For info, here are the taginfo links for amenity=embassy (11k uses), amenity=consulate (30 uses) and where else consulate is used, including 782 diplomatic=consulate.

Much tagging discussion takes place on the tagging mailing list. Some of the messages there come from people with a deep knowledge of a particular field; some with a lot of familiarity with how OSM tends to tag things. Some there however do seem to overestimate the power of the tagging list (and the wiki) to change the use of tags within OSM - most mappers just use their editor’s presets.

Whilst OSM mostly uses British English tags for things, there are a few exceptions, often related to tags that have become established, or would be confusing if a British English term was used (“sidewalk” is an example of that), so it’s difficult to say that a tag is “wrong” because it doesn’t exactly match the British English usage of a word. An example of the latter is “city” - everywhere in the US that is legally a city there is not tagged as such (see for example Cando in North Dakota). However in cases such as this the wiki should be clear and point out the difference (as the city page does). If pages such as diplomatic=consulate or key:diplomatic contain factual errors about what e.g. consulates do, then please change them, but the “how to use in OSM” part should really reflect usage in OSM, even if that doesn’t match British English usage, unless that usage was agreed to be in error (due to an erroneous import, for example). There has been some “targetted editing” and “tag gardening” of embassies I believe, and I seem to remember at least one directed editing task to “add certain tags to embassies” that didn’t actually check that the things being edited were embassies.

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend (a member of OSM’s Data Working Group)

Just for info, this map shows barriers (and PRoW refs) in that area. I can see a gate, stiles and kissing gates there. If there’s anything else that you’d expect to see that isn’t shown, please let me know!

Personally I wouldn’t assume that “highway=bridleway” implies universal horse access, only that it’s a way designed to be used by horses (among other traffic). You might guess at horse=yes if there’s no access tag added, but you can always add an explicit “horse” tag to make it clear. The converse is sometimes true - the footpaths at osm.org/#map=18/54.21721/-1.04628 are legally bridleways but you’d struggle to fit dobbin through.

I’ve seen towpaths that could qualify as any of highway=footway, bridleway, cycleway, track - it really depends on what it looks like locally.

I’m not sure why everyone seems to be shooting the messenger here :)

Whilst it’s true that that Nominatim can be used to search for relations (in fact most of the time I search for places in OSM I’ll be returned a relation) it’s also true that relations of the type that the author was looking for here won’t be returned by Nominatim (which is fair enough - it’s designed as a place search engine, not a hiking trail search).

Also, Overpass’ wildcard support seems to have been written by Incy Wincy Spider, and using Nominatim to create Overpass queries for you is definitely far easier than trying to remember Overpass’ syntax without crib notes - it’s how I always do searches like this.

All in all I’m sure that this diary entry will be useful to lots of people - I’m not sure why there’s all the negativity.

Whilst it’s great that changesets near and not so near are being reviewed, I wouldn’t equate “Flagged for Review by Mapbox” with “vandalism”, which your graphic above suggests. Even if they’re problematical, most “flagged as vandalism” edits aren’t (for example of the last 6 “vandalism” issues reported to the DWG via the “report” function at an absolute stretch only 3 could be considered “vandalism” - more common reasons are new users trying to get the hang of things, and disagreements over tagging.

Yes - “showground” is British English for what Americans would call “Fairgrounds”. Local ones often less permanent - the nearest one to me is just a field with fancy gates 363 days of the year.

The name of India was recently changed from English to Hindi and back - see https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=706785#p706785 and the rest of that thread for details. It’s possible that you’re seeing a tile with the “old” name in it from a cache somewhere (such as your browser cache).

The isn’t really the fault of OSM Carto - “path” in OSM is a pretty nasty concept. It’s really just “a way of getting from A to B that isn’t wide enough for 4 wheeled transport”. However we are where we are, and its certainly not going away.

“bicycle=designated and foot=designated” just means that two forms of transport are suggested to use that route as opposed to others; it doesn’t tell you anything about what sort of “highway” it is. Personally I’d always try and use a more appropriate highway tag if there is one (does it look like it’s designed for use by bicycles? highway=cycleway, with appropriate access tags. Horses? highway=bridleway, again with appropriate access tags.

You can also use other tags (surface, width, tracktype, smoothness etc.) to try and get the sense across properly.

@b-jazz That comment in that SOTM-US video is clearly meant as and taken as a joke (clue: the audience laughs). I’ve no idea what you said to the SotM-US organisers or what they said to you, but perhaps you need to be a little more open to what other people think - sometimes things are a little more complicated than you might at first think.

Is it usually difficult to come to a local concensus on tagging?

The short answer is “yes”. It can be particularly tricky when there are relatively few mappers in an area, and so less chance to see other people’s views on how best to tag certain sorts of objects. Generally speaking the way to resolve these sorts of issues is to talk about them, but there has to be an amount of give and take - sometimes in OSM discussions there (and I’m thinking of this tagging list thread in particular here) there isn’t.

