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Diary Entry Some Thoughts on Phantom Fords

Many OSM validators will report an error if a waterway crosses a highway without some additional tags or structure at the intersection, such as a b...

Comments 0 comments Date July 24, 2025

Diary Entry The State of GNIS Imports into OSM

This diary entry is also available as a personal page on the OSM wiki. Some History of GNIS Imports GNIS is a database developed by USGS that con...

Comments 1 comment Date June 05, 2024

Diary Entry A Glossary of Tags for Landforms

In the course of working with GNIS data from the US Geological Survey, I’ve sometimes been frustrated with the limited range of expression in OSM t...

Comments 7 comments Date June 25, 2023

Diary Entry How to Build a Personal Overpass Server on a Tiny Budget

The GNIS matching project I’ve been working on uses a lot of Overpass queries to find things in OSM. At some point during the project, I needed a f...

Comments 4 comments Date March 30, 2023