@b-unicycling

Yes, different iterations of Bing in the Dublin area was my first thought, and I am very aware of the timeframe this task was open. I opened a task for 12 hours – as an experiment – using an overpass query for objects dated prior to the last change and tagged as landuse=construction. When I checked these out very little, other than temporary construction tags were different, and I couldn’t find a single example of a building that was on the current bing that wasn’t at least outlined by mappers.

From what I can see, the sheer huge number of gaps relating

1. mixed up offsets (more than 2 per tile)
2. incomplete geomettry (extensions to the side and rear of buildings not attempted)
3. completely missed garages, sheds, service buildings and farm buildings
4. lack of effort in inspecting extant objects for size
5. ratio of building=yes contributions per tile when the correct tag is obvious

These gaps cannot plausably be the caused by the difference in imagery. These are more like a systematic approach to mapping tiles that emphasises speed over accuracy and is leaving the full completion of the task to someone else.

I will provide more and more evidence of the above. What’s troubling is that tiles continue to be marked as complete as recent as yesterday with no effort to address the validator feedback and numberous reminders of the task instructions.

This is awesome, I love that osm is, for the moment, the only place where everything is recorded. I also wouldn’t discount how capturing these features is a huge step forward in conserving them against destruction.

In terms of what caused you to see these needs to be said (apart from osm and a campaign passing through rural and urban Ireland mapping buildings #osmIRL_buildings) the background is two record breaking dry summers in 2020 and 2021, off which the ESRI and Bing imagery is based.

It has been separately reported by the Irish Times that the NMS is dealing with a large number of reports, including on the ground visual sightings that might be archaeologically significant. Very sudden drying out of soil shifts things around, some of which you and others now see.

Well done on this. I hope you keep finding things.

Super work, but in the rest of the country the same lag would be more significant. Its good that you discovered 100 extra buildings, but all the same look at how many were added after the task was conplete with the 2017 imagery, and you see them being added throughout that time. The tagging changes are just as important as the location of a building too, as they give a much richer consequent picture of landuse.

Well done, long live the private task because it makes for consistency.

I’m glad that our efforts to engage caused the server to be rebooted and the issues cleared up.

I think that while fieldpapers is not an editor as such, mappers need to have a diversity of such tools in place to encourage craft-mappers. I used fieldpapers several times in the #MapLesotho with groups of 12 mappers who walked all over a village called Lencer’s Gap outside the capital city in 2016.

The benefits of the tool are that it allows a group of surveyors to split up and cover ground and meet in the middle somewhere when finished. The group agreed a shorthand before going out, H=house, S=shed, Sh=shop, and L1 for a one story building etc… that shorthand is flexible which is a positive because it allows those who don’t know the tagging schema to participate.

I am adding my voice in a request to the osmf to rescue this tool from the difficulties that it experienced in the last few years that mean it was down more often than available.

I wouldn’t deign to say this applies everywhere but the thought some of us in Ireland have had is that we have passed some critical mass point in the developed countries for people who are going to make accounts and start editing.

We have a welcome tool set up detecting our new mappers for around a year now, and I think 2022 saw 432 new signups on our island, which is basically one per day and two at weekends. This sounds great but a big amount of these are “one-node adders”, usually their own business. Others would be just checking it out and realising they couldn’t sustain interest once they add a few features. Some of the other chapters and countries are set up on this and it might be useful to draw comparisons. Nigeria for example had 500 signups in two months, and nothing for the rest of the year - which goes to show that promotional or event driven effort makes this rise and fall.

Interesting, well maybe look at it this way. In big organised pushes for mapping a particular theme like all roads or all buildings those mappers can say the area is mapped (in the strict context of doing their task). They aren’t wrong in that context, but of course more can be mapped.

Indeed every map is out of date, as would be the case with anything that tries to represent reality. If you accept that maps are representations then this isn’t a problem. There is no omnipresent force, or canonical reality possible in a map, however, electronic maps are miles more useful to end users, than paper ones. All the same we all work with 1-3 year old, often badly rectified Bing, Maxar and ESRI so, without loads of regular surveying and GPS capture this will always be a limitation somewhere.

Thanks for your diary post though.