Thank you for the boundaries. They’re extremely important for a good search.

As for the Wikipedia link, you know that the boundaries now also get rendered in Wikipedia when a correct link is provided? You can see it by clicking on the little map icon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts

The German wikipedia uses a different rendering (mostly standard Mapnik, but with localised names) but for this page, it seems to be missing the coordinates template.

I haven’t used a Nexus 7 for mapping, but I have used another Android tablet for mapping (just as the Nexus 7, with GPS, without mobile network).

When I map, I normally do photo mapping. In that view, there’s no real difference in usability between an Android phone and a tablet.

The tablet is handier though, when you want to collect POI directly (like you can do with OsmAnd). This works great when being a passenger in a car. You don’t have enough time to make a picture, but you can just hold the map, make your POI (give it a name and type) and upload it directly when you get home.

So it is handier when you want to map when doing also non-mapping stuff.

I know how bad your own city looks when living next to those well-developed cities.

I live only 300km driving distance from the German city Köln (Cologne), and I’ve been trying hard to get my city up to that level, but don’t quite succeed.

osm.org/?lat=50.93866&lon=6.95745&zoom=17&layers=M

Thanks for the ping, we normally don’t get a mail that there’s a new reaction.

First, don’t worry about unnecessary nodes. If we want to map the world, the map will be big.

And naturally, surveying is needed, but the times we had to do everything with GPS are over. Now GPS is just an additional help for mapping. Your way of working is perfectly fine.

For that point I’ve mentioned. You need to consider what directions will be generated. I think a left-right (to get from the road on the footway) is more clear than a “slight left” or even “straight on”. Crossings with more than 4 roads on one point are always very tricky. So if in real life, there aren’t more than 4 ways joining on that point (but they join on several, close points), it’s best to draw them on several points. Now it looks a lot better.

Happy mapping

Yeah, some people must have thought I’m crazy too. But the things you did could have been done more simple. You have a “background” button in your editor, if you choose for “bing images”, you can draw it on top of that (Bing was so kind to donate their images to us).

It’s best to make sure the images are aligned well in your area (this needs a few gpx traces), but once that is done, you can map the rest from the images.

Once you mapped the lines, local surveying is off coarse needed to tag the names, the benches, dustbins, surface of the roads, speed limits and a bazillion of other things you can’t see on the images.

Also, watch out for the “snap” feature in Potlatch. I see you have snapped this point to the road, while it probably isn’t meant to be so.

I hope I helped you a bit.

Happy mapping, and enjoy your hand-made maps ;)

@vincent, I knew about that (should probably have mentioned in the first post),but it’s not useful for country borders (they contain too many nodes) and linking to search is indeed missing.

I assumed patches are welcome, but I would spend too much time learning Ruby, while I also can use that time to work on other osm stuff (mainly OsmAnd for the moment, and the data off course).

@amm, I had seen that map before, we also have it in the Dutch wiki. but I’ve never seen the boundary feature. It’s very nice.

Now, for Belgium, wikipedia was the last that needed this, as some user drew simplified maps (boundaries, water and residential areas) of all cities, even before OSM was active in Belgium.

Well, this would at least allow us to see that the boundaries are correct :D

The purple lines rendered with Mapnik don’t help a lot.

This is indeed very clear with distinct population centres. But that wouldn’t solve the road classification inside a city as Moscow.

Some consider Flanders to be one big city with some holes in it (there’s not a single place where you can’t see a building around you). So I’m particularly interested in the classification inside those big cities.

See Moscow and the central part of Flanders on the same zoom level:

osm.org/?lat=51.068&lon=4.27&zoom=10&layers=M osm.org/?lat=55.732&lon=37.715&zoom=10&layers=M

But because Flanders didn’t evolve from a single city, we don’t have a motorway around it, but only motorways through Flanders. But still around the old cities.

I think, in Moscow, the situation is more clear than in Flanders. In Moscow, you can assume a star-shaped road network to start from, and with the rules such as “trunk may only end in primary roads”, you have a decent classification. While we have something quite random to start with.

So I guess we’re quite stuck with our classification (because our government never saw the benefit of spacial ordering, and nobody in Flanders wants to live in a city).

I think it is there now. I don’t know if someone edited the map, our you just had to wait a while to get it rendered.

If there is no one-to-one relation of building and housenumber, it might sometimes be better to leave the building without housenumber tag, and add some address nodes instead.

Btw, when I see your way of mapping, you might be interested in this site: http://walking-papers.org

You can print your own map pretty easily, and you can scan it (or even take a picture) to have it as a georeferenced background in JOSM (via the walkingpapers plugin).

Which editor are you using?

If you’re using JOSM, you can simply select all members of an associatedStreet relation, select the members with role=street inside your selection (via CTRL+F) and apply other tags to all houses in that street at once.

Beide sind richtig.

