now they're almost completely useless. So I'm using these tiles on my phone instead, which show the maplint layer on top of the Mapnik. It's ugly, but at least I've got recent nonames data.

Query string format is http://foo/foo.php?a=x&b=y&c=z

I went out on the bike and did Carseldine, Fitzgibbon, and a bit of Geebung. I think I've finished everything in the newer development areas around there where the satellite imagery starts to flake out. It's starting to look pretty too.

There's a few nonames and a fair few parks and things that might be better to do with walking papers, but other than that the area's looking pretty complete road-wise. It's been fun. :)

The issue that's concerning me today is to do with pedestrian routing. I've traditionally placed parks and commons a small distance away from the road, mostly because it just seems to be the done thing.

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I'll never know, but I'm really sick of missing streets when I'm editing, then packing away my traces & waypoints never to be seen again.

I keep looking back at areas I've "finished" only to find street names missing, and in one case I've literally surveyed the area four times and still somehow managed to still miss tagging a street name.

There's not a bug that'll drop some changes when uploading at all, is there? I just can't believe I'm that careless, and months on I just couldn't be bothered sorting through my logs to correct the errors. Lamelame.

I'm fairly interested in railway stations and the associated micromapping that comes with them.

One particular thing that I'm interested in is getting platforms to render nicely on the main layer. It's not one of those crucial things, and obviously nobody's been interested enough to push it through to date, but once you start mapping at a higher level of detail, you'll get odd gaps in your map where platforms should be.

I noticed that some of the platforms around Brisbane started rendering sometime after the new API was released, and thought that maybe something had changed. Upon further observation I found that someone had simply added the tag "building=platform" so it would render as a building. This is wrong whichever way you look at it.

Then it occurred to me that because platforms are routable (area=yes,) and always allow pedestrian access (except I presume in some fringe cases,) so why not add the tag highway=footway and render it as a general purpose pedestrian area?

I implemented this on my local railway station, and it now renders rather sportingly as a light grey area on the Mapnik layer. I then went and applied it to the other station with the broken building tag, but it's yet to update.

I know what you're thinking, "Don't tag for the rendered!" and you're right, but I'd argue that this isn't necessarily a hack. I'd argue that it makes routing easier because it can direct pedestrian traffic along a platform (where appropriate) instead of having to know whether railway=platform can be traversed. I'd also put forward that if the Mapnik stylesheet ever were to be updated to reflect platforms they should render like this anyway because it's a neutral colour, keeps with the existing colour scheme, and is perfectly clear as to what it is.

So there's my justification, what's your opinion? Hack or neat trick? Should we work on the Mapnik stylesheet to implement this the “right” way, or would you consider this an appropriate measure?

Yesterday when I was out mapping, I collected enough street numbers mapping one smaller estate, that I was able to interpolate the majority of the numbers in the estate myself.

It's got me thinking; previously when I've been collecting house numbers and address information, I run around with my phone camera and geotag photos of people's letterboxes, but this is a really mundane and repetitive process, especially importing everything into JOSM.

Instead, it might be more worth my while making a note of the house number on either side of the street, only at crucial areas, like corners. This is what I did yesterday, and I was able to use the Yahoo imagery to work out roughly where the rest of the house numbers were supposed to go. I got about sixty addresses out of nine waypoints (with two addresses per waypoint, one for each side of the road.)

Because I don't have to swap from GPS mode to geotag mode on my phone, I can collect addresses at the same time I'm doing a general survey of the area. This makes it a lot more practical to get more comprehensive data for urban areas.

You can check out the area I'm talking about (it's linked to this entry.) I'm always interested in feedback, so let me know if/how you collect this kind of data.

Lost a two-hour edit session tonight.

I'm really not impressed with myself, having done it all in one big lump, and finding out someone else had edited underneath. Unfortunately JOSM was unable to reconcile the differences.

