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daveemtb's Diary

Recent diary entries

osm.org/go/eurtAVrQ6-

This housing development was recently mapped on OSM, within a month or two of completion. It is still years out of date in Google maps' Teleatlas data:

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=51.113283,-0.17503&spn=0.005099,0.009624&z=17

Or, Yahoo's Navteq data:

http://uk.maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&lat=51.113588&lon=-0.175537&zoom=17

The same goes for another development (half completed on the ground)

osm.org/go/eursdyU@U-

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=51.105961,-0.147221&spn=0.005099,0.009624&z=17
http://uk.maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&lat=51.105545&lon=-0.147127&zoom=18

Clarification on the status of the A272

Posted by daveemtb on 7 September 2009 in English.

Having travelled part of the A272 recently and found the signs to be a confusing mix of green-signed and white-backed signs, I emailed West Sussex County Council's highways department. They have clarified that the entire A272 currently has primary route status, although there have been changes in the past and there may be changes in future.

However, it isn't clear whether this applied to the sections of the A272 outside of West Sussex. I suspect either end of the road may be non-primary.

I must remember to tag the West Sussex section accordingly. People keep swapping it around as they see various signs in either background colour. Any suggestions on a good tag to indicate authoritative source? I'm currently thinking source:ref=WSCC highways dept, perhaps followed by a link to this diary post.

Location: Pondtail Farm, Shipley, Horsham, West Sussex, England, RH13 8LN, United Kingdom

I just spotted the "keep right" link in the wiki page for my town, and found that it's a great error checking tool. It helped me fix up a lot of small errors in my area.

For anyone who wants something to do, there are lots of highways that haven't been joined properly in this area:

http://keepright.ipax.at/report_map.php?db=osm_EU&zoom=15&lat=51.17439&lon=-0.16685&layers=B00T&ch30=1&ch40=1&ch50=1&ch60=1&ch70=1&ch90=1&ch100=1&ch110=1&ch120=1&ch130=1&ch150=1&ch160=1&ch170=1&ch180=1&ch191=1&ch192=1&ch193=1&ch194=1&ch201=1&ch202=1&ch203=1&ch204=1&ch210=1&ch220=1&ch231=1&ch232=1&ch270=1&show_ign=1&show_tmpign=0

(oh and when it complains about waterways intersecting rivers, they should be on different layers - don't add an intersecting node!)

Location: Ladyland Farm, Salfords and Sidlow, Salfords, Reigate and Banstead, Surrey, England, RH6 8JA, United Kingdom

Crawley complete, time for a break.

Posted by daveemtb on 31 July 2009 in English.

Now that I've reached my goal of completing the roads in Crawley, which has taken me over 18 months, I'm planning to take a break from OSM contributing, as I'm getting too busy for it at the moment and have other projects I'd like to spend more time on.

There is plenty more that could be done in terms of addressing and residential building tracing, but I've lost motivation for that.

I'll probably contribute the odd bit here and there, and upload traces when I go somewhere unmapped.

Maybe come winter i'll have a bit more time for OSM. Horsham and Southwater need finishing some time...

So... signing out for now.

Location: Northgate, Crawley, West Sussex, England, RH10 8DT, United Kingdom

Plodding on towards my goal

Posted by daveemtb on 9 June 2009 in English.

I'm slowly but surely working towards completing the roads in Crawley. There are missing road names dotted around, a mixture of traced areas I haven't visited yet, and names that got missed when mapping previously, sometimes the voice recording wasn't clear enough to make out.

This kind of mapping isn't nearly so satisfying, especially when there is no nonames layer that updates more often than once a week.

Still, I'll try to keep pluggin away at it, until I can say that Crawley is complete (for roads, anyway, there are millions of footways in some of the areas, which I have no intention of mapping!), which should be satisfying.

Then I'll probably take a break from mapping for a bit (except for a small un-mapped village in North Norfolk that I'll be visiting this summer) as I have some other projects I'd like to spend more time on for a while.

Location: Southgate, Crawley, West Sussex, England, RH11 8TE, United Kingdom

Desperation with dumb tracers

Posted by daveemtb on 23 May 2009 in English.

Argh! After putting this junction right twice I've had to take desperate measures. (see map location and click edit)

I wish yahoo tracers wouldn't assume that other mappers are wrong when they haven't been to a location recently themselves. This roundabout was changed to a big crossroads more than a year ago!