Einige Leute bevorzugen das Gebäude Tagging, weil sie denken dass Adressinformationen gehört zu einem Gebäude (das ist ganz natürlich, in ländlichen Gebieten). Andere Leute glaube, dass ein Punkt verdient die Adressinformationen. Sie sehen diese mehr in Städte, in denen Adressen und Gebäude sind nicht so eng miteinander verbunden (ein Gebäude kann mehr als einen Eingang haben, jedes mit seiner eigenen Adresse und mehrere Gebäude auf dem gleichen Platz kann die gleiche Adresse haben).

Vielleicht versuchen, ein wenig konsistent zu sein in der gleichen Straße oder Gebiete.

In diesem Fall mussen die Werkzeuge alle Arten von Tagging unterstützen. Wenn sie erwarten, dass eine Adresse nur ein Knoten ist, müssen sie die Mitte des Gebäudes berechnen.

Si la route n’a pas de surface dure, et c’est possible de l’utiliser avec des machines agricoles, highway=track est la seule tag correcte.

On peut varier tracktype=* selon la surface, mais on peut pas utiliser highway=service ou highway=path pour cette route.

There are some problems with the license Apple forces on apps in their store.

http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/9846/iosmac-app-store-and-cc-by-sa-compatibility

This is probably why some apps dropped OSM support. I don’t own an iPhone, so I can’t help either.

And how do you calculate the “relative importance in the road graph”? We have no data to determine that.

We only see the data on the ground. That is the official classification and the design of the road. We try to determine the relative importance from that data:

Exxx and Axx -> motorway

Nx and Nxx with special “autoweg” sign -> trunk

Nx and Nxx -> primary

Nxxx -> secondary

two lanes -> tertiary

one lane -> residential or unclassified

This was done in the hope that our state makes those decisions based on the importance of the road. You may know that Belgium has a very bad spacial ordering. We don’t have the normal residential centres but lint-construction. There used to be centres in the middle ages, those were connected with roads, and from than on, people build their houses along those roads. So you get huge lints of buildings.

The example I showed you is also this case: osm.org/?lat=50.934473&lon=3.080182&zoom=18&layers=M

You see that the teriary road starts together with the lint of houses. All those people living there have to be frequently in the city. So it’s difficult to determine the importance, as it accumulates while you go via a lint.

Btw, our state doesn’t give us the best data. The recently turned a primary road (with the ref N37) in a no-exit road. Off coarse, in cases like that, we deviate from our scheme to follow the numbering.

And because it’s so difficult to calculate the “relative importance”, Belgium indeed has some different definitions than France. Btw, you will see that the routing graph is still mostly connected (although the best way often leads over a few residential roads or tertiary).

К сожалению, я не говорю на русском, это было переведено с Google Translate.

Несмотря на то, как правило, верно, что дорога классификации лишь изменения в переходах, я не думаю, что это всегда так.

Иногда дорога классификация также изменения в границы (государственных границ э даже границах сообщества). Как здесьhttps://maps.google.com/?ll=50.934538,3.079777&spn=0.009155,0.026157&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=50.934601,3.079926&panoid=0b8wFrYgiY_Lp4JquVjlxQ&cbp=12,237.07,,0,18.09 , На границе мое Oostnieuwkerke деревни и города Roeselare, дорога изменений с двух полос (классифицируется как третичный) в одну полосу (или несекретные). Или вот, на франко-бельгийской границы: osm.org/?lat=50.780064&lon=2.739279&zoom=18&layers=M дороге не изменится в виду, но Бельгии и Франции использовать различные схемы классификации.

Original text:

Although it is generally true that road classification only changes at crossings, I don’t think it’s always that way.

Sometimes, road classification also changes at borders (state borders er even community borders). Like here https://maps.google.com/?ll=50.934538,3.079777&spn=0.009155,0.026157&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=50.934601,3.079926&panoid=0b8wFrYgiY_Lp4JquVjlxQ&cbp=12,237.07,,0,18.09 , at the border of my village Oostnieuwkerke and the city Roeselare, the road changes from two lanes (classified as tertiary) to one lane (or unclassified). Or here, at the French-Belgian boundary: osm.org/?lat=50.780064&lon=2.739279&zoom=18&layers=M the road doesn’t change in view, but Belgium and France use different classification schemes.

Also, take a look here: osm.wiki/Category:Users_in_Barcelona

And if you want to get in touch with Spanish users, subscribe to the Spanish mailing list. osm.wiki/Mailing_list

You are not the only one, but you are certainly the most active one (at least for last weekend)

osm.org/browse/changeset/12695822 osm.org/browse/changeset/12699599 osm.org/browse/changeset/12699995 osm.org/browse/changeset/12710029

Yeah, restrictions, tell me about it. My city decided that it wanted more visitors. Result: all one-way streets point towards the centre.

In other words, it’s very easy to get in, but very hard to get out. And if you miss one turn, you’re likely to arrive at the other side of the town.

Anyway, I’ve also been doing some micro-mapping lately: addresses and extra POI information. I’ve really began to value some tags you don’t see a lot: like website=* or phone=* or opening_hours.

It surprises me how few there are, and when using an app like OsmAnd on your smartphone, they’re really handy to check a website of a restaurant, or to call it immediately from OSM data.