Hi,

A couple of us have been talking about running another Open Street Map mini mapping party in December or January near Bradford, possibly inbetween Christmas and New Year as a chance to walk off that Christmas excess (and maybe get away from the family).

The best options I can see are:

* Worth Valley, specifically getting the Worth Way walk mapped and a
CC-licensed guide and map produced. We could do it out of the Computer
Gentle training room in Keighley, it would have a clearly defined goal and it's mostly through pretty nice countryside and villages.

* Bradford city centre, whilst it looks fairly well mapped there are still
some Open Street Bugs, there are lots of missing one-way and turn
restrictions, and other things to fix. We might be able to host this at
the University but wouldn't have internet access for non students/staff.

* Bradford outskirts, looking at zoom level 10 on the map you can see
where is built up but not mapped.

* Making a concerted effort to get the Sustrans routes of Yorkshire
"finished". This would be a very different event to any of the above, all
of the central organising work would have to be done online, but it would
be pretty awesome to see the few remaining bits finished. It'd also be a
nice chance for people to try out their new bikes they got for Christmas.

Anyway, those are my ideas. What are you most interested in completing and when?

Shouldn't man_made=wastewater_plant render now? There was a trac ticket and subsequent changeset, so surely it should render now?

Only it isn't rendering the big Esholt plant, and I'm not sure if something is broken. There are both areas and nodes tagged as wastewater_plant here, so something should appear. It looks wrong having it all missing.

So it seems the northernmost part of Europe wasn't showing on the map. I've fixed this by adding place=locality to the node that was already there. Like most people I believed the most northerly place was North Cape or Nordkapp (also missing a place=locality), it seems not. We have a gpx track going up to Knivskjellodden which I assume is a hiking trail, but would like confirmation before I trace it.

I'm toying with the idea of making a trip up there this summer. I'm due to go to Denmark in late July for a meeting and then up to Lapland for an anti-nuclear protest (but more to enjoy the train ride through Norway). Being so close it seems a shame not to go further, but I really haven't done any research at all to see if it is possible.

I got my first puncture whilst out riding for OpenStreetMap today. To make matters worse it was several miles from home with a big bag of books (to imitate the weight of a tent and sleeping bag) and no puncture repair kit. A rather nice young man passing on the greenway spotted my difficulty and slowed to chat, but also had no repair kit and was in a rush to catch a train.

I did however make a few additions of roads, though was receiving poor GPS coverage most of the way. I wonder if it's related to my Geko's recent poor battery metering and indicates my GPS is on it's last legs, I really hope not. I also picked up some trail mix whilst passing through town for my next longer ride.

So at some point this week I'll be heading up to Ilkley to pick up some new handlebar tape, a new inner tube to carry as a spare, and possibly map some footpaths towards Bolton Abbey. I may also do some Gorse and Elderflower picking for some homebrew.

At the weekend I'm planning on joining a tour of amenity=place_of_worship buildings in Bradford, which will hopefully lead to some new additions to the map.

I added a missing section of Sustrans ncn_65 North of York today. Things were rather messy around there, and in some places still are, so a local might want to do some tidying up (I blame NPE maps). It doesn't look quite right in places, and detail needs adding in some areas (lots of passing places need adding) However, the gap between North York and Alne has been added in which will look nice when it renders. The gaps further north are too far for me to get to in a day, I may be convinced into making a special visit on a tour up that way though.

Also, how does one map a road which is signposted as "unsuitable for motor vehicles"? The road is a standard country lane, and was actually better condition than some of the "suitable" roads I rode - I suspect it is signed as unsuitable to try and get traffic to go the other way in order to ease congestion.

Finally, I paid a visit to the National Railway Museum whilst there in order to do some research on disused lines near Bradford. I didn't find an out of copyright map like I was looking for, and nobody seems to know about the particular line I am interested in. I suspect it isn't actually a railway line then, I shall have to return at some point.

The bulk_upload_06 php script in SVN doesn't handle deletes (or rather didn't handle the deletes I gave it yesterday) so my edits around Euroway Industrial Estate are a little messy. Since the API now seems back up to speed I'm using Josm again and have fixed the errors.