To add insult to injury, some of the edits that messed me up were the same as the ones I'd spent several hours earlier collecting. It's really, really disappointing, and now it's twenty past midnight and I've got sweet little anything to show for my work.

Things I lost include:

• Updates to Chermside shopping centre, including car park and landuse designations, a duplication of two-lane ways, and a tidy-up of the traffic lights.
• The majority of the Downfall Creek bikeway, including water taps, notable buildings, connecting trails, road crossings, updated waterway designations, bridges, tunnels, and several new estates adjacent.
• Numerous incidental edits between Chermside and Taigum, including postboxes, names, node cleanup, and alignment.
• Three new estates, including previously untraced stuff, parks, common areas, landuse designations and about a hundred Karlsruhe Schema addresses interpolated from painstaking satellite examination.

And right now the only thing I feel like is cvffvat and ovgpuvat about how bad-off I am. You can un-rot13 the previous sentence if you feel the need to read the low-level expletives I thought the OSM diary pages could do without.

I know it's my own fault for doing it all in one big blob, but who edits in Brisbane, anyway?

I had a dream about OpenStreetMap last night.

I had a dream that a fellow mapper in the area had micromapped some random town down to the nth degree. It was brilliant, and it made me realise we need some lovin' on the mapnik layer.

For the longest time it's been my opinion that there needs to be some kind of grid system to line up points and ways, because as it stands it's very difficult to get an accurate satellite trace turn out as an aesthetically pleasing map. The orthogonalise feature in JOSM is nice, but more often than not it will skew things differently, so you've got nice even buildings that are all out of line with each other.

With a lower resolution grid in the editor, you could sacrifice accuracy by a tiny margin but make everything look aligned and oh so much nicer. Imagine a street-front that's not all wonky! (My own case in point., it's just too difficult to line everything up.)

It's also my opinion that we need some nicer icons. This is something I can at least help with; if there's sufficient community support I can come up with a new scheme. I quite admire the CloudMade rendering, with the little tile-like images although perhaps if we were to come up with an unified OSM colour scheme, we could do even better.

I'm not sure if any of this is viable. Is there enough interest for a new icon scheme? Would a snap-to-grid feature in JOSM be all that useful? I don't know, discuss. :)

I was told I had to come up with an amusing blog post chronicling my adventures this afternoon, so this is it I guess.

Disclaimer: The following content may indeed not be amusing. Continue reading at your peril.

I mounted my bicycle this afternoon in the aim of cleaning up some more nonames and getting some footpaths I knew existed out of the way.

I loaded my phone up with maps, and headed off from my place and down the Boondall Wetlands bikeway. It took me through to the back of the entertainment centre, and the fun started from there.

I surveyed a few different bits (and quite a lot more than I'd intended to,) starting with the little grassed parkland at the edge of the wetlands. I continued through to take a trace of a long and seemingly completely useless footpath through the entertainment centre, and then went on a contorted journey around the streets of Boondall, collecting street names all the while.

It was really quite good, and nothing like the last time I tried to cycle-map. This time the area was (relatively) flat, and I presume the exercise I've been getting recently has given me more endurance. The only time I actually felt tired in the three hours of cycling was when I was powering down St Vincents Road on my way home, going a little faster than 30 km/hour.

I'd like to be able to say that after of all that, I've finally completed the area. There's still a bunch of dumb aisle roads through the car park in the entertainment centre though, as well as a dumb tertiary road through the southern-most estate that has three different names, of which I've only got two. Other than that the area's looking pretty good, and could probably be declared complete (to the right of Sandgate Road, at least,) after a little perfectionist landuse tweaking.

I've also been experimenting with multipolygon relations to punch holes in some of the larger areas, but judging by the render at the moment, I think I may have messed it up.

Just got home from the Brisbane OSM meet-up crossed with the local Twitterers' meetup, and thought I'd do the sensible thing and post a slightly drunken diary entry on OpenStreetMap. That's a logical thing to do, right?

