OpenStreetMap logo OpenStreetMap

Post When Comment
announcing new OSB service

Funny enough, the bug tracking thing doesn't work on IE7 either. Or at least the "issues" page doesn't. It just says "Loading..." but never actually loads. When I went to http://github.com/emka/openstreebugs that loads fine.

announcing new OSB service

The link provided doesn't seem to work with IE7. Firefox looks ok. The old one does work.

I don't know what needs to change to make it work, but given the intended audience of OSB, it should support IE.

No through road

Depending exactly on the layout, the usual way is to put a short length of e.g. pedestrianised road, cycleway, footway etc. representing the length that is not drivable. This will still allow foot/cycle traffic to proceed when routing - but will prevent cars from being routed down there. You can then furnish the gap with whatever e.g. bollards etc.

Remember that the pedestrianised road, cycleway etc. should be a short way - bollards are normally on nodes.

GPS accuracy

Oh, and whilst I remember, usually the vertical accuracy on a consumer GPS is much worse than the horizontal accuracy. Even if the points were close in height, they could all have fairly large deviations from the true height (height here is of course relative to the WGS84 Geoid - not necessarily from local sea level)

GPS accuracy

Technically I doubt you could call observations an hour apart truly "independent" due to the fact that the satellites may not have moved *that* far, the atmospheric conditions could be similar.

You'd probably need to spread observations several days (weeks?) apart - but then that could take ages!

I'd be interested to see how much difference sampling every hour gives compared to sampling every second

A way to use Getmapping imagery

Can I suggest also that the Getmapping imagery, as I recall, was created in or around 2000, so will be getting on for a decade out of date.

Apart from the usual things that are hard to survey on the ground, rivers, field boundaries, building outlines, landuse areas perhaps - it's not going to be much better than actually going out with a GPS and mapping properly. Some features on the imagery are probably no longer there. There will be other features on the ground now that aren't on the imagery.

We're Back!

Oh, just seen the new "changeset" feature
osm.org/browse/changeset/873751
and the new menu option showing the edits that people have made.

Looks good!

We're Back!

Excellent news! Just uploaded my first 0.6 changeset - although I seem to be having trouble downloading gpx points. I presume that'll speed up once the changes have bedded in?

More about JOSM spelling

You'd obviously need to be a bit careful - e.g. St could be "Saint" or "Street". There are a few places in the World with "Ave" in the name and are not abbreviations. Not everyone uses the same abbreviations. etc.

Vandels at work

Now removed and a quick message sent to the culprit - User:BentleyCoon

First expedition with GPS (and snow!)

I've had a quick look at your trace - and the first part of your trace has trackpoints without any timestamp - which will be rejected. The rest looks fine - and looks like what I get from my Vista when I write tracks to the microSD card.

Looks likely that the first set of points have been saved as the other Richard said - which strips the timestamps out.

You could put dummy timestamps on these points using something like a text editor or a spreadsheet even. Apparently the "sendmap" program can do this as well - although I don't use it myself. Once you've done that, the rest of the points should be accepted by the server.

1 million gpx points / 1 millón de puntos gpx

I reached the million sometime around August or thereabouts, in the days when you only needed around 800-900k to get on the top 50 board. Now over 1.6million and counting. Only had the GPS unit since Christmas '07... Maybe I have OSMCD. Now you need to have about 50% more trackpoints to get on the top-50 list - just four or five months later. Amazing how OSM has grown (pushing up to nearly 90,000 registered users as well).

Roll back and comments - Deleting work

Oh, and surely you don't need to store large edits locally - if someone delets loads of data then it could be restored from a recent Planet.osm file.

Roll back and comments - Deleting work

Um, doesn't Potlatch have an undelete function? It certainly used to. If you press something like "U" then it highlighted in red any way that had been deleted.

Node or way

If you can map it as a building - then map it as a building. Don't be afraid to go against Map Features.

I'm in the top 50!

DavidDean: Yes of course, but there are some roads that no OSM-ers will otherwise travel on for many years in some cases, apart from when they're doing systematic mapping. Even though there are quite a lot of us these days, there still aren't *that* many in the grand scheme of things. These roads would give very odd results when you tried to do any kind of analysis to them. In addition, roads that are travelled by others will be tainted with this odd data, which might be difficult to tell it apart from heavy traffic in places.

I doubt we'll get to the stage that we'll be able to do much useful traffic analysis with this data anytime soon - especially as much of it has been done on foot or by bike (how do you know if one has been done by bike or has been done in a car in relatively heavy traffic?).

If I'm doing a long-distance journey somewhere - or a journey to somewhere more local that I know hasn't got many traces - then I'll definitely put the GPS in the car, but I don't record my daily trip to work and back each day (but of course I've done it once or twice).

If we want to do traffic analysis - then we need lots of data covering all days of the week, all times of the day, and the entire road network ideally. This might be better as a separate (but connected) project?

Hierarchy of places

Oh, and population is a bad way of determining importance on the map. A town of 10,000 people near to a major city is often insignificant locally, but a town of 1,000 people in rural Wales at the junction of two or more major roads is very significant locally. Judgement is required, not raw population figures (even if we could get that information free from copyright)

Hierarchy of places

Just to put the record straight here - St. David's is a city *NOT* because it has a cathedral. That hasn't been used as a way of determining which place is a city or not for around 150 years.

St. David's became a city only in 1994. City status is awarded by the monarch and usually places apply to be considered upon special events.

e.g. the last two times when a town could apply to become a city were in the Millennium in 2000 and for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002.

I'm in the top 50!

You've got no excuse, smsm1 - you can trace 5-times quicker than me...

David, you say "of all time?" - yes, it is an all-time list - however you'll notice number 1 on the list is "Lost GPX traces" - for some reason at the back end of 2007 a number of GPX traces were mysteriously wiped from the database (including my first ever trace from September 2007). They were all recovered - but without any data about who they came from - so they were all placed in this one user account. You could get them back if you knew what they were called or what tags they had.

i.e. some people may have actually uploaded more than the database currently says.

You say multiple traces are useful for traffic modelling - hmm, if they did that in half the areas I've mapped then they'll believe that all users turn left every time they get to a side turning and they stop randomly at post-boxes, pubs, churches, schools, etc.

Having said that, multiple traces, particularly taken on different days, are useful for "averaging out" position errors in individual traces - and I'm sure in future the likes of JOSM will be able to do some averaging by looking at the density of traces.

On the other hand, my residential cul-de-sac probably has a higher density of traces than the nearest 8-lane motorway a few miles away...

Flat Earth & BB Treasure Hunt

Ahh, but you couldn't have any satellites orbiting a flat Earth - and without satellites there would be no OSM - therefore it does affect your daily life. QED