I meant to say that can you use this to create a neat set of data showing number of active users in past year (No personal data needs to be shown), & in the past month and other important useful data.

This post is a technical one that is explaining how it works, I was just asking for a post/comment with judt data (such as num. Active mappers)

P.S. what is OSMF’s definition of an active mapper?

Very useful.

Can you post the active user stats here? I don’t think this is somethinf I will do myself.

What does point 11 mean?

Can you be more specific about point 9?

As for point 6, would you prefer a town full of address numbers or a suburb of that town with housenumbers, fences and gardens? I would definitely prefer the former.

quite useful.

However, I am really confused about the wiki page. Pressing Ctrl-F and searching “Streetcomplete”, “osmand”, “JOSM” yields no results. Why is this?

Seems like that user hasn’t made an edit in three years. They have stopped contributing to OSM, doubt they will see this. If you want to know directly, you could try contacting them directly through the message function, although most likely you won’t get a response.

why are people spamming the openstreetmap user diaries page with ads

Thanks for the mention!

As you probably know from reading my entry, I prefer method 2 for terracing buildings (split the terrace into individual houses and mark them as “building=house”). This is because it is easier for software to understand that the “building:part” method, it is also easier to do and it is more detailed than marking the whole terrace as “building=terrace”.

As for my diary entry, it is not meant for new mappers as they won’t know how to use JOSM. My diary entry assumes you can use JOSM already.

Also, your link to the osm wiki doesn’t work, you have to put “https://” before “wiki.openstreetmap.org”

As for the main osm map, yes it is not that good. You can right click (or hold on mobile) and “query features” to get more info about a point of interest.

Looking at the map of Ravenshead, you have inputted housenumbers. What did you use to do this? Streetcomplete? Fieldpapers? Keypadmapper? Qwant maps provides a more user friendly interface.

I translated it, it is an ad

Wow why is someone spamming the openstreetmap user diaries.😆

Oh, and also, a high quality out-of-copyright map of buildings & housenumbers in London exists

tms:https://geo.nls.uk/mapdata3/os/ldn_tile/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png

(Add that as an imagery source in JOSM).

This is many, many decades ago, so lots of construction and destruction has taken place since then, meaning that some of that map won’t be of much use. However, quite a lot will be useful. User “spiregrain” mapped the housenumbers & buildings of “Stratford New Town” in London using this map.

Hello, I am quite late to the party, but I just wanted to mention one other method of collecting housenumbers that no-one mentioned - Streetcomplete.

Streetcomplete is far more accessible to newer mappers, meaning anyone can enter housenumbers into the database. Just recently, Streetcomplete was improved slightly to make housenumber entry faster.

The disadvantage is that you have to draw properly terraced buildings first. This may be harder without having housenumbers, but usually you can do it by looking at the fences seperating people’s backyards.

I wrote a full guide on how to draw buildings (in JOSM) and make them StreetComplete compatible.

Doing this, newer users will be able to enter very important information (housenumbers)

@coolmule0

This guide isn’t meant for new mappers, as they won’t know how to use JOSM. This guide assumes you can use JOSM.

I get your point about advertising. I tried reddit (didn’t get much attention there). The diary isn’t read by that many intermediate mappers. I would assume more of the people who read this diary are advanced mappers. I tried entering it into the “weeklyOSM” news, but that is also probably read by advanced mappers.

I don’t really know what can be done to advertise this to more intermediate mappers. Maybe a youtube video, but I then I would have to do a voice-over (which I can’t don & I don’t want to do).

Even then that would not get many views.

@CjMalone

If you terrace houses properly, “building=house” is just as accurate as other tags.

For example, you could either map a single building as “building=terrace”, or you could split it into 10 individual houses. A piece of software can pick up that those 10 buildings belong to a terrace, because buildings in the middle share 2 nodes with a building on one side, and 2 nodes with a building on another side.

Therefore, if you terrace buildings properly, tags such as “buidling=semi_detached” is unnecessary - the software that is reading OSM data can figure this out on its own, as long as you mark it as “building=house”.

Even “building=detached” is just as accurate as “building=house”, because if a building is marked as “building=house”, and it does not share two nodes with another building, then it is a detached house. That being said, however, it is more explicit to mark it as building=detached.

This means that you should use those tags (building=semi_detachedhouse, building=terrace) if you did NOT terrace a building, or you cannot tell if you should terrace it or not.

Because of this, I see no problem with using building=house extravagantly, as long as you terrace the buildings properly.

You can read more about building=house vs building=semi_detached on the openstreetmap wiki.

@CJMalone

Yes, but if you are offline it will not then continue to ask for the housenumber.

Even if you are online while surveying, imagine how tedious it is to enter housenumbers, but now because no-one mapped the houses properly you have to map building type as well as street name. That is three quests per building.