It was a good night, in any case. David Dean organised pizzas early so by the time I arrived (and spent five or so minutes looking for everybody) the pizzas were already ready.

It was a pretty massive turnout by Brisbane OSM standards, there were seven people who actually turned up. I'm not sure if the others got lost (like I did) or just failed to show up, but though it was slightly less that I expected, it was still a great turn-out.

David did a JOSM demonstration, and there was some discussion of metadata and top secret projects.

After the place closed (at half past 8 PM) we went out and did a brief mapping expedition around the University campus before catching the ferry out to the other event.

Hello everybody. I'm writing today to tell you that I've got one monster-massive GPX file that needs to be pored over.

It's this year's accumulated traces from my parents' caravan Australia-touring expeditions, and since OziExplorer is such a difficult application to use, I've only now found out how to export the damn track. You might notice it's all in one big blob.

In any case, I can't go through the entire thing on my own, and indeed I couldn't be bothered having already been through a fair portion of it, so now it's your turn. Check out my edit history to see which bits I've been working on, and have a look if there's anything you'd care to chew on.

Edit: on second viewing, that track's showing up in the ocean. I've absolutely no idea how that happened, but I'll have to sort it out later.

I did some more tracing around Rockhampton, last night. I figured it would be a good test of my newly working Yahoo layer, and if the data's there why not make the most of it?

I maybe doubled the suburban street coverage, and then extended down south west until the high resolution maps ran out. I'm not sure how well aligned they are to reality, but it's better'n nothing. Someone local can go through and finish them off. :)

Here's some comparison shots I took because I thought it was cool.

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After my last few days of field mapping, I figured I'd spend today catching up on my data entry. I finally got WMS fixed on my Ubuntu 9.04/JOSM setup, so I've been doing satellite tracing and whatnot that I've neglected since it first broke in April.

Things I've done today include:

• Tracing some extra bits and pieces over the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, and getting that more up to scratch. Now the only thing left to do is trace a few of the footways I've doubtlessly missed, notably one that runs along the Western boundary.


• Straightened and tuned some landuse boundaries I'd guesstimated around Boondall. Added the greenway/common area, and fixed some bits and pieces.


• Added the shopping/retail complex where Gympie Road splits into the M3 (Bunnings, Aldi, and other places I've not mapped.)


• Added some railway stations based on memory and the satellite maps. Carseldine (added the third line, and some platforms,) as well as Nudgee, through to Sandgate with both platforms and additional line corrections.


• Added some landuse designations around Boondall based on satellite maps. I had to stop myself here or else I'll end up covering the entire of Brisbane. At this point I think landuse=residential is probably more practical as a "I was here, this area's done" tool than anything else.


• Fixed up some more Narangba, from the satellite images. This area's skewed, so it's difficult to align correctly. Will have to work it out later.

Overall, it's been a productive afternoon for OpenStreetMap.

Starting a health kick, I decided to hike (read: powerwalk) to Boondall and do some mapping. I always surprise myself how comprehensively I'll cover an area, just by going for a walk.

I ended up spending a little over three hours on my trip, but a lot of that was spent walking there and/or waiting for public transport to take me home. There's only about eight streets I missed, but I'm thinking a daytime trip (night time is a bit creepy) through the greenway where the cycling paths are, and I can get most of those streets because they back onto it.

I'm planning a few trips out to that general area, because it's within a convenient walking distance from my new abode. I might eventually get around to fixing up the entertainment centre one day, too, because it also needs some love.

Bring on the mapping!

I've finished!

Well, I've finished the little bit I was focusing on, anyhow.

I've spent probably one hundred years working on the area (actually I only did about four trips out there over a period of about six months) and now it's finally done. I missed one street, but I can probably get my nephew to grab the name of it for me sometime.

I did get streets, cycle ways, foot paths, parks (and park names where applicable) and I estimated some stream/drainage routes. They're not super-accurate, but I figure the entire greenway turns into a river when there's any kind of heavy rain anyway so it doesn't matter that much.

