I've been doing lots of updates using the new Bing imagery; it seems to be pretty good and it's invaluable for filling in details of places that are difficult or impossible to physically survey. Today I've updated some mapping of the town of Somersham, which I mapped from survey a while ago.

I don't think having aerial imagery really detracts from the fun of exploration; it does mean that some "low hanging fruit" disappears because detailed GPSing is not required. But for footpaths, bridleways, places that have changed recently, postboxes, bus-stops, etc it's still necessary to survey in person. And this is some of the "added value" detail that makes OSM so useful anyhow.

After being sadly distracted from mapping for some time I was able to get some decent surveying done whilst on a walking holiday in the Lake District.

I was surprised to see how dense the Lake District coverage already was but pleased to see that my traces still covered unsurveyed paths. So far I've only processed part of the data from one of our longer days - a walk in the hills around Grasmere.

I've now uploaded a load of new paths, locations of some cairns, benches, postboxes, assorted other landmarks and POIs. Where I judged that my surveyed paths ought to connect with (or were the same as) existing paths I tried to only modify the existing ways where I thought I could improve on the accuracy / detail of them.

The only section that I've not uploaded is a walk down some sheep tracks (as well as some trackless hillside) from the end of the day when we were a little lost and needed to cut across the hillside to get back to proper tracks and thence to the car. I'm a little unclear over whether this was technically trespassing (without looking at an OS map - which I obviously can't do - I don't know if the land was open access) and over whether this is something I should usefully include on OSM or not. Any thoughts on whether it would be appropriate would be appreciated; regardless I have still made some useful additions for the day.

Should be able to add lots more useful data from our outings, although this was probably the biggest (and hopefully the most josm-time consuming!) batch.

I've been thinking about weather forecasting and wondering if wiki-like principles could be applied to it.

It seems to me that by leveraging a wide set of data sources (which will typically be user-contributors uploading local data but may also include public domain data where appropriate) and aggregating them into one database you could get a pretty accurate "current weather" view for large areas of the world reasonably easily. On top of that, a very-near-future forecast based on e.g. prevailing winds and observations of rainclouds seems like it should also be possible with reasonable accuracy.

I'm aware that "proper" meteorology is a complex science and uses vast data sampling and computational power, so I'm not proposing a replacement for that. Maybe one day it would be feasible to do some distributed computations in order to improve forecasts from an "OpenWeatherService" without requiring a supercomputer. However I think big gains could be made with only current and short range forecast data, plus a historical archive.

Consider:
* In remote areas, an OpenWeatherService could provide more relevant data than otherwise available (as mentioned OpenWeather-related links below).
* In highly populated areas with a number of OWS contributors, finer granularity data may be possible.
* A friendly-licensed historical archive might be useful for research purposes?
* Sites like OSM have shown that just having friendly-licensed data available can be great for encouraging unexpected innovation.

Imagine if YourNavigation.org could immediately warn you "there is rain on this route". Or how about if your MID or phone could detect through GPS that you're walking out the house and beep "Take an umbrella, it's raining within 10km of here". How about city articles on Wikitravel or Wikipedia being able to show CC-licensed temperature graphs of previous years' seasonal weather. Imagine just being able to overlay weather data onto the main OSM map.

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My parents live in the suburbs of Cheltenham so whilst visiting them for Christmas I'm going to do some mapping in and around Prestbury, where I first went to school. This area is pretty sparse, with much of the existing mapping being stuff I'd filled in from a previous brief surveying trip and from memory / NPE. Hopefully I'll be able to have a more systematic go at some of it this time!

Went for a trip out to Teversham Fen today.

On the way out there I found some interesting looking paths in Fen Ditton which led along the course of an old railway line. This was a bit of a mixed bag - it looked like some care had gone into putting the paths in and making the area nice. It also looked like it's gone downhill since then - various bits of abandoned junk, beer cans, etc which seemed a shame in such a nice setting. The path ended (as far as I was concerned) at an old humpback road bridge, crossing the path of the old railway line. The bridge was covered in graffiti and there were a couple of burnt / dismantled motorbikes underneath it. I was not eager to hang around in the area and found a path leading back to the road. Seemed like a sad waste of a nice area, really. At least I was able to map (some of) the paths there.

