Russ,

Great to see you writing here again. That’s awesome that you’re going to FOSS4G! I’m only planning on getting to the St. Louis one this year. Hope to see you again soon. I guess we’ll talk tomorrow!

– Jim

Awesome news!

Thanks for all the great work you’re putting into this project! I am excited to use the new imagery for our marathons and import tasks! Keep it up!

This is great! Congratulations and happy mapping! 🎉

I’m an OSM Mapper in Somerset County, NJ. I have made a lot of edits in Carteret, but rarely get out there to do on-the-ground mapping. Let me know if you need any help getting started, or hit up the Slack or IRC groups that Clifford mentioned.

These boundaries seem to be the same as the ones used by the NPS for their web maps and the upcoming Cape Hatteras app. Although I think the bigger issue is that the rendering is a solid color when the boundary includes both land and sea. The NPS uses a transparent fill on its maps, and I think that’s the best approach.

I wanted to post an update on the situation, as we are still working with the same struggle.

We have not been able to use OSM data directly for Public Domain uses, but we have found a few usable solutions.

1. We can use a tool to determine where people are making changes in parks and determine if changes need to be made in our internal OSM systems as well.
2. We done a lot of work with conflation and translation efforts, allowing people in the parks to maintain their own data in any format they prefer, and bringing that information into our OSM based system.
3. We have been exploring the use of crowdsourcing tools to allow people to run conflation tasks from our systems into OpenStreetMap so that our public domain edits can be used by a wider audience.

Hey Alan,

This is Jim from NPMap. Thanks for using the #parktiles hashtag!

For various reasons (licensing and accountability) we cannot use data directly from OpenStreetMap inside the parks. Although we do use it outside of the parks.

I would also encourage you to add our “Park Tiles” to iD as a custom layer http://b.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/nps.397cfb9a,nps.3cf3d4ab,nps.b0add3e6/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoibnBzIiwiYSI6IkdfeS1OY1UifQ.K8Qn5ojTw4RV1GwBlsci-Q

This will allow you to digitize from our information, which is in the public domain, and completely free to add to OpenStreetMap.

I know a professor at Bates College is interested in getting more students involved in OSM, especially within the Parks, so I’ll reach out to her to see if anyone wants to help!

Thanks again!

– Jim NPMap Profile

Glad you enjoy editing! There’s a lot to be done. While the gov in the US may have made OSM a slower start in the US, they have been getting on board with using OpenStreetMap recently. One example is the USGS National Map Corps Project.

Hope you stay and keep on editing! There is still a lot to be done!

I was going to reply with roughly the same information as TomH.

I think this kind of task may be better for a tool like MapRoulette than an automated script. The remaining St tags may be ones that are difficult for the existing bots to pick up, and my be ambiguous between “Street”, “Saint”, or another value (“State” comes to mind).

Paul, thanks for pointing that out. Public Domain is a big deal for the US Federal Government, but most governments around the world, and even local governments in the United States release their data under more restrictive licenses.

I’m not advocating that OpenStreetMap adopts a public domain license or that we create a completely separate OpenStreetMap that is in the public domain. I am looking good way that contributors can add information that can be reviewed by the US Government and incorporated into their maps. This information can then be used to improve OpenStreetMap.

davespod, I like your method of using an account specifically for Bing edits. I read over the original license agreement, and you are correct that no license was specified. It looks like the data is really only allowed to be used in an online editor:

The rights that you have under this agreement are limited solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor application of OpenStreetMap maps (an “Application”).

I’m not as sure what this sentence is meant to mean: >Any updates you make to the OpenStreetMap map via the Application (even if not published to third parties) must be contributed back to openstreetmaps.org.

If you’re only allowed to use the imagery with an application on openstreetmap.org, how would you contribute to other sites?

There is some more information in the wiki about the restrictions when using Bing imagery,

At least for US government use, NAIP imagery is released as public domain.

Minh, Thanks! I guess spellcheck got me!

Issues with your system

It sounds like you want to base socialization off of datasets. I could envision this being implmented as having a discussion attached to each node, way, or area in the database. Flickr is linking images with OSM data in what could be a similar way. http://code.flickr.net/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too-dorky-even-for-us/

Machine tags / hidden tags

@ebwolf brought this up as a way to make sure your tags stay in the larger openstreetmap system.

The hidden tags would prevent people from deleting them or getting confused on what to do with them.

The way that the USGS system works, it basically removes the ability to use the Advanced tab in Potlatch2. This is one way to restrict what the users can edit, see, and remove.

@wonderchook brings up some good points on why this could create a problem. The USGS system is so locked down that we don’t see a lot of issues, but it is a possibility.

If you’re going to use tags specific to your project, I would just add them in your project with a prefix and combine them with standard tags as well, like a machine tag:

"moabi:water_rights", "group_1"
"waterway", "river"

If you do conflate your information with the larger OpenStreetMap dataset, you can leave your tags in. But someone can go in and delete your extra tags.

I think for future imports to OSM from the USGS GNIS database, I will try to maintain a list of the node ids that are associated with the GNIS ids so that people can delete them in OpenStreetMap, but the information will not be lost. This is something you could keep track of in your system as well.

Pros for using OpenStreetMap

• If your data license is compatible, information can be imported back imto the main OSM database
• There are a lot of great tools out there that can easily be used with your platform (JOSM, ID, mobile apps)
• The planet.osm file itself has a lot of great tooling built around it.
• A lot of issues with OSM have been brought up and discussed, and at least partially solved. This means you can spend more time mapping and less time worrying about problems.

Cons for using OpenStreetMap

• It forces you to use the OpenStreetMap data model
• It may be quicker to create tools that edit the map with other platforms.
• Although there are easy ways to convert OpenStreetMap/Planet data, it still might be easier to use a system that supports a more standard format natively.

I did get a chance to talk to the NPS about their data, and since most of their data is in the public domain, they have no problem allowing it to be imported to OSM.

Really cool stuff, I was going to suggest to look at how OpenCycleMap deals with the missing data, but it appears they have missing data as well (http://opencyclemap.org/?zoom=10&lat=34.96305&lon=-79.92216&layers=B000)

That's a real shame too, because the site it pretty cool. I definitely believe that OpenStreetMap needs to be cited in this case. Do they have any webmaster contact information?

It's not so clear cut as that though, I have found it referenced as West 10th St on a few other maps:
http://gis.solanocounty.com/solanomaps/ <- from the county map data
http://tnm2beta.cr.usgs.gov/viewer/ <- USGS National Map view

Although the City Map doesn't have the street at all:
http://www.ci.benicia.ca.us/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={6AB7C04C-3AE2-4902-81A9-3A94CC0D2BE3}

I would assume the information comes from the TIGER database and wasn't copied to OSM from Google Maps.

Most people make GPX files from their GPS units, if you have a GPS or an iPhone you may be able to make GPX traces. If you don't have those technologies, you can edit maps directly from aerial imagery. The above link should be able to help you with both approaches.

(via @sch_dk on twitter) some guy from paraguay uploaded 1.3 Gb GPX file to #openstreetmap and now the pending queue is growing :O