I didn't get lot numbers, because — let's face it — at some point in the future we're going to inevitably acquire and import a database of street numbers from somewhere, so any half-arsed work in the interim probably isn't going to make that much difference. I'm a bit jaded, like that.

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I took a few trips out to Darra to do some mapping over the last week.

The first time it was a nice sunny afternoon until I got there. Then it became a rainy, blustery, truly miserable evening. I got caught under a shelter in a park I didn't get a chance to map, waiting for the train to stop.

Not content to get caught out just the once, I decided to push on after the rain stopped. In the stupid dark, I proceeded to traipse down badly lit streets, mud-slicked construction areas, and eventually found myself quite unexpectedly stranded once more; this time under a really decrepit bus shelter.

By the time I got home, my jeans were covered in silty mud, and my demeanour had been thoroughly drenched by the rains. My hardware was all right, because it was only really wet enough to make everything *feel* miserable, not actually penetrate my backpack.

The second time around was great. I covered the north side of the train line. Aside some guard dogs in an industrial area (scary turds, them,) blocking access to a cycleway, and a particularly large spider dangling over the footpath (even scarier turds, them,) it was a good night.

It's not a particularly interesting area, but now it's seemingly complete. That extends the little corridor of completedness out a little further along the Ipswich line.

I've yet to add my changes from tonight, but you can be certain they'll be finished by midnight. [Edit: I lied. I forgot. I got caught up. It happens.]

Went a little bit crazy recently with the mapping. It's an awesome hobby, and it's a dangerous distraction from real life.

In the past few days I've got a few more streets and names in the little pocket of Narangba I've been mapping. I've also gone through and marked out residential areas and leisure areas along the greenway in that area too.

I've added a load of residential zoning in and around Banyo, mostly from memory and local knowledge. I went as far out as I could before I started getting too fuzzy on the details so I'm not concerned there's many mistakes, especially looking at somewhere like Toowoomba where the landuse=residential has been applied liberally and without bias.

I've also been upgrading the railways with more detail. I say "upgrading" but I'm really of two minds as to whether I'm mutilating them or doing a service for railfans everywhere. I'm a bit biased in that I love the intricate details, of multiple rails, platforms, underpasses and whatnot that I'm adding but I'm not entirely sure if it's healthy for the overall map. No other map goes into such minute detail as individual lines without a good reason, so maybe in the future when the map data starts getting massive, this can be another cycle-map style spin-off, leaving the main render with a simpler version? I don't know.

I also went for a little walk around Toombul with a pal of mine and we got the same footways that David Dean added just days earlier. The minutely updated/noname tiles aren't updating any more, so I didn't know it had already been done when we set out. Still, I got some extra streets that didn't exist on the map (another living street too, second I've found in Brisbane!) and filled out some other small details.

And I just uploaded my backlog of GPS traces. I kind of doubled up on a few older ones by mistake, but it's far too much effort to work out which, and delete them manually. I ought to write a script to, though.

I got roped in to travelling to Caboolture to see a friend this afternoon, and it was the first time I actually got the time and incentive to do some on-the-ground OpenStreetMapping done.

Caboolture is one of those awkward areas right on the edge of satellite coverage. The imagery available is skewed terribly, and as such nobody likes tracing the roads and whatnot. It's not much fun having to line them up again at the end.

In any case, I got some nonames, had a sausage roll, and then tried to get some bearings on the railway station.

I'd love to be able to micromap the area, but as it was even my traces were inaccurate. I'm not sure what the problem was because I usually get almost accurate reads, but tonight everything was just wonky. I've only now found out that I can use A-GPS to augment my GPS data over the network, but I've yet to work out how to do that.

It was really an awkward time to be running around. It was dark, I had a load of cash in my wallet that I forgot to put in the bank, and my laptop was in my backpack. A recipe for no end of failure in the dark reaches of Caboolture. I'm glad I didn't get mugged, really.