My real destination was a pair of footpaths near Teversham Fen. I've recently put some work into extending waterways down into this area using Yahoo coverage and NPE. I knew there were paths down here and the area looked quite sparse on the map, so I wanted to fill it in. I set off down one of the paths, got some advice from a dog walker, traipsed through muddy fields for ages. Myself and my bike got very gummed up with mud - the bike picked up a vast amount even though I wasn't sitting on it. Very sticky mud, it reminded me of chocolate icing, although I didn't eat it.

Once in Teversham, I cycled down through the village, looking for the Southern end of the other path which I knew to exist - the dog walker had told me it came out somewhere down there. Finally found it and looped back up to the A1303, although along the way I discovered some more paths still to map - this always happens when I go exploring!

I've now uploaded the footpaths and done some enhancements to the detail in the area, drainage ditches, streams, woodland, etc. Hopefully in due course this area of the map will look rather less bare!

I needed some exercise and daylight yesterday, so I hauled myself down the NCN to Stow-cum-Quy to explore the footpaths there. Found one from Quy Mill across to the village itself (intimidatingly, this one went through a working farmyard, which I walked through looking anxiously around for irate farmers). There was a tiny footpath in Lode that took me to the main road, which I walked down to get to my next port of call...

A "footpath" running mostly North out of Stow-cum-Quy was already stubbed. I knew there was a rather large gated road / track running up there (saw it on Yahoo imagery) and had assumed the footpath went either parallel to that or went off in some other direction. It turned out that the (enormous) concrete track actually *was* the footpath for some distance, until it eventually shrunk into a normal-sized path some way along. The footpath went really badly signed at that point and I ended up taking a path that looked probably private (there's a really big house there and I think I strayed into its grounds a bit too far!). I backtracked from the road and mapped the correct route.

Then followed a muddy path up beside Quy Water, through the Anglesey Abbey grounds and out at Lode Mill. I found a ridiculous number of paths in Lode itself, my GPS trace looked like a web spun by a caffeine-influenced spider. I think I got most of the paths within Lode but then had to stop and go home as it was getting dark and I had work to do.

Whenever I'm out mapping footpaths I always seem to find a load more I didn't know existed - will I ever run out?

I went to visit my parents for a bit (actually, the specific timing was dictated by a dentist appointment) over the weekend. Weather was a bit cold, wet and windy but was tolerable for walking around outside with a big coat on.

I managed to map some more residential streets around Prestbury, which is the location of this diary entry. My mapping here is a bit sparse, I was walking with my parents who are "mapping muggles" and don't really understand why I'd want to walk up and down pointless side streets. Prestbury was always bigger than I perceived it due to the housing estates around Noverton Road which I hardly ever went into. It's now even bigger due to new development...

I discovered we'd driven down an unmapped road on our way back to Cambridge. Unfortunately the path of the road that I'd GPSed (my trace looked pretty sane and smooth) conflicts with the North part of Copt Elm Road here:
osm.org/?lat=51.88982&lon=-2.04615&zoom=16&layers=0B00FTF
I suspect the existing data is not entirely correct since my GPS trace overlapped the roadways given in unlikely ways. I'm not able to correct it as I can't go back to check the junction layout. If nobody does it in the meantime I expect I'll take a crack at it when I go home for Christmas.

Back in Cambridge, we got mildly lost and came to an entrance to an allotment. I was then able to find the site on the Yahoo imagery for Cambridge and trace roughly round it, which should appear here:
osm.org/?lat=52.23021&lon=0.11531&zoom=17&layers=0B00FTF
another empty space filled in, hurrah!

I went back to do surveying in and around Somersham again today. My visits to this village / town have been a recurring theme where every time I go there I find the place is bigger than I expected and I can't quite finish. Well, today I think I finally conquered the place. I've done basically all the streets in the town, except for a couple of private roads that I wasn't sure whether I should go down.

I've also surveyed all (I think) of the post boxes in the village, many of the bus stops, a number of drove roads to the north, some shops, the pubs, the church (including the churchyard paths), noted down some nearby farms and businesses, etc... Before returning home to Cambridge I also made a start on the footpaths through fields around the settlement.

