(with regard to the last comment)

which is strongly linked to American business culture and kind of implies that OSM is a business project based on American cultural values.

Actually, I don’t believe either of those are really true. I’m from the UK, and I’m sure I’ve been involved in SWOT analysis work instigated by customers in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. It’s try that it’s mostly a “business” thing, but I suspect that that’s not a reason for not doing it here - I think that it’s a great initiative, and we’ve already seen that it’s a good conversation-starter!

Before just deleting stuff, I think you’d need to investigate what was going on. Here’s a query that shows some. In the case of this one you’d need to find a local to see if the tagging was accurate. This one was tagged by a local and I’m sure is just fine as it is. This one had the name added from OS OpenData, where many of the names are obsolete or just wrong, and then deleted by someone else - I’d guess that we can give the deleter the benefit of the doubt.

So no, while it doesn’t make sense to “delete all place=localities without a name” it would make sense to look in more detail at them, and after checking I’m sure that some of them probably could be deleted.

Ich hoste statisch auf meiner eigenen Seite

Nur damit Sie es wissen - die obigen Bildlinks funktionieren im Moment nicht.

Great stuff - thanks!

Also it would be good if OpenStreetMap itself was customisable.

It is! The maps that you see on osm.org are only a few of the different ways of showing the data.

Lots of companies actually use OSM data to create their own maps (including Bing, actually - though what gets used in different places in the world probably varies).

You can also create your own maps based on OSM data as well.

My preferred formatting for a name the local name in the local alphabet with the English name, if different, below

I’m sure you’re already aware, but for the benefit of anyone who isn’t, quite a few online maps take that route already. OSM DE’s deutscher Stil does this, and so does the Cycle Map on openstreetmap.org .

So for hiking I use Avenza Maps and I load in geo-referenced PDF maps that I render myself

What toolchain are you using for this? It’s quite possible that whatever it is it it’ll support some sort of tag transformation (like OSM Carto does, for example).

or are fairly complex with formatting other than what I like (OsmAnd).

You certainly can do tag transformations in OsmAnd, and if you create the maps yourself you’ve essentially got full control over what the offline map looks like. The user interface is still OsmAnd though which is not to everyone’s taste.

I’ve actually used osmfilter quite a lot myself - surprised I forgot about it! One downside is that you need to convert to a .o5m file before using it and then back again afterwards; another is that I found (and other people have found) it to be a bit tricky to get exactly the right filter in place if you only want to make a couple of changes.

I sent 32 emails in total and I got only 3 answers and no deals

I’m not familiar with the territory, but I suspect 10% is actually not a bad response for an unsolicited email!

There are of course plenty of people “making money from OSM”, either directly or indirectly. People working for large companies like Apple, Facebook and many others do so. There are lots of smaller OSM-based consultancies, and there are lots and lots of people (including, ahem, “SEO specialists”) at the low end adding things to OSM for profit. The problem with the “low end” stuff is that you don’t get paid more for doing a good job; you get paid more for doing lots, badly.

I’d suggest you try and get more familiarity with some of the various tools around OSM - perhaps think about what you’d need to do to create a simple OSM-based map showing where a business is that they can put on their website, for example?

Then again, don’t take my word for it - I’ve always been a volunteer in OSM and an “amateur” in the original sense.

• Andy

Does “#7275” perhaps refer to a HOT project? If so if you can link to the URL that you accessed it on that would be helpful, as there are numerous servers with different project numbers on each.

Best Regards,

Andy

@Pedja Ah - I see what you’re saying now! Yes, the list at http://www.sotadata.org.uk/summits.aspx are indeed the “most prominent peaks” (and certainly all the English ones are missing prominence data in OSM).

@Pedja Thanks for that. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see any prominence data there? However:

@imagico I’m guessing in “computable and at the same time in the general case practically non-verifiable except through computation using external data” the missing external data that you’re referring to is the saddle elevation between peaks (basing it of this explanation)? That’s measurable, but doesn’t tend to be in OSM.

Linked from the previous site are a couple of options - there’s a fusion tables link (which will go away in a couple of weeks) and also a link to https://github.com/edwardearl/winprom which offers a plausible way to download some SRTM data and process that. However, it’s not a small job - here are “peaks by prominence” where I happened to be yesterday (here in OSM. As you can see, OSM has 4 peaks there (which I definitely noticed!), and the prominence map “only one of note”. Many more prominence values would need to be calculated than the “everymountainintheworld” version.