Furthermore, if you tag your building as “building=house”, that indicates you have terraced it properly. “building=yes” does not indicate this. If it is not terraced properly, then that makes entered house numbers a lot less useful or even impossible (as you have to enter multiple housenumbers for a single “building”).

That is why I recommend drawing buildings properly (i.e. spliting a “building=terrace” into 10 seperate attached “building=house”), and add the tags. It should make other tasks going forward a looot easier.

As for OpenData, I’m pretty sure no open vector data for buildings exists in the UK. Housenumbers are also not available in vector for under an open license.

The Property Locator “OS Open UPRN” is useful, but it slightly offset frrom the actual houses, sometimes making it less useful.

Inspire polygons doesn’t seem that much use in my area. Entire streets are mapped as a single building.

@ndrw6

I have already mentioned how to quickly select multiple buildings in the “freeselect & utilsplugin2” section. I’m assuming that people already know how to add tags in JOSM (if they know JOSM, they should be able to), so I didn’t cover the “Alt-A” shortcut.

What is the “split areas” function? I saw it mentioned in your diary entry about how you started using JOSM. I don’t really understand what it does. Is there a video tutorial, or a “gif” that shows how it works?

As for the import postcodes, I mentioned that in one of my previous comments under this diary entry. I’m not going to put that in the actual diary entry, as it is more advanced and I think it can be done separately to drawing buildings.

What do you mean by “copy-paste” tags? Do you mean that you should copy the tags off one building and then paste them to every other one? This is what I did originally, however the more effective method is to get buildingtools to automatically apply “building=house” and “source=bing” to each house. You can then select multiple buildings using free select and utilsplugin2 and add the street name to them.

I didn’t bother tagging buildings as houses, mainly because sometimes the use of a building is not obvious (can be garages, businesses etc). But if StreetComplete needs it I’ll try to revisit buildings I’ve mapped. Thanks for the tip.

Make sure you terrace them as well. Thanks for your work.

This hasn’t been formatted properly. Make sure to leave a spare line before and after the headings/subheadings

I tried posting this on reddit, and it got 4 upvotes. The forum won’t let me post anything in the General chat, it returns an error (probably because I am a new user to the forum). Is there any way I can get many people to see this? I think at least the tagging section is important so that housenumbers in the UK & US can be entered faster.

Irritatingly, you can’t edit comments. Anyways, here is ndrw6’s diary entry on the Codepoint script:

osm.org/user/ndrw6/diary/156825

Okay. I am going to try to respond to every comment here. I also updated the post slightly based off feedback. Thank you for all the comments!

@Sanderd17 - I know there isn’t an algorithm. However, it never occured to me that my post would be seen by quite a few people through the “User Diaries” page. I thought this would be buried in the sea of posts. However, it seems there aren’t that many posts, so my single post was seen by quite a few people.

@aeonesa

The problem is, drawing extruding parts simply negates most of the huge speed benefits of Copy-Paste and the terracer plugin. This means - in the end - less buildings will be drawn. I don’t know about you, but here in the UK, you can zoom in to most areas of outer london and buildings most of the time aren’t drawn. That is not a good, especially for the most populated (and therefore mapper heavy) area of the UK.

Say for example, I wanted to draw a ten house terrace (similar to the one in the diagram). The easy way is to draw the buildings, open the terracer menu (shift-t), enter number of segments and street, then press enter. That is it. Now you have entered ten houses, very quickly.

By contrast, to add the extruding parts, you have to do it one by one, for each of the ten buildings. Using the merge buildings technique, you select a building, draw the extruding part, join with Shift+J, remove unnecessary nodes. Using extrude tool, you extrude that part of the building, merge the nodes of that extruding part with the extruding part of the next-door house, do this for every building, then orthoganalise.

At this point, if I hadn’t drawn the extruding parts, I probably could have drawn 3 or 4 other terraced buildings like this.

Semi detached houses face a different problem. Ignoring extruding parts means you can quickly copy dozens of semi-detached houses accross a street. If this house is slightly bigger or smaller, you can easily resize what you have copied (Ctrl-alt-mouse). What happens if you try to extrude the building? Well, if the extrusions are the same for every single semi-detached house, then maybe it is a good idea do draw the extrusion for the first house, then copy. However, if the extrusion is different for every single house, but the general shape is the same, you have to manually add the extrusions for every single one.

In other words, it is either pressing CTRL-V 10 times or carefully adding parts to each building, one by one.

What is the end result of all of this? Well, effectively, since you have spent so much time carefully drawing houses in your local area, when some new user 50km away from you logs into StreetComplete, they will not be presented with any housenumber tasks, meaning that a big oppurtunity for this critical data to be added to the map was missed. And that will lead to some user down the line downlaoding an OSM based application but deleting it after realising that it can’t even geocode housenumbers.