I think it's fair to call the place basically complete, although there are still some rural and residential footways linking up various roads to do, plus the couple of private roads to find a solution to and one or two other data quality considerations. Still, I'm pretty pleased with the data now and it feels good to have done an entire town!

I'd also like to give thanks to my friend Chris for keeping me company on one of my expeditions here, providing moral support whilst putting up with my incessant camera snapping and GPS poking.

Have been tracing more buildings from around my neighbourhood using Yahoo through YWMS in JOSM. Time consuming but hopefully will be useful in the end. It seems a shame to have a partially-building-ified map but the data could always be hidden if necessary. In the meantime, help on this project is welcome ;-)

Some buildings were hard to see or exactly discern the shape of so I either did my best on those or left them out. Going out "on the ground" to see what things should look like would probably be useful at some point...

I realised yesterday that there are even more footways between terraces in my area, as there were some I'd previously forgotten to cover. I needed to buy some dishwasher tablets today so I took a circuitous walk to the convenience store in order to get some mapping done on the way.

I took care of various paths, upgraded one to a service highway and I found an allotment site that I never knew was there! I was able to map the allotment using Yahoo imagery once I knew it was there; I'll go back and add in the access footways at the North and South ends using my GPS.

A few observations:
1) This is a fully mapped area, as far as "normal" streets are concerned, yet I've been able to contribute a lot of additional data to it, making it substantially more detailed. This should be heartening to contributors in already-mapped areas who are looking for something local to do.
2) Adding in (some of) the housing in the area has added quite a lot of value here, making it easier to spot where the (well hidden) pathways actually are when using the map. The housing data also helped me to line up the paths I'd mapped when the GPS reception was put off by the buildings.
3) Building style around housing areas seems to vary a lot. I've found loads of these footways in this area but a couple of streets down there are few or none of them.

Changes to this area are on the Osmarender layer now, Mapnik maps should show this data next week...

I was in Norwich on Monday. I was visiting family so had very little time or opportunity for mapping. I was able to get some rough traces of roads and collect a few POIs. Near the station I did The Nelson hotel, its gastropub restaurant "Table Table" (!?) and the taxi pickup at the station itself. Later on, I was able to trace Cotman Road from a taxi and also had the chance to walk down a bit of Telegraph lane and in a loop back through Ranson Road.

Not much but every little counts. The GPS traces for all of this were a bit vague; there are also some footways that want adding (e.g. steps from Norwich Station to Thorpe Road, a track between Ranson Road and Thorpe Road, etc).

If I'm ever in Norwich for long enough I might be able to add a bit more detail.

I've been trying to fill in some more of the alleyways between terraces and semis near my home. These are generally unsignposted and often unpaved. Looking at one from the street it's pretty hard to tell if it's just a path to a couple of garden gates or if it in fact goes all the way through. There are a lot of these and because they pass so close to the buildings, it's been very helpful to have the Yahoo imagery to help refine my GPS-ing results.

I think it's going quite well, next thing I'll need to find some more! Interestingly, some blocks of houses in the area seem to not feature through-paths at all, whilst others are full of them. Weird!

I'm glad to put these on the map as without some guidance it's very hard to know where these go! I wonder if they're strictly public, private or what; the land could be council-owned or part owned by the adjoining properties.

I also found a little playground tucked away whilst refining a path that currently overlapped a building location.

I went to visit my girlfriend in Hamburg over the weekend. Whilst I was there, we took the GPS and digital camera for a walk around a redeveloped gasworks. They've kept the original gasworks buildings and cleaned them up, putting in new interiors. The site now has a couple of hotels, a couple of restaurants, office space, residential flats, shops and a small park. Lots of features to map in a small space! The previous OSM coverage for this area was good but not complete. Google Maps coverage is also incomplete here; the redevelopment may mean that things have changed relatively recently, although interestingly the omissions in the two maps were very different.

There was already existing work in this area, so I set out to improve what was already there and fill in the gaps. It looked like quite a lot of tracing from Yahoo had been done already (building outlines, etc). I made some tweaks to this data - the Yahoo imagery seems slightly inaccurately positioned, so I aligned it to some reasonably consistent parts of my GPS tracing and then moved some of the existing features a small distance to better correspond to this. This is not a major visual difference but hopefully makes things slightly more accurate. Since the Yahoo imagery is slightly from the side of the buildings, I moved some of the outlines to correspond better with the footprint of the buildings, rather than the rooflines.