There currently seems to be a bit of a discussion going on in the forum thread at the moment, but there aren’t that many people there (and especially not many Canadians). The Canadian country forum is also very quiet. There’s a bit more at the talk-ca mailing list; maybe try there?

On the tagging itself, the only other thing that I’d add would be to try and capture as much other information as possible to give renderers a chance of making a decent job of the road regardless of classification (surface, width, that sort of thing).

But does it have a beer and an airline?

First things first, obviously Betteridge’s law of headlines applies here. :)

To be clear about one thing - the user blocks list is not a “list of shame”. As described on the DWG’s wiki page, blocks ‘don’t imply that users have done anything wrong, and often contain friendly language to try and communicate that fact. Usually before any block is applied (even a “0-hour message that has to be read”) attempts will be made to contact the mapper, such as via changeset discussion comments’.

It’s also meaningless to try and equate blocks (or OSM accounts) with actual human users. Where one user (or a group of users) has created multiple accounts to try and “make a particular edit” in spite of their being problems with it (real examples: change all the tracks in an area to roads so that their preferred Garmin map shows them; changing their school’s name to something like “please don’t give us any homework”) then the number of blocks per user or even per OSM object might be very high; they don’t mean that more OSM users are proportionately being blocked.

As Mikel is I think trying to suggest, it would be possible to obtain details of the actual incident from the block(s) associated with it (and “incident” will most often be “hello and welcome to OSM, some people are trying to help you”). Excluding data from deleted users, OSM changeset, object and block data is public, so any OSM user can do that (I’m assuming here that OSM’s eventual GDPR implementation will somewhat resemble what Geofabrik and HDYC have already done).

Best Regards Andy (from the DWG, but writing in a personal capacity)

In a diary that’s shared between people of many different cultures and languages, I wouldn’t assume that anything was obvious, actually.

http://osmtools.org/ just looks to be domain parked right now. I’d suggest contacting whoever you think created it.

@Marcos Dione That sounds plausible, yes. Although it’s a proprietary channel there’s an “open sign-up” page somewhere, though obviously you’d want to archive anything you want to keep as obviously they can take it away at any stage in the future.

I’d imagine that most OSM CartoCSS people who use IRC will either be in #osm or #osm-dev, so I’m not convinced that a new IRC channel would get that many people in it. No harm in trying to create a new channel of course and see who turns up.

Another possibility might be https://gis.stackexchange.com/ (but you’d need a well-defined question there not just “help!”) or maybe the US-based Slack might have some US-based CartoCSS people in it.

Do you think at this point the whole instruction should be just “docker up wherever/openstreetmap”?

It rather depends on what you’re trying to do, I think. If you’re already familiar with Docker etc. and “just want to render some tiles”, then quite possibly. If you’re not, or you want to set up a server to serve custom tiles in an app, or you want to understand more about how everything hangs together, then probably not. The idea behind these guides is that you can follow them with essentially no existing knowledge. The carto docker guide just throws you at this page and expects you to figure out for yourself what you need.

Following the same steps for 4 years seems to be a bit redundant in 2018.

The “obvious bit missing” to me is an equivalent guide for some sort of vector mapping. OpenMapTiles is a whole lot nearer to that than it used to be, but it’s not quite a solution to the same problem.

Something like this? See also this PDF.

(re tag removal) JOSM, and some other editors, will remove some imported or previously set tags that subsequent discussions have suggested are best removed. See the comments at osm.wiki/Key:created_by for example.

I am very surprised that you consider it to be “fairly straightforward” (!!!) to get hundreds of command-line steps working. I mean, I’ve done a fair bit of Linux development, and I’d schedule several days to get something like that working; for the general mapper, that’s clearly a non-starter.

The entire text of the page is only 402 lines long, and most of that is description. Based on my experience if you’ve done it before I’d estimate it would take about 2-3 hours to cut and paste the commands onto a server and complete the data load (if for a relatively small region) - including the documented tea breaks!

How, exactly, does having ones own map server help with that?

In at least two specific ways:

1. If there’s a group of people working on a lightly mapped area (perhaps a HOT or similar project) then a server that’s under their control is capable of rendering whatever tiles they want, at whatever zoom level, whenever they want. This is not currently possible with the tile layers on osm.org for all sorts of reasons, including the “long tail” of applications fighting for those same free tiles.
2. You’re not limited to the tile styles currently displayed on the OSM website. OSM’s standard style is a compromise designed to cover vast deserts and tightly-packed cities. It’s limited to a relatively conservative maximum zoom level which prevents a lot of detail being visible but suppresses what might be important features in some places (paths and tracks, say) when zoomed out.

You say above that the situation is “sad”, and I’m trying to help provide a solution. There’s always room for improvement of course - an opportunity for someone to create a better mousetrap - but to say “All the ways that used to exist, to get visual or numerical feedback or progress metrics, are gone” isn’t remotely true.