Of course, extrusions can be added later, but I think right now it is very important to get as many buildings drawn accurately (and by that I mean in the right position) as quickly as possible. This isn’t “taking the fame”. If someone else decides to add the extrusions to thousands of the buildings that were drawn later, then that person will be displayed in the building history. The fact that their changeset edited hundreds of buildings will be shown on osm.

Note: I have added a notice underneath the image saying that “unnecessary” is a strech. Also, I archived the images using wayback machine, but wayback machine seems to have deleted them. You should modify your comment by removing the “web.archive.org” section of the image, and only leave behind the imgur section. I also quickly edited the image to remove the word “unnecessary”. (It looks bad because I did it using my screenshot software called “flameshot”, not with an actual image editor. I’ll do it better in a few days).

@InsertUser

The problem is, most of the extrusions are at the back of the building, and therefore provide no advantage whatsoever when surveying. On top of this, I don’t think the extrusions are the best way of telling which building corresponds to which housenumber. What I do (as I have done some streetcomplete housenumber surveys), is look to see the where a building ends and the next one starts. For example, when surveying semi-detached houses, I see which part of the semi-detached house I am trying to add the housenumber of (e.g. is it the south side of the semi-detached house, or north side), and compare it to the map. This way, unless I am off by two buildings, I can enter the housenumber into the correct building on the map.

For terraced buildings, I see how many houses from the current house that I am trying to enter and the house on the end of the terrace. I can compare this to the map to, and enter the housenumber into the correct house. Unless I am off by an entire terrace, this is usually fine.

This is something you can get used to, and is done quickly in your head (after all it is just some counting). All of these tricks are also just used to make sure that GPS offset isn’t screwing me over - GPS is mostly fine anyway.

Besides, getting the housenumber off by one house isn’t the biggest problem when it comes to routing.

@kucai

Why do you prefer nodes? Nodes in a terrace don’t line up in a straight line unlike buildings. What do you mean by lighter maps? I think buildings make a cleaner viewing experience as it shows where one housenumber ends and the next one starts.

@spiregrain

I tried using the out of copyright maps, however the quality is significantly lower than that of Bing. For example, oftentimes I can see that a building is a terrace of four individual houses since I can see three fences in the backyard. However, with this imagery, oftentimes such a terrace with four houses looks like a semi-detached house (i.e. only two individual houses). I don’t think any imagery or data source will be able to outcomete bing in the UK, unless for some reason OS decide to release their newest maps under a free license, which won’t happen.

As for imagery offset, I don’t really think much can be done about this. JOSM and many people always warn that you should GPS tracks. However, I don’t find these to be useful. For example, on major roads, there are lots of GPS tracks the range from one side of the road to the other. This doesn’t provide much help. On smaller roads, where there is one track, it doesn’t provide much use either, because you don’t know if they were cycling/walking instead of driving. If you align the imagery so that this track is in the middle of the road, your imagery will be misaligned because actually the GPS trace was on the side of the road.

Also, the “OS OpenData Streetview” map which you can enable via the imagery dropdown in JOSM is quite bad, at least for buildings. In my town, many of the buildings were drawn years ago using this imagery… and they’re awful. These buildings are often drawn bigger than the actual ones, sometimes one drawn building equates to 3 buildings in real life, etc. Oftentimes when I am drawing buildings in that area, I simply delete the existing ones drawn using OS imagery and draw them again using Bing. Sometimes however, the buildings are accurate, however they haven’t been terraced. In this case I can simply terrace them using the terracing tool. The OS imagery does not show detached vs non-detached houses, and the new imagery you showed me still isn’t that good.

As for Postcodes, in my imagery dropdown, an imagery called “UK POSTCODES” shows up. I just installed a fresh copy of JOSM onto another computer to check, and that imgaery wasn’t there. However, the “historic imagery” that you talked about was there. I definately do not remember adding any new tiles to my copy of JOSM. Maybe that is bad memory. That being said, if historic map tiles show up automatically in the imagery dropdown, I see no reason that this “UK POSTCODES” tiles can’t automatically be available if you zoom to the UK.

Speaking of postcodes, user ndrw6 created an script that allows you to convert codepoint postcodes into nodes in OSM, which can be then merged with the closest building. See a [diary entry for it here], and here is it’s Github repository. I found about about this because ndrw6 has added all the postcodes in my area. I think this is probably a better way of adding postcodes than doing it manually.

Okay, I checked, and it is pretty high up on the “User Diaries” section. That is probably why.

I just logged in. How on EARTH did this get 12 comments? Who found this? I hadn’t advertised it on any forum or anything.