Interesting. One way that the distinction between official paths and shortcuts can be made that I haven’t seen here is by using relations. This is often used outside urban areas to define long distance paths. See www.waymarkedtrails.org for a rendered map, the wiki for tagging. You could easily define the main paths in a park as part of a very local network.

That said, having walked and mapped paths in different parts of the world, I do agree that a simple classification would be useful. The approach to cut properties up in very many different tags appeals to my inner nerd, but it increases the learning curve and makes for a complicated decision process for data users. Your proposal on the other hand looks nice, but it does try to measure many dimensions at once and fit them in a single scale. That means you assume e.g. that an unobvious path will always be hard to walk (or easy?).

That’s why I like Sander’s proposal. It allows for a few very common, intuitive categories that actually have some features that do go together (forests tend to be muddy). It looks easy for data contributors and for data users. It might even cannibalize the specialty sac scale.

Geonick, I’m guessing you’re Stefan by the picture. After the comments here and further discussion, I think your third point is exactly what I proposed to the iOverlander team. Three years after you came up with the idea :)

Escada, you’re right. When classifying nodes, I saw a lot of them that add some information to roads: e.g. some roundabouts, highway=Ford ford etc. Hence my attention to these. It is, as you say, probably more I.interesting to use the tags on the ways themselves. I did build some indicators like that already, like how many roads have the surface tag, the maxspeed tag, resiresidential roads with and without name. I’m not sure on how to add this all up at the road network level.

Hey Sander, I don’t have the data right now, but I think nodes tagged with something like “editor=JOSM” are to blame. These have been deleted around that time. I might exclude these from the totals.

Not being a programmer and having manual-o-fobia, I second DaCor. Absolutely love the wizard as a way to get to know the thing.

Now for an interface that directly converts a query to a nice little global uMap to get those user numbers even further up :)

Usario naoliv escribio sobre este script en su diario.

En Belgica tambien estamos interesados utilizar un script para los mensajes.

Hizé algo parecido al proyecto de Jese hace un tiempo, vea mi diario

So I should have tried the preview first…

building address	node address
2009	1		13
2010	183		685
2011	1365	1767
2012	12268	2563
2013	25846	4483
2014	62064	8529
2015	83720	19884

Hey Sander,

I did some analysis myself on the history files. I use Mazdermind splitter and importer tool, so deleted items linger around and I’m not sure how it handles relations. Here’s what I get for Flanders:

  poly address	node address 2009	1	        13 2010	183	         685 2011	1365	1767 2012	12268	2563 2013	25846	4483 2014	62064	8529 2015	83720	19884

My numbers seem to be a lot lower. Any idea why that might be?

My definition of an address was “has an addr:street and an addr:housenumber tag”

Nandachuva, there is no necessity for there to be a one on one relationship between openstreetmap objects and external objects. In your example, it sounds like a reasonable query to ask OSM to show all statues related to one person from this person’s wiki page. But what if there’s a wiki page for the person and for the statue. Than the statue might need two values for the wikidata tag (u-oh). Or we would have the statue refer to the statue page, and create a relationship for the person (u-oh), containing the statues for this person. This relationship would then have the wikidata id for the person.

The second problem you mention looks more complicated to me. I suppose wikidata will only allow wikidata id creation for things that are ‘notable’. I believe all things should -potentially- have an external id. I could theoretically just tagging things for my theoretical project, say introduce a openrestaurantid=Q123 , for my own selection of things that deserve an idea. But what I would really like a s a kind of API that allows any external project to ask to generate an external id to be written into OSM; and preferably all using the same tag. Maybe though, it would be better to do something like this with something like externalid:opentrip=Q123 and externalid:wikidata=Q111 , for a restaurant that has both reviews and a wikipedia page.

Very interesting thoughts, thank you all very much. I didn’t know about the wikidata tag. What makes this example so interesting, is that they could in fact refer to an object in OSM by the wikidata tag. Instead they refer to the relation ID. Here’s an overpass example for a random thing with a wikidata tag: http://www.overpassturbo.eu/s/7wY

I wonder why they didn’t do that. Yes, there are problems with my proposal, but much bigger problems with using an OSM id.

I just use Osmand on my LG G2. Quality seems good enough to me, but of course, I’m using it mostly in not so densely populated areas. Here’s an article I wrote about how to use Osmand to contribute to OSM. And here’s a pretty map of the tracks I’ve been uploading to OSM over the past 9 months.

@Peter Mead One building can easily have more than one address, so there is a real need to map some addresses as nodes. Address nodes also have the advantage that they can indicate an entrance: eg an apartment building can have two adresses, with entrances quite far apart. So I’d just map all addresses as nodes.

El trabajo de Diego, lo vi, es fenomenal. Como me gusta la autopromocion, durante mis tres meses de viaje en el Peru en 2014, he puesto como 500 notes (300 ya lo corregí), he grabado y subido GPS track de todo el viaje para uso en OSM, he mejorado un monton de rutas principales en el Peru, y he puesto la informacion sobre pavimentacion (surface) y calidad de las rutas (smoothness).

Si usas Osmand, se puede actualizar el mapa cada semana.

Because of population density? This is what Japan looks like at night, a good proxy for population density within a country (actually population density * prosperity * measures to decrease light polution). Striking similarity, no. It could be interesting to overlay both images and look for outliers. A bit like I believe members of your team did some time back, but using image complexity in stead of population density as a predictor of expected data density.

Thanks for the write-up. Looks like a good way to fix errors. Can’t see how anyone could have anything against this method.

@SomeOneElse a more systematical approach is needed to get statistically valid results. The good thing is, the longer we wait, the more likely we have enough data :) I’d like to look into this further in June 2015…

I think Switserland and Belgium might be interested in the automatisation. I’ll send this diary to @xivk from Belgium. Do you think you can share this?

We had some success in Belgium. I think we recruited some people for the Meetup group.

Please don’t kill overpass :)

Just only make the call after a certain zoomlevel is reached?

I’ve been navigating for 25000km through South America, using Osmand. In general, quality is definitely good enough, though making notes of all the errors made me a top 50 note maker worldwide :)