Once these edits have rendered (I believe Wednesday for Open Cycle Map?) there will be a nice continuous line for Sustrans Route 66 between Bradford and Dewsbury. There are then a couple of tiny missing bits in Dewsbury which I wasn't entirely sure about (especially given current diversions) and then it will be possible to route from Bradford to Huddersfield using Sustrans routes.

There are access points and POIs missing on Spenn Valley Greenway (batteries ran out despite having been on charge for 24 hours - will buy new ones this afternoon), but otherwise I might have a play with producing a CC-Licensed map of the route for when it reopens later in the year - I've been wanting an excuse to have a play around with Adobe Illustrator.

I cycled some more of Sustrans Route 66 near Bradford last week but didn't take GPS because I've yet to buy/make something for attaching it to my bike. I've added in some Open Street Bugs and FIXME tags where things need fixing and added in some rough ways where I could remember them. This diary post is tagged at the worst section with a missing industrial estate and link roads up to Bowling

The Spenn Valley Greenway near Dewsbury is closed for several months, and diversions have been put in place. The diversions are (mostly) very well signposted, and are partly on previously private tracks owned by the water authorities (Yorkshire Water?) The publicity states that these tracks will remain public once the Greenway is reopened, and so will want mapping at some point.

Somebody more on the ball and living in Dewsbury area may want to do some mapping of both the proper Route 66 and the diversionary route 66, otherwise I shall return when it is less hot and sunny. It shouldn't take too much to finish mapping Route 66 now if we make a real push to get it completed, or rather the open sections won't take much - Sustrans have yet to open a few stretches.

The village my mother lives in is very poorly mapped by OSM, and commercial offerings are all rather out of date - especially around the outlying areas where a lot of construction has been happening over the past few years. People are talking about putting together a tourist map, and we've been considering the various options for getting a map together. My sister, a geographer, will be on the ground all summer and I'm hoping will be able to take gps traces and add POI data whilst my colleague is keen to hire a hang glider and shoot aerial photography for tracing.

As exciting as it would be to be the person flying the hang glider shooting images, it's just as exciting to have people excited enough about getting their home town mapped to go to extraordinary measures.

There's an awful lot of gps tracks North and West of Kettlewell which have had nothing done with them. A few were clearly continuations of existing roads and tracks, but many are completely unidentified. It'd be nice if people who know the area better could take a look and turn them into highways as that would really improve things and doesn't need gps (though a few may need more accuracy to be usable)

Today was the first sunny day in a while, the first day I had to myself in quite some time, and the start of daylight savings. All of which added up to a perfect chance for a bike ride.

I headed up to Crossflatts along the roads to see why the back route to Skipton doesn't look right on the map. I didn't get as far as the point at which it starts going wrong, and discovered that gps really needs attaching to handle bars for good reception. Considering it was a new bike and I haven't ridden in so long I felt I did rather well though.

I came back along the towpath to find out the true extent of Route 66. It was mapped as going further than it is signposted, and so I removed the extra bit; it won't make much difference since the extra bit is route 69 and therefore still mapped as a sustrans route. A man on expensive mountain bike, with all the "right" equipment kept getting very annoyed that an inexperienced road biker kept managing to overtake him, so I was glad to turn off back onto roads where the Sunday drivers were actually rather good for once.

Finally, returning through the local park I discovered people celebrating the return of the lion sculptures which had been gone for many years. And so I added two new attraction=art_work nodes to an already busy park.

I've just spent some time trying to work out why the presets menu in josm no longer fits my screen. Using GTK or CDE feels it's fine, but not with the (default?) metal theme I know and love. Getting the menu to scroll is more work than I can do in Java, squeezing the menu items together might be possible but isn't a long-term solution. For now I have patched presets.xml so that it the main presets menu fits into one screen, though the landuse submenu still needs "fixing" and a more long-term solution needs working on.

I was up in York today for purposes other than mapping but thought I'd check the cycle routes whilst there. Route 65 goes through York and was mapped but not a member of the relevant relation; I've added what I could but xapi wasn't working so it needs returning to later, ie. download ncn_ref=65 and then add everything to the relation. The same should possibly be done for all the ncn cycle routes.

Route 66 I'm still a little uncertain as to the exact route, I saw a link to route 66 whilst in York but not the route itself. Looking at where route 66 appears on the map it seems very messy, but hopefully it'll become clearer as more is added. Which reminds me, I still need to map the missing bits of route 66 around Bradford.

