Hi atchius, welcome to our little corner of OpenStreetMap!

In Cincinnati, we started out by mapping each neighborhood as a place=suburb POI, but only as a first step. Recognizing that Cincinnati neighborhoods have definite administrative boundaries (with occasional controversy over those boundaries), we’ve demarcated CUF, Clifton, and University Heights with relations tagged as boundary=administrative admin_level=10 border_type=neighborhood. Even so, we still need to keep the place=suburb node because many map renderers use it to position the label.

As always, you can find more information on the wiki. In particular, in Ohio, we mostly do join administrative boundaries to roads and other features when they are legally defined to go down the road centerline. Laws are different in every jurisdiction, though, so this is not the usual OSM convention.

We’re really glad to see you help out. Please let Nate or me know if you have any questions.

Just want to point out that some of the commenters here are conflating the share-alike requirement (SA in Creative Commons parlance) with the attribution requirement (BY). Dropping the share-alike requirement doesn’t necessarily mean going all the way to the public domain.

Just a small nit: Wikimedia has nothing to do with Wikimapia.

In case it wasn’t clear, you can select both the area and the point while holding down Shift. Clicking the merge (+) button that appears copies all the tags from the point to the area and deletes the point.

Note that TIGER’s coverage of Ohio schools is horribly out of date, even after you filter out all the “(historical)” POIs. For example, cities like Bellefontaine and London have replaced all of their schools recently, while others like Hamilton and Springfield have consolidated quite a bit. Also, I’ve mapped scores of school buildings with courtyards as multipolygon relations. Not sure if planet_osm_polygon would catch those cases.

Still, I’ve always had the impression that the junior/senior high school distinction is a bit older than the middle/high school distinction. In Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky, school districts typically build new schools with the following naming schemes: Elementary+High, or Elementary+Middle+High, or Primary+Intermediate+Middle+High, or Elementary+Intermediate+Middle+High.

…in response to #5, not #1. :-)

1. iD has that too: Q squares an area and O circles it.

Or just put everything in alt_name and leave the ways otherwise unnamed. Better to be less helpful than (from the user’s point of view) misleading?

I know, but it sounds like the road is signed as if it’s named “Disney’s Pop Century”. My suggestion above optimizes for drivers reading printouts, but there doesn’t really seem to be an ideal solution without using some obscure tagging scheme for the signs themselves.

I think your proposed change would break Nominatim’s TIGER-based address interpolation, but if OSM has address data for the entire street (either explicitly or using interpolation ways), I don’t think it’ll be a problem at all. Then again, since “Century Drive” is in actual use – not just in the county database – maybe alt_name would be appropriate?

It sounds silly, but maybe you could split the street leading into Coronado Springs, so that the segment from the big intersection up to the first sign or gate is name=Coronado Springs and unsigned_name=Avenida del Centro, and the rest is name=Avenida del Centro.

Vanity street names can lead to all sorts of weirdness. I can’t remember the names exactly, but consider a Ye Olde Drive-In Theater off Main Street (with a Main Street address) and the blade signs at the Main Street entrance that say “Movies →”. Or consider Loveland High School, whose driveway has a vanity name of “Tiger Trail”. The school has two addresses: “1 Tiger Drive” and “[some four-digit number] Rich Road”. Thankfully, I can’t remember that four-digit number. :^)

Wow. Well, as the bench ads all say: “Made you look! Advertising works!” :-)

taginfo lists a few aerial messages tagged with type=sign and type=message relations. Does anyone have a preference?

Here’s a partial transcription of the message. No idea what it means.

Pushpin has been doing that too.

“Sierra Mountains” is a less common local name for the range, but you’re right, “Sierra Nevada” would be more appropriate for a map. MapQuest may be using their own custom layer or something for topographical features.

I’ve seen this behavior on occasion a few times on I-275 around Sharonville, Ohio, where one of the two carriageways incorrectly straightens out, crisscrossing the other. The problem tends to resolve itself after a few weeks. I’ve never seen it this bad or on motorway_links, though.

Much of Australia was heavily affected by the “redaction” process about a month ago that removed contributions by users who didn’t agree to the new contributor terms and license. (This update even calls out Hobart specifically.) If your contributions (other than the GPX traces) consisted of modifying ways and points that these disagreeing users added in the first place, I’m afraid your contributions may have been collateral. If it’s any consolation, there’s a fork of the OpenStreetMap project called FOSM that mostly reflects pre-redaction OpenStreetMap. They accept contributions too.

maxspeed should be fine. Otherwise we’d have to slap motor_vehicle:maxspeed on everything.

But I get the feeling this way also needs a minspeed. Wouldn’t want an ion to get stuck behind a Sunday driver.

If you plan to delete nodes where ele=0, please make an exception for nodes with gnis:feature_id or gnis:import_uuid tags. Those belong to a huge, perfectly legitimate import of GNIS data in the U.S. Much of the GNIS data is stale, but it provides tons of names that would take us impossibly long to collect ourselves.

I’m glad to hear things are going well in the Cleveland area! Awesome that the GIS department is testing the waters – unsolicited, even?

Recently there was also a flurry of activity from students in Ohio State’s Geography 607: Fundamentals of GIS course, mostly around Columbus but also in small towns throughout the state. A few students have even stuck around after the assignment was due.

Now if only I could pull some Cincinnatians away from foursquare to help with OSM…