We paced round many unmapped footways, noted the positions of bicycle parking, steps, some unmapped roadways, playgrounds, etc. I also got some address details for some the buildings and tagged those too. When I got home I uploaded these changes, plus a load of extra tracing from Yahoo that I was able to do now that I understood how things looked on the ground.

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After a trip to the excellent Carlton Arms pub tonight I did a quick loop up Carlton Way, then Mere way and then down Arbury way. I was able to note down an atm, a shop, a few bus stops, some B&Bs, a garage and a veterinary practice.

I then proceeded up Milton Road (most interesting stuff already mapped here) and ramped up the speed - the GPS said I hit 27.8mph (on a bicycle) and it became basically the first time I'd gone down that road without fast cars zooming past me. The only taxi that caught up with me seemed too impressed by my speed to come past, even when I slowed down and moved over to allow it!

Took another trip out to Somersham yesterday, this time with a cycling buddy for company. We managed to take care of some more residential streets in the village although I'm aware there are still a few left to do: some off Parkhall Road and possibly some to the west down the St Ives road (there's a service road to the business park that needs doing, also).

The thing which was particularly surprising on this trip was the network of drove roads to the north of the village. There are quite a lot of them, running across a large area of the countryside. A few were marked private and we didn't follow them, however there were plenty that appeared to be rights of way. There is more surveying left to do up there but I didn't have time to stub all of the paths as I usually try to. There were also several wind farms out there that I wasn't aware of. We came back down the Chatteris Road (B1050), enabling us to fill out more of its length with accurate GPS traces. On a future trip, I'd like to go all the way to Chatteris and finish this part off.

We were able to fill in a lot of local detail in Somersham this time, including memorials, pubs, the pathways in the churchyard, etc. Hopefully by the time the mapping of the road network is completed, we'll also have a decent amount of local detail that might be interesting to cyclists, pedestrians, hikers, etc. I've been considering the idea of e-mailing village councils / village webmasters to say "You have been mapped", since they might be interested in being able to use OSM maps for local purposes rather than having to pay for some "official" maps. Has anyone tried this?

I went on a fairly local expedition with a buddy yesterday. We covered a decent mileage at a decent speed and we did some new tracks in the process. Highlights included a newish bridleway North of Girton which took us to the guided busway (they're making good progress with that, looks like this in both directions: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8947936@N07/2934605215/sizes/o/in/set-72157607967786251/ )

Later on, we biked and hiked around Stow cum Quy fen for a while and found some new tracks there, although one poorly signposted one eluded us - we found ourselves in a dead end corner of a field, surrounded by stinging nettles.

To finish up, we decided to try to traverse a public byway that we've previously always been scared off by the sound of many barking dogs in the night. We had just crossed the bridge over the A14 when we came across a burning motorbike: the rear tyre had come off and flames were coming out of the petrol tank. The tank cap had been removed, so it looked like a deliberate act of vandalism rather than an accident. Shouted out and looked around a bit to verify that there was no injured rider out of sight somewhere, then called the police to notify them. The police ran a search for the registration plate and meanwhile called the fire service to "turn the fire off or you know what I mean" (those were roughly the dispatchers words!).

Since we were asked to wait there in case the fire truck needed directions, we stood around and watched the (not-very-impressive) flames for a while. Eventually, silhouetted against the setting sun, a lone firefighter appeared over the line of the bridge. It looked awesome but I felt that taking photographs before we'd introduced would have appeared suspicious. Once we'd had a chat with him, a load more firefighters showed up, which still looked quite awesome:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8947936@N07/2934636567/sizes/o/in/set-72157607967786251/

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Well, I breezed up to Somersham in the nice weather we had here today. I decided that I really ought to go get some exercise since being cooped up with impeding everything else, including work.

I was rather expecting it to just be a small village with a few features to be mapped; I was then going to continue on to Pidley and maybe some of the other villages in the area. If things went really well, I naively thought I might take a look at Needingworth. Hah!