I wish we could just get the data from Sustrans to add in to OSM, it's difficult finding where sustrans routes go just by following signposts. The signposts often run out, meaning you have to go back to the copyrighted Sustrans maps to find out where you should be going, which presumably means I can't add the un-signposted sections of the routes to OSM.

Quick question - how do I map a double mini roundabout, two mini roundabouts which feed into each other with no road in between? At the moment a small road has just been added to separate them, but that's going to be flagged as a road not having a name and therefore an error; it's also not correct.

They're too small to make into proper roundabouts, and you can't have two nodes connected to each other without a way between them.

Incidentally, I spotted they weren't mapped when adding the A99 bus route which embarrassingly goes through an area of Bradford not mapped, the area near my house.

Seems we could do with some more military tags. I spent much of yesterday finding airforce bases from various sources around the internet, confirming they existed using landsat/open aerial map/Yahoo, and adding in what I could. We now apparently have every airforce base in Taiwan and Afghanistan added, though I wouldn't be so sure there aren't missing ones.

Anyway, the things I got stuck on were:

* Helicopter Landing Zone. There is aeroway=helipad though so I tended to use that.

* military=airfield. It's documented and there is a josm icon for it, but it'd be nice to see it rendered.

* military=missile_base. Is being used lightly (2 in Europe) but doesn't get rendered anywhere

* rocket launch pad.

* man_made=mast

* tagging a military base with multiple names

Just done a little tidying up of Amesbury and Boscombe Down. There was an area rather badly tagged with bus stops getting name=bus stop and roads getting their individual nodes tagged with a name. There were also NPE sourced features over Boscombe Down airforce base including a forest over the top of a taxiway.

There's still lots of residential roads in Amesbury for somebody on the ground to map and lots of detail for Boscombe Down to be added from Yahoo if anybody is bored.

OK, JOSM fixed and I'm back to fixing existing data. Fixed a few errors around Warlberswick I made (thanks to Keep Right for spotting them), and I've warped the village's map from their website to see how things compare. The map on the website is clearly sketched and not at all accurate, but does give something of an idea what's missing for the next trip.

There's a village much closer to home that needs lots of work doing on it, a cursory glance suggests it's rather complete but it's full of errors. Some of them are obvious enough to fix without visiting, most aren't. Fixing errors isn't my idea of fun, so I'm unlikely to get round to that for a while.

Finally, I'm visiting Kalkan, Turkey in 5 weeks time. I wonder if it's worth proposing to the local hiking club in advance that we walk as much of Likya Yolu as possible whilst I'm there so we can add in missing signposts and missing bits on the map. Nobody else seems to have done much mapping of it at all.

I'm having a problem with the latest svn revision of Josm (1469). I've filed a bug report but given I'm not doing a huge amount of work on Open Street Map at the moment I'm not too fussed right now.

As part of trying to debug the problem I deleted my preferences files, meaning the new color scheme introduced recently is now being used. I really don't like the new colors and may have to find a way of reverting them if I can't get used to them.

When I do get josm working again, I'll be making some trips along a couple of missing bits of our nearest regional cycle network.

I've just added in a relation for Bradford's free bus.

It's well into it's six-month trial, and so might not last much longer if the powers that be decide it's not worth keeping. Alternatively, they may bow to pressure and make it run in both directions. Either way, it may need editing soon.

My plan for tomorrow is to get a day rider card and add in some more bus routes in the area. That was also my plan for today though, so don't be too hopeful :-)

I've done a load of tracing of car parks, buildings, etc. by Liverpool John Lennon airport. It's quite a while since I've been to that part of the country, so somebody else will have to add in the details of Speke Hall. For bonus points, see if you can spot the message written into the sand just to one side of the final approach. I wonder if it's still there, it only appears to be in Yahoo's aerial photography not Google's.

I've just done a load of Yahoo tracing around the military base at Rendlesham Forrest. It's looking rather good now with most of the buildings and roads added in though I don't suppose anybody will be allowed in to check it; sometimes it wasn't clear if a boxy thing was a building or something else, in which case I just left it out.

Somebody in the area might want to tweak the landuse=military tagged area - I added in what looked like military land, but obviously that's hard to tell from Yahoo imagery.