Mapping these footpaths separately from the street could be a problem for routing applications. There is a bit of a controversy about whether they should be mapped as a separate way or simply as a sidewalk=left/right/both tag on the road, which I don’t want to talk about here too much. However, if you are going to map these separately, you need to connect them to the road (with a shared node) everywhere where one might want to cross the road, and at every driveway etc. crossing the footway.

Other than that, I didn’t spot any obvious errors. Mapping fences before buildings is an unusual decision, but setting those priorities is up to you, of course.

Even though I don’t agree with every single argument made in the diary entry, I would appreciate if OSM adopted a different license along the lines of the CC-BY or even CC0 (although the latter is probably not realistic).

It may not be obvious to everyone, but as soon as you try to build something with OSM beyond mainstream use cases like 2D rendering, the ODbL frequently becomes a highly annoying obstacle. I was under the impression that OSM was supposed to enable a broad range of commonplace and creative uses, but the current license hampers that mission.

Thanks for your effort maintaining this source of money for OSM, Malenki! I try to use the affiliate ids whenever possible.

Ich finde Detailverliebtheit nicht einmal das Problem in diesem Fall - wenn dadurch wirklich nutzbare Daten hinzukämen, könnte man gerne Gehsteige separat mappen. Das eigentliche Problem ist, dass die Frage der praktischen Nutzbarkeit komplett ignoriert wird und daher sogar Funktionalität verloren geht!

Konkret: Wie soll der Router bei getrennt gemappten Gehsteigen noch wissen, dass ich eine verkehrsarme Straße an jedem Punkt überqueren kann? Wie soll er noch “folgen sie der X-Straße auf der rechten Seite” ansagen können? Wie soll ich im Renderer - 2D oder 3D - lückenlos an die Straße anschließende Gehsteige als solche darstellen können?

Mit sidewalk-Tags ist alles oben genannte möglich, mit separaten Ways nicht. Wo ist da die Verbesserung?

Perhaps there should be some kind of integration with GeoChat for JOSM, too?

Sehr schönes Beispielprojekt, zeigt gut die Möglichkeiten, die in Wikidata stecken! Seit ich Wikidata entdeckt habe, bin ich absolut überzeugt, dass sich da Synergien zu OSM ergeben müssen.

Anders als du würde ich mir allerdings schon wünschen, dass wir doppelte Arbeit weitgehend vermeiden, eine Ähnlichkeit mit Wikipedia-Relevanzdiskussionen sehe ich beim Wunsch nach Koordination zwischen zwei freien Projekten auch nicht gegeben. Meiner Meinung nach ist OSM von der Software und Kultur her am besten für Recherche vor Ort geeignet – und natürlich generell für geografische Daten. Wikidata wäre eher für Dinge, die man über Quellen- und Literaturrecherche findet. Nach dieser persönlichen Abgrenzung sehe ich dann auch population (inklusive historische Bevölkerungszahlen etc.) eher als Aufgabe für Wikidata.

Trotzdem hast du natürlich recht, dass man Zugeständnisse für technische Anforderungen machen muss.

I would like the OSM community to become more diverse, but I would not like the foundation to choose goals – no matter how noble – and impose them onto the community. The current activities of the Wikimedia foundation are actually a rather negative example in my opinion, because they appear to be done mostly in a top-down fashion, the exact opposite of how a community-driven project with minimal formal organisation should work. Your ideas feel similar to me, so I’d rather not see them implemented, sorry.

“Anyway, as you say it’s a do-cracy. And I have mapping parties to organise…”

That’s the spirit! :-)

Well, if we dropped the various restrictions regarding the precise appearance of the attribution, we could magically turn a lot of incorrect attribution into correct attribution overnight. I feel it is generally irrelevant whether the attribution says anything about “OpenStreetMap Contributors” or just “OpenStreetMap”, whether it includes the © sign, and whether it is in a corner of the map, on the bottom of the page or behind a link. The proper attribution for OSM looks exactly like the usual legalese you see on the internet all the time, so users will habitually ignore it anyway.