It looks like the town planners in Somersham had other ideas. The village *looked* pretty small one entering from the south; after going a little way down Chatteris Road and surveying all the stuff I found down there, I rather assumed that I had almost everything. Wrong! I found a small residential development to the south first, a fair few roads in there with loads of twiddly little side bits. After covering this, I stopped for a bite to eat, then headed back to the B1050 to continue through the centre of the village. I turned up Feoffees Road and entered a terrifying fractal landscape where every single residential road had offspring. My heart started to sink with every corner that brought another cul-de-sac into view but I pushed on and *finally* got back to where I'd started, having done all the offshoot residential roads in the area.

It took so long surveying all that thaht it was now dark. I don't think there is much more to the place but decided it would be best covered by daylight - as I had a longish trip back to Cambridge I decided to get pedalling and return at a later date to finish the job.

Anyhow, Somersham is very much better than it was before. Most surprisingly I found some B roads to the East and West of the village that weren't on the map yet at all; I should probably be able to do those at some point but it would seem to be a good target for someone with a car available!

Well, last Friday I grabbed some time with the attention of walking / riding down the abandoned Cambridge-Mildenhall railway line, starting near the old Lode station and continuing through as far as the rights-of-way allow. I've seen other parts of the abandoned line as a farm track, near Stow cum Quy but parts of this were either marked private or were apparently unsignposted.

I managed to go about 20 metres down the track before coming to a fork; it turns out, looking at NPE that the side of the fork that I took was not actually the course of the railway. Ah well :-) Looks like there's a National Trust permissive bridleway along some of the old line, which I have yet to investigate.

Instead I ended up doing a load of footpaths / bridleways around Stow cum Quy fen, which was very pleasant - it's a lovely area with loads of paths, many of which still want mapping!

Today I'm intending on visiting some villages around St Ives that have yet to be surveyed, as far as I can see. If I don't have time to do this, I'll try and survey some public footpaths between here and there... Laters!

Went for a (very) late night shop at the local 24 hour Tesco last night. It was a lovely crisp, slightly misty night - much cooler weather than we'd had until recently. It was awesome to see empty dual-carriageway stretching out ahead like that. As I rose over the Milton cycle bridge, the glowing tower of Tesco rose gloriously into view. Much as I dislike Tesco behaving like a bit evil corporation, it's also true that its products / services are really very good and I generally enjoy my visits there. My family plots cross-country car journey routes in terms of regular Tescos toilet stops at Tesco.

Mapped all the bus stops between the Elizabeth Way Roundabout and the Milton cycle bridge. Also did some miscellaneous other fiddling to ensure good coverage of POIs. It's now visible on Osmarender, along with some tagging of mainly bus stops that I did on Gilbert Road last night.

I've been tagging guest houses too, recently, as there seem to be a lot around where I now live. It'd be nice to see these rendered at some point in the future!

Went out on a longer range bicycle expedition with my usual buddy. We navigated there using OSM (which showed a helpful cycle path that enabled us to avoid an awkward choice of a large detour vs bicycling a dual carriageway - thanks OSM!).

The village had recently been traced in (main streets only), apparently from NPE maps. We were able to improve on the placing of the streets (GPS survey being more accurate that the NPE's data), add street names, postbox, telephone box, bus stops, the church, some missing streets, the beginnings of some footpaths / bridleways, pub, car park, recycling, war memorial. Basically almost everything we could see :-)

It wasn't very large so we were able to get complete coverage of the village itself without too much effort. There are a few more features that could benefit from future survey:

* The North-East road out of the village has a complicated junction with the A428, which the current data doesn't show in detail.

* There are a number of footways within the village that could be mapped.

* Footpaths / bridleways into / out of the village could be mapped.

* Bodies of water could be converted to areas, with a bit of effort.

* House numbers?

* Extent of the church yard area, which is a reasonably large proportion of the built area?

The basics are done but there's plenty more that could be tackled!

Still, it was quite satisfying to have a whole settlement to map and to be able to cover all of the major features in an hour or so and thoroughly map the place. We hope to tackle more of the smaller outlying villages around Cambridge in future as there are a fair few within our ranage that are unmapped.

NB: if you look at the current Mapnik render of Eltisley, it looks absolutely bonkers. The database dump seems to have somehow picked up the village mid way through my edits, even though I uploaded them all at once... The Osmarender layer looks fine and hopefully Mapnik will correct itself next week.