Excellent - great to see some of the footpaths nearby popping up on the map. I took the liberty of changing path round the middle bit of the Y of Ardingly Reservoir to a Bridleway as I remember this being the case from last time i was there. Please correct this back if that's no longer true or my memory's playing tricks!

yep, looks like html tags work.

using HTML tags I would guess?

bold

Hehe, it is rather addictive isn't it?! The good news is it becomes more manageable when you start running out of things you can easily do. ;)

About the FIXME thing, if you use JOSM, you could download an area, and then search for name "FIXME" and remove the name tag, perhaps replacing it with fixme=no name or something, just in case the original user was trying to differentiate something by which roads they tagged name=fixme with from those they didn't. Then next time the noname map renders, it should work ok.

Nice work. I remember being a bit puzzled how to map something like this in Japan last January. That was before highway=pedestrian was widely used.

I think for Japanese cities, a 3D renderer would be great! :D

Welcome Barry! It's always great to read of new people who want to begin contributing. The beginners guide (osm.wiki/Beginners%27_Guide) should help with the learning curve.

I'm curious about the title of your diary post - I looked up the post code and it seems to be an area of Leeds that is largely unmapped. Or is it that you can't search for the postcode accurately? It doesn't seem to be in the free post code database yet. You can submit it here http://www.freethepostcode.org/ if you have can gather the coordinates yourself.

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. It's sad that there are kids like that around, but like you said, some places are pretty much "no go areas" even in daylight. A bike is certainly a better plan as you can turn around and cycle out of trouble more easily than on foot, but it isn't foolproof.

Maybe we should think up a tag for roads like this, to warn anyone else who might be adding POIs etc at a later date?

locals=unfriendly ??? :) Probably goes for farmers with shotguns too!

Or even if you know what to get people, if, like me, you buy lots of christmas presents via Amazon, try to remember to use the OSM link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home?site=amazon&tag=openstreetmap-21

This sends 5% to OSM at no cost to you! :)

If you don't know what kind of highway to tag a road as, you can use highway=road. This is intended for just such a case, and later contributors will know that further investigation is needed.

Regards, Dave

I'm with alv (and the rest of the openstreetmap community) on this.

If you consider driving across a dual carriageway at an intersection, you first cross the path of one carriageway, then then other. There is no single point where both go. They do not technically cross. They are linked by a section of road, which can be considered as the intersecting road.The example you showed simply doesn't reflect the road layout or the path that vehicles take. I would argue that the method you propose is both misleading and incorrect, whereas the current widespread practice is neither.

I believe that accuracy of road layout is more important in openstreetmap than the number of traffic signal nodes. I think it is better to put the traffic signal nodes where they are encountered by intersection users (although ideally we need some way of indicating whether they only apply to one direction of flow for this) and leaving the renderer to simplify this at lower zoom levels through collision detection.

Ed,

There are two possible reasons why the street may be split in two.
1. The person who added the streets didn't know whether the sections of road have the same name, so split them to avoid one name being given to both sections inadvertantly.
2. The sections of road need to have different tags, eg one part is oneway, the other isn't, the type of road (primary, residential etc) could be different, one might be a bridge etc. Basically if any tags need to be different the way needs to be split.

So, if you can see no differences in the existing tags, feel free to combine the ways. You can do this with Potlatch by selecting one way, then shift-clicking the other. I think Potlatch now warns you if the tags don't match. If there are differences, or you're not sure, tag the name to both of them seperately.

Regards,

Dave

Welcome! Always good to hear of new people starting to contribute to OSM :)

Caroline,

For me, mainly, it is that the kind of data I want to be able to use on my computer, my mobile phone, my GPS etc, is not available at a sensible price, has ludicrous licensing limitations, and is full of mistakes. Why should I correct mistakes for commercial companies when I will have to pay to receive my own updates in future?! So if I contribute data to OSM and others do the same, we will all benefit. It's satisfying working together for a common goal.

As a secondary motivation, I find it fun mapping things and satisfying seeing my contributions appear on the various output maps. I have always found maps inexplicably fascinating.

Yeah, it's always great to hear from new contributors. I think quite a few people read the diary entries.

With things you spot that you aren't confident to correct, www.openstreetbugs.org is a very useful website. you can mark errors with coments, either so you can come back at another time, or potentially allow other contributors to fix them. Also, it's great for getting non-technical friends/family to mark errors, add road names etc.

I have tried Gosmore, but find the interface too awkward to quickly add a waypoint, but it's neat for route planning.

As I understand it, the Tiger data is of extremely variable quality, as it's put together from a lot of different sources. It's great to see people turning it into good data :) Where things are a long way off, some of the duplicates may come from people adding streets they believe to be missing, when in fact they are just in the wrong place.

I too would suggest Gosmore, as it seems there are problems with GPS interfacing on a lot of WM Java implementations. Mine won't let me install Mom for that reason :(

However, the interface for Gosmore isn't exactly slick yet, though some of the functionality is pretty good.

I'm also using NoniGPSPlot, on an HTC TyTN II (the built in GPS is very good). I set it up with the "up" key to place a point, then pressing tab on the keyboard, typing text, and clicking the "ok" button allows me to add notated waypoints very easily. I also have the "down" key set up for starting a voice waypoint. Then clicking the select button twice ends it an saves waypoint.

Re: writing an application for OSM mappers, I would be very interested in this. I find the other windows mobile programs out there for OSM slow and cumbersome. I would be happy to contribute ideas on the spec, and help with testing.

Unfortunately I never got very far with programming (though I've done a little) so I can't offer any help with the actual code. If you are able to make it open source, it would fit really well with the ethos of OSM.

You got to love flaky USB drivers! I've come across quite a few of those :(

Dutch, Nice work!

To Gustav, I've had a play in JOSM with the rectangle function, and was dissapointe that it can't be used on four nodes that aren't connected by a way that forms a simple rectangle. I wanted to use it on buildings with much more complicated shape, without having to faff around making extra rectangular ways to do it and then deleting them.

Me too. I would say the proper way for this to be handled is for devices not handling Arabic to look for a name:en tag. However, I know this is easier to say than to do in practice.