What brings in new mappers is when an application is nice enough to dedicate a popup or two to alerting its users to OSM, or when the developers blog about it, or when users recommend the great OSM map files to each other, or if the application is popular enough to get us press coverage. Attribution helps very little with all that, except for one thing: It serves as an easy proof that this cool application is made with OSM data, which can be helpful for our own PR and recruiting efforts. But having an “OpenStreetMap” anywhere that we can point to is enough for that purpose.

tl;dr: Let’s focus on those who do not provide attribution at all, and relax about the details.

As a first step to combat the spam it would be helpful to introduce a way for users to easily “flag”/”report” spammy user pages and comments so that they can effectively be dealt with. Such a functionality is built into the forum software, but elsewhere it’s always quite cumbersome to actually bring it to someone’s attention when I see spam.

@Diomas: No, highway=path has nothing to do with “informal” paths - use informal=yes for that. The “path” value can be used for for basically all sub-car highways. Based on the original definition of higway=path, you could technically replace all highway=footway/cycleway/bridleway with highway=path (although the article explains why this might not be a good idea).

There’s a few more example areas of varying quality listed here: osm.wiki/Simple_3D_Buildings#Demo_areas

In my biased opinion, OSM2World deserves at least a mention, too. ;)

See: http://maps.osm2world.org/?zoom=18&lat=53.62456&lon=11.41839

No WebGL interactivity and animations (yet), but textures, building levels and a few other features.

You will occasionally get multipolygons even for amenities, shops and the like. Some examples (found via overpass turbo):

• a parking ground around a McDonald’s
• an unusually shaped church
• a mall enclosing a garden

Compared with ways and nodes they are of course quite rare – Taginfo says that 0.06% of shops are relations, and about 1% of amenity and leisure features. It’s up to you whether you think including them is worth the effort.

(Sorry for the slow answer, expected to be notified about replies somehow.)

You don’t mention relations. Does your code handle POI mapped as multipolygons, specifically if the tags are on the relation instead of the outer ring?

How about roof:material=grass?

Regarding OSMI: There were some server problems apparently, but it should now begin to work again according to a Forum post by Frederik (in German).

Höhenlinien werden derzeit nicht direkt in OpenStreetMap eingetragen. OSM-Anwendungen, die so ein Feature anbieten, nehmen die Werte normalerweise aus Quellen wie SRTM oder OpenDEM.

In OSM gibt es zumindest den Schlüssel ele, mit dem man einzelnen Punkten eine Höhe spendieren kann. Leider herrscht dort ein bisschen Chaos, was das Messsystem der Werte angeht. Und die Werte werden – soweit ich weiß – von bisher existierenden Anwendungen auch nur zur Beschriftung von Berggipfeln o.ä. eingesetzt.

Go to osm.org/traces/mine which is a list of traces you have uploaded. Click at the file name of a trace. At the bottom of the overview page for that trace, there is an edit button. Click it. You will now be able to edit the description, visibility and tags of the trace. Do so, then click the save button below the text fields.

@Chaos99: vVvA has already contributed and tagged several nodes and ways, so I’m going to assume that this question is indeed about adding tags to traces, not about adding tags to map elements.

I think what you describe in your post is indeed something that should be implemented and would be very helpful for OSM.

Maybe I can help. I’m actually using a bot to extract template data from the wiki already. Right now I’m doing this for the software templates. The software catalogues have been kept up to date using this automated process for years.

Rewriting this as a more general framework for template extraction (preferably in a programming language that is more popular among OSM developers) has been on my todo-list for quite a while - there are several unrelated ongoing projects I would need this for. But once that tool exists, it could be easily used to expose the data from key/tag description sites as JSON, too.

Like other commenters, I disagree with the idea to delete accounts without map edits. For one thing, it is known that some people only start mapping months after they have registered their account. Furthermore, OSM accounts are needed for other services than mapping: Posting in the forum and on help, uploading gps traces, or even just storing your preferences for osm.org. Thus someone who is not a mapper might still be actively using their account - e.g. a developer using OSM who participates in forum discussions.

If the problem is that “find nearby users” is too cluttered with inactive accounts (and I actually agree with that), then the solution is to filter the accounts showing up there, not to delete them entirely.

In communication, reporting the number of people who have actually mapped something, rather than the number of registered users, would indeed be preferable. But that would be possible even today.