OpenStreetMap
Ahh, the junk that some people put into OSM...
icao= tags should contain precisely 4 uppercase A-Z characters. Not cryllic. Not unicode. Not essays about how you hope to discover the airport's code.
OJW's Diary
Recent diary entries
All the houses and buildings in Walton on Thames (up to the Thames/Reservoirs/Railway, and excluding Oatlands) should now be in the OSM map, thanks to aerial photography from the Surrey Air Survey
So why do the (View / Edit) links on diary entries sometimes appear as (Anzeigen / Bearbeiten)? Isn't it based on the language of the person viewing the diary?
Anyone notice that Aberdeen suburbs are almost entirely Yahoo tracing without road names?
Labelled a few bits of Aberdeen Airport that I happened to notice while visiting. The whole area has good yahoo images but doesn't seem to have had anyone from OSM to do the street names.
There's another terminal at Aberdeen Dyce operated by CHC Scotia, but I'm not quite sure which building is their main "departure lounge"-type place
However, Longside airport osm.org/go/e6nYUnw seems to be completely missing. As the backup airport for lots of helicopters travelling to aberdeen, it might be useful to map that sometime.
"CloudMade reserves the right, at our discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of these Terms at any time without notice to you. All changes shall be effective immediately."
so how about just change the terms to "you must donate all your proprietary data to OSM", wait for their website to download another tile, then inform your customers of their new obligations ;)
just been doing a few buildings, with positions guessed based on the view from the street (e.g. 4 houses between x and y)
Following-on from Nick's talk about how OSM (and specifically cloudmade) allows highly specialist maps, I've been trying to create an aeronautical chart as a cloudmade layer.
Now, some aspects of this are never going to be possible in a generic map editor, and I'm not expecting it to rotate symbols according to magnetic variation or any of the other weird stuff that specialised software would do.
Similarly, some data is never going to be available in OSM, e.g. airways and approaches that only exist within proprietary datasets and can't be seen on the ground (so to speak ;) We're not yet encouraging people to leave their GPS on during airliner landings!
However, it would be nice to have a map layer where you can browse airports, so if you want to buzz around Kent in your flight sim, you can easily see "ah, I want EGMD to EGMH", then zoom-in and see the runways available.
Maybe a few navaids could be entered into OSM by particularly keen mappers (and they could even listen to it on the radio to figure-out the frequency/ident without consulting proprietary charts!)
For display in the helicopter cockpit you might want something that looks like a low-flying chart, with power lines, television masts and tall buildings in bold red, that also shows wildlife sanctuaries, gliding clubs, heliports, etc.
So, onto cloudmade editor, and see how much of this is currently possible. Other options include Kosmos (which is very good at this sort of thing - osm.wiki/Kosmos_AirNav_Rules - but only works on smallish OSM files), or running your own Mapnik (which I intend to try once I figure-out wtf my PC's postgres password is set to...)
We were in Milton Keynes at the weekend, for the mapping party. During Saturday night, various components were stolen from my bike needing £95 of repairs, and on the same night, the OSM banner was stolen.
Meanwhile, the police had enough free time to stop and question one of our surveyors for the crime of photographing a bus stop...
From WindowsUpdate:
"Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the familiar Web browser that you are most comfortable using."
I somehow doubt that
in Dublin. There are more unnamed roads nearby
one interesting feature that's difficult to map - there are several roads which are unexpectedly difficult to cross given their size (no traffic islands, no pedestrian lights anywhere, and views obstructed by the curve of a bridge)
So I show the OSM website to someone at work today, and their first response is "my street isn't on the map"
This is weird - the person lives in Bedford which is within range of at least 2 OSM mappers. So what went wrong?
Well it turns out that they live in an estate that was still a muddy construction site just 2 years ago when the area was last surveyed. Since then it's become a housing estate with loads of dodgy modern houses in various stages of construction.
So I went to visit and made a map of the area. But watch out -- something which is a cornfield one day may be someone's house the next day, and if you only visit the place once you might miss it...
(use osmarender layer to see latest maps, while mapnik is still showing old maps)
Uploaded my notebook scribblings from the OSM conference:
OK, so wandered around Temple Bar area of Dublin at the weekend, just need to add those to the map now. I got a bunch of Irish-language street names -- is there any name:ga=... renderer that will display them yet?
Just back from the cycle ride - we aimed to get part of the the National Cycle Route 51
osm.wiki/index.php/Bletchley_to_Bedford_cycle_ride
Hopefully we have recorded all of that cycle route which exists. The round-trip distance (for me) was 65 miles. Shaun McDonald is (as of 8pm) setting-off for his return trip cycling back to Bletchley, so wish him luck getting back okay.
Building outlines from aerial pics. (select the osmarender layer)
Still can't find a good PD sketch-map of what all the building names are. Anyone who works there want to help?
Looks like the wind farm has rendered on potlatch.
The proposed tag: power=generator; power_source=wind doesn't have any effect yet
osm.wiki/index.php/Proposed_features/Power_plants
Using man_made=power_wind works on mapnik
Neither are shown on osmarender layer - this would be quite useful, as you could see them without waiting a week for mapnik
I think the location might be this one?
Just tracing some water features around what I guess must be the california aquaeduct. Wikipedia is quite a help in discovering the names of some things. Apparently we might have some government data source available for these, which would be better than tracing?
It's difficult for the renderers to do justice to a junction like this, where the right-hand lane of an elevated trunk road just disappears into the earth, emerging at ground level in a different direction.
In fact, this whole section of road is a nightmare to navigate around, where an incorrect lane choice can send you in unpredictable directions. The 'sliproads to exit and normal lanes to continue' convention doesn't apply...
I've traced some buildings on the University of Nottingham main campus from Yahoo imagery, filling-in names from memory (and with a few hints from the Wikipedia article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Nottingham_Halls_of_Residence
It adds a new tag:
place=hall_of_residence
which may be worth rendering on campus maps.
In the meantime, I've lablled the residential buildings with the name of their hall (e.g. 10 buildings all with name=Lenton and Wortley, which shows-up on the map)
There are parks and woodlands marked inside the campus. The area tagging causes some problems:
To make a woodland appear above the generic "landuse=university" purple area, we have to use the layer attribute. But that makes some paths disappear 'under' the woodland. I don't want to put a higher layer on those paths just to make them render, since technically they're ground-level paths.
Multipolygon relations are being used for courtyards within buildings.