Can you be a bit more specific? Sites such as this one still work for me.

@Pedja @pangoSE The standard OSM Carto stylesheet has been reluctant to add significant pre-processing. I suspect that one of the reasons why is that it does tie the display of new features to a database reload. I do one every few weeks on average and it doesn’t take long to do. In this graph the period from 00:00 to 03:00 is the database load, and from 03:00 to 13:00 is just applying missing diffs. If you wanted to render the whole planet at any significant level of detail the time to load would lead to noticeable downtime, so you’d probably need two rendering servers; one to serve “old style” tiles while the “new style” one was being reloaded. That’s not impossible to do, but it’s a major change to how things are done now, and I suspect people would think that the effort to do that would be better spent in other areas (and I’d probably agree).

@yvecai The general answer to “why pre-processing” is that it makes the OSM-Carto code much easier to write and to understand - just add the pseudo-values like “bigpeak” to the selection in project.mml and add the extra display code here and here.

More specifically, it’s doing a bit more than an “ORDER BY” - the lua code first looks at peaks with an “ele” more than 914m (3000 feet in old money - the height that is the differentiator of a munro in Scotland). It then tries to infer the prominence if it isn’t set. Firstly it assumes that it’s the same as the elevation, but if the “munro” tag is set but prominence isn’t, then it’s likely to be a “munro top” - over 914m but still on the way up the primary mountain, and so it assumes low prominence in that case. This “prominence guessing” works in Scotland but not very well elsewhere (in particular sort the list here by prominance and compare to Kerry here), but it’s better than nothing, and as people start mapping actual prominence the need to guess it goes away.

As an aside, I believe that the prominence data in Scotland comes from the Database of British and Irish Hills. There’s a bit of background on that on talk-gb here and here, and on this changeset among others. I’m pretty sure that the prominence data doesn’t come directly from the OS; the question is whether it is derived from data that does. We certainly do have permission from someone from DoBIH to use it. If it does turn out to be valid to use within OSM it’d be good to see the missing prominence data in Wales, Ireland, England and the rest of Scotland added.

I’m not convinced about “iD och Potlach2 är värdelösa på MPer och dess medlemmar” (“iD and Potlach2 are worthless for MPs and their members”) - with a DWG hat on I regularly use P2 for making individual changes to relations and relation members simply because it’s the easiest way of solving a particular problem (see http://hdyc.neis-one.org/?SomeoneElse_Revert for the numbers).

(adding some comments from the context of a working group member, in my case the Data Working Group)

We did try to pick up the pieces by trying to do a relations reset with the Working Groups, and with each other. We are trying to clarify what we expect from our relations with each other.

Firstly, thanks to Joost for picking this up in a way that simply hadn’t been done before. The responsiveness of the previous board on the Crimea issue was dreadful (strictly speaking, the DWG and the wider OSM community are still waiting for a “final decision” message on this from the previous board, but the time for that has long gone now). The DWG sent a reply to Joost’s initial “relations reset” discussion email back in July; we look forward to the board’s response.

That’s the fundamental work that needs to be done to make sure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the same way again.

Fully agreed, because one thing that can be guaranteed is that issues like this will happen again. I can think of a couple of current issues that I’m dealing with at the moment that have the capacity to escalate in the same way, and one is entirely sea, which makes checking the “on the ground rule” there difficult.

While making location-specific exceptions to policies isn’t particularly scalable, allowing people to easily create maps for themselves and their communities from OSM data is - they can even include their own “alternative facts” that may actually needed for legal compliance within their country(1), something that’s also in the disputed territories policy, with less perjorative wording than mine of course .

(1) India and China are often mentioned here, but other countries also pass “laws about how they should be displayed on maps” that may look just as silly to outsiders.

Hello KWIOOSTB35,

You were unblocked as soon as you read the message - you can carry on editing now!

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM’s Data Working Group.

Just for info - the images in this post aren’t visible

If you see problematic edit (by anyone, “foreign” or “local”), please try and explain the problem to them in changeset discussion comments. If they continue, please report it to OSM’s Data Working group, by email to data@osmfoundation.org.

Best Regards,

Andy (from the DWG)