Grrrr!

Location: Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom

I was surprised to spot a large village with a population of more than 10,000 people totally absent from West Sussex on OSM - not a sign there was mapping needed there.

I've filled in the residential landuse and the lakes from Landsat, in the hopes it may inspire some mapping. Maybe at some point I'll get down there myself.

Location: Great House Farm, Southwater, Horsham, West Sussex, England, RH13 9FB, United Kingdom

Frustrations with photo mapping

Posted by daveemtb on 12 May 2009 in English. Last updated on 13 May 2009.

I haven't done any photo mapping for a long time, but took some photos on a recent journey, planning to fill in some street names by referencing to the GPX.

Unfortunately I can't seem to get Agpifoj working. The documentation on the wiki doesn't cover the essentials, and I get stupid erros claiming that none of the photos match. I tried to reinstall the plugin, but now my JOSM installation has got totally messed up. I tried clearing out the .JOSM folder (i'm on a mac now) and downloading the JOSM .jar file again, but now it comes up with a blank list of plugins. :( I can install the plugin manually by placing the jar file in the .JOSM folder but it still doesn't work, even with no other plugins.

The times in the GPX file match up perfectly with the timestamps on the photos.

This is doing my head in! :(

Anyone got any suggestions?

I say bring back the old geotagged photo plugin! :(

GPX upload

Posted by daveemtb on 8 May 2009 in English.

Just finished uploading a whole stack of GPX files, after manually removing the point clouds from around my house and place of work. I really wish someone would write a neat app that could bulk process GPX files to do this, with a GUI. The ones I made public were just a small part of what I uploaded - 66 files.

During a recent visit to Silloth, I mapped most of the town. There are still several roads remaining round the edges, though, as my time was limited.

Also mapped a few roads in Maryport but much more work is needed.

I have also done quite a lot of NPE tracing in the area between Maryport, Silloth and Carlisle. I've been marking roads as highway=road. There's quite a bit more tracing work to do to join up with the area to the south of Cockermouth which has already been done.

Location: Silloth-on-Solway, Cumberland, England, United Kingdom

Changesets across large areas

Posted by daveemtb on 23 April 2009 in English.

The new history tab is very interesting, however, I've spotted something that makes it a lot less useful: Changesets that cover huge geographical areas. I'm not sure how these come about, but I have seen a changeset with one point POI in Germany and one in the USA. Perhaps these are the work of bots.

The problem is that such a changeset is listed under the history of all locations within the box defined by these two points. For an area where few recent changes have been made, the history is totally swamped by just a few of these wide area changesets.

Perhaps the system needs to filter out changesets with a very large areas.

update: I noticed this has been added to: osm.wiki/OSM_Protocol_Version_0.6/Known_problems

Lets hope this gets worked out somehow soon.

Hiking at Causey Pike

Posted by daveemtb on 11 April 2009 in English.

Added some hiking paths on a circular route around Causey Pike, and a few roads in the area. Improved the accuracy of other roads.

Some of the paths, though public footpaths, were pretty tricky climbing, so I tagged with appropriate sac_scale. I'm still not totally happy with choosing whether to use highway=footpath, footway or path for such paths. I'm not sure whether the current recommendations for tagging hiking paths work well with representing public rights of way, but I'm not sure I have any better ideas. Perhaps the rendering needs to be thought about a little more.

Looks like there are many other footpaths and bridleways in the area yet to be mapped.

Location: Above Derwent, Cumberland, England, United Kingdom

Madeira tracks uploaded

Posted by daveemtb on 3 January 2009 in English.

I have uploaded a bunch of GPX tracks from Madeira, and edited what I think some of them are. However, they are from a relative who couldn't be persuaded to do more than just give me the tracks, so it is possible I have misinterpreted some of them. Please feel free to check them if you know the area.

Location: Serra de Água, Ribeira Brava, Madeira, 9350-323, Portugal

Added a few more miles of bridleway on Saturday between the SDW and the A27, along the A27 over Ditchling Road to Stanmer and also to the North of Stanmer. Also added the Chattri War Memorial - just in time for Remembrance Sunday! Doesn't seem to show up on Osmarender though.

It seems there are still many rights of way to add in this area, so if you know anyone with who walks/cycle/rides regularly in the area, lend them a GPS! :)

Location: Patcham, Brighton and Hove, England, BN1 8QF, United Kingdom