Preface

User Watmildon recently posted their conflation workflow with the new hospitals dataset in the HIFLD, and as such I thought I’d share my own process of converting these datasets into an OSM-readable format.

Workflow

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I’d like to note a few things that are rather inconvenient when working with this setup.

Firstly, this causes neck pain! When I’ve got my camera mounted and recording, the combination of the extra weight plus the aerodynamic profile make this camera very cumbersome on the neck. you will notice right away a mild pain in the back of your neck.

Secondly, dropping. I’m pretty clumsy, and after a good ride I come home and start taking everything off, primarily the camera off the helmet right away to alleviate the pain. I haven’t got a good place in my garage to set the camera down, so I hold it awkwardly while I try to open my bike crate, camera box, etc. and put things away. Twice now I’ve dropped the camera on the ground, and the first time it scratched the main lens pretty bad, and the new mark is visible on the newest photos I’ve taken.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the tools for any superior camera mounts. My bike isn’t very conductive of temporary stick mounting, and all the selfie sticks I have are of a less than satisfactory length to use as a standalone system. I’ve thought about mounting it to a backpack like I used to do with my old LG360, but that suffers from lots of shake and insecure mounting. tying down all the straps on my backpack still made the stick wobble, and made it very inconvenient to work with.

I’ve also recently had an issue with the version of OsmAnd that I’m using, the latest version has a glitch that makes the currently recording track disappear if the start point isn’t on the screen. https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/16947

All that aside, it still is rather easy to set up, and it’s not difficult to ride around for an hour or so and get some footage quickly.

Hi, my name is James Crawford, and I’m running for the OpenStreetMap US board.

About me

I’m a regular editor from Auburn, Alabama. I mainly contribute by editing TIGER road data, importing from external sources, POI surveying, street level imagery coverage, and backcountry trail details. I’ve been active on OSM for over 2 years, and I love keeping in touch with the US community about mapping efforts across the country, and I like seeing community leaders that are active in public forums, and are willing to mingle with their mapping peers.

My current priorities for OSM are as follows:

1: Encouraging the coordination of importing high quality data from external datasets. There are numerous datasets from government agencies in the United States with permissible licensing for use with OpenStreetMap. These datasets provide useful information about a variety of objects mapped in OpenStreetMap, and save huge amounts of time over having mappers collect the data redundantly. It is important to be in touch with the community when coordinating data imports, and it is important to be in touch with government agencies so that we can be more aware of available data that is free to use.

2: Prioritizing focus towards what OSM is useful for. OpenStreetMap defeats commercial competitors in the predictable niche- where there is a demand for geospatial data but no lucrative monetary return. Trails and public land data make a good example. Outdoor enthusiasts have a demand for accurate and low cost map data, but large scale commercial map providers have no commercial incentive to allocate resources towards maintaining this kind of data.

I’m a big fan of outreach, and I’m not a fan of the idea of serving on the board without having meaningful communication with the community. I manage a local community myself, and I love keeping in touch about mapping activities!

Thanks for the consideration,

-James

Hello everyone.

Recently, I’ve been trying to map National Recreation Trails in OSM. the NRT program will designate a ‘system’ as a national recreation trail, generally meaning all of the trails within a park or other public land.

I want to represent this on the map, but it seems to be beyond the scope of the type=route relations.

I’ve been considering using this: osm.wiki/Relation:network to try and represent these, but I ran into problems with this as well. I tried interpreting the documentation, but it was written so confusingly that I could not understand how to use this relation on the map at all. I asked on the talk page, but I’m still confused on the meaning of this relation.

Additionally, there are National Recreation Trails designated to places serving ATVs or ORVs. I don’t know if this is some redneck thing that the Europeans don’t have or what, but there was no documented tag for ATV or ORV paths on the wiki. so I also created the page osm.wiki/Tag:route%3Datv. I’ve been working on expanding this page as well.

Right now I’m using type=route for these system NRTs, but I feel that it’s probably incorrect and I’d love input from others.

Thanks, SherbetS

Hello all,

I recently picked up mapping with the river modernization folks, and one of the first things I wanted to do was to speed up the rate at which I could modernize rivers.

When I was in 5th Grade, I bought a PlayStation 3 from a friend that I used to have sleepovers and play on together for 100 USD. it came with 2 controllers and I’ve since used them to play games, mostly on my computer.

Recently, I stumbled upon this program, that recognized my controller and let me map keybinds to it. I toyed around with it and ended up making a basic configuration to speed up my most common key combinations.

To complete any given riverbank with no other tags on the to-do list, I would simply press O, then move the right joystick up and to the left to add the desired tags natural=water and water=river, then to the right to mark the object complete.

If I ever messed up any part of the process, I could simply move the left joystick down and to the left to undo the change.

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