I don’t think that “uploading a GPS trace LOWERS the quality of OSM” - it only would if you then converted that trace to some sort of highway without looking at any other data source (which is something that I would hope that no-one in 2020 would ever do, except in the very unusual case that there’s no other data sorce available).

If you can provide a bit more information about where you’re interested in adding data, I’m sure local mappers can explain which sources locally they find most helpful - both in terms of being not offset and also in terms of being recent.

@Rob perhaps you need to reread what I actually said:

If an individual mapper on the ground can’t verify your edits made from this source, then they have every right to change the data to what they believe to be correct.

That applies to everyone - my edits, your edits, someone working for Amazon’s edits, everyone.

Best Regards,

Andy

Hello,

How do we know that the source that you are using is licence-compatible with OSM? Can you publish that licence, so that it is clear to the community that you do have the right to use that data and there are no potential future problems?

Also, there is a very real problem here with osm.wiki/Verifiability . If an individual mapper on the ground can’t verify your edits made from this source, then they have every right to change the data to what they believe to be correct. They’ll only have access to the normal sources available in the usual OSM editors, so it’s very possible that some of your changes will be removed because they don’t match what other mappers can see. In the event that such a dispute is escalated to the Data Working Group, we’d have to favour the publicly available imagery over private imagery that no-one else has access to.

I’d therefore suggest, in order to avoid the issues above, that you find some way of working where the data that you’re using is actually verifiable by the rest of the OSM community.

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, from OSM’s Data Working Group.

The link shows 3 colors that are valid color for color-blind people

Ah, OK. A problem would be that there are many more than 3 colours in use - if you look here you can see a selection of them.

Another possibility is to use a number of dots as scale (0 dot=0 1 dot=restricted, 2 dots=yes).

Something like that would be a possibility (but with 4 states not 3 of course - “don’t know, no, restricted, yes”). The wheelchair indicator is already intentionally not “in your face” - you can use two fingers on a leaflet map to quickly magnify a section, and there it might be possible to count 0,1,2,3 or 4 pixels.

@trial I’ve no idea what your link is supposed to show?

On the more general point - no, common forms of colourblindness were not taken into account when choosing the colour palette used, mainly because pretty much every possible colour variation is in use for something. If you can suggest how to show the same variation of information and make it work for people who are colourblind as well that’d be great - the best way to start would be by opening an issue explaining what you propose to do, and then if that sounds sensible pull requests as necessary.

Although it’s not that that time consuming to create a few more icons that differ only slightly from the originals, it would be interesting to be able create at least some of the variations automatically.

I think that Imagemagick supports scripting (though I’ve never used them with it), and I’ve no idea if it supports things like “change pixel x, y to colour z”.

It’s a lot of icons but not a lot of pixels - it doesn’t take long to take 3 copies of an existing icon and dab in two dots of green, yellow or red.

The original pub icon was an old OSM Carto one - that started out as an empty beer glass, with the other features added to that.

I really had to squint to see the red bar under Moors Inn. Would having a border around the icon in red/yellow/green help?

It would - and one of the problems that I’ve spotted elsewhere is that the name is currently displayed quite close to the bottom of the icon, which means a “b”, “d” or “h” can have the upstroke obscure the indicator. However, part of the idea was to make the “wheelchair tag” visible, but not the “most obvious thing” about the icon as displayed. I’ll possibly experiment with slightly larger ones, or differently placed ones.

Select the layer switcher (the “stack of books”) at the right-hand side of OpenStreetMap.org . The cycle map layer and transport map layers both show English names. Also look at openstreetmap.de.

Hello Beachmiles,

Andy from OSM’s Data Working Group here. I’ve hidden the note with the offensive comment on there, since comments like that have no place within OSM. I’ll separately message the person who made it explaining why that comment was not appropriate.

With regard to the problem that caused you to add the note in the first place, it does look as if the turn lane information is now in OSM (actually added by the person who made the offensive comment) - see osm.org/way/755568005 - but that doesn’t contain information about the destination of each HOV lane.

I’ve re-added the note contents at osm.org/note/2060067 , but I suspect that it’s really a more general question (“how should we tag the destinations of individual lanes”). The answer to that is that there seems to be some usage of “destination:lanes” - see https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/destination:lanes#overview for the number in use around the world and osm.org/way/375327794 for an example on the I5 South not far from you. What I don’t know is whether a Tesla will actually use that information (osm.wiki/Key:destination#destination:lanes.3D.2A_tagging asks that question more generally). You’d have to ask Tesla that question.

Generally speaking, if you see problems with offensive comments you can either email OSM’s Data Working Group directly on data@osmfoundation.org . In most cases you can report the item on which they appear, but in this case it’s your own note, so you may not be able to do that.

You can ask future “how to tag…” questions at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ , and if you want to talk to people in the OSM US community, you can use the link to request to join “OSM US” from osm.wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Slack_workspaces . I know that Tesla’s use of OSM data occasionally gets mentioned there.

Best Regards,

Andy

(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