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.

Today I added the whole of the 363, 503 and 576 bus routes in Calderdale. They all run in both directions, but I only added in the direction I rode them on.

I also added a large section of route between Halifax and Todmorden which is shared between various bus routes (590 and 591 I rode today but I think 592 and 593 also share the route). Mapping isn't complete in Halifax or Todmorden so I couldn't add complete routes. From Todmorden the buses go on to Burnley or Rochdale or just turn around. Incidentally it's NOT pronounced 'tod moor den' as a certain celebrity chef recently kept using, the mor is a much softer sound with the emphasis on the first syllable; I wonder if there's a way of tagging that...

It's cold outside and it's trying to snow. My plan for today had been to ride ncn_ref=66 in either direction of Bradford, but that clearly wasn't going to happen in this weather. So instead I spent time playing with the Cadastre data and have added quite a lot of buildings and roads up in North West France. It obviously all needs checking on the ground to add in the correct road types and names, but it gives an easy way of getting initial mapping done.

I've also been playing around with dbpedia to see if I can increase the amount of villages showing in Turkey. I couldn't. There aren't many places in Wikipedia that aren't on the map and most of them were being encoded horribly. I do however now vaguely understand how to pull geographic data out of wikipedia in an almost useful manner.


SELECT ?subject ?lat ?lon WHERE { {
?subject rdf:type .
?subject geo:lat ?lat.
?subject geo:long ?lon
} UNION {
?subject rdf:type .
?subject geo:lat ?lat.
?subject geo:long ?lon.
} }


Whilst it's great to be able to get this mapping done from a warm(ish) desk, and feels great to get so much mapped with so little effort, it's never going to be as accurate as actually venturing outside to take GPS readings.

I was attempting routing from Scunthorpe to Grimsby by bike, and Open Route Service sent me on a bizarre 200 mile route via Nottingham so I've gone over through the area looking for anything obviously wrong. I've fixed a few bits and pieces (mostly cosmetic), but it all looked routable so I've no idea what the problem is.

The entire area needs work, not just Grimsby (which was recently flagged as the worst mapped place in the UK). It's relatively flat so mapping by bike should be fairly quick, but there's a large area to cover and existing data to check (you know when you get the "that's got to be wrong" feeling). There are existing gpx plots, some of which I have added roads alongside today but others don't match up to existing data very well.

I might be tempted to spend a week camping in the area doing lots of cycling/mapping in a few months when it's warm enough.

Edit: Upon further investigation, Open Route Service appears to try and avoid highway=unclassified when routing by bike or foot. Or at least that's what it looks like is happening in this part of the country. Can't think of any reason why highway=unclassified should be avoided though, surely it would be more preferable to a busy main road for walkers and cyclists?

Two major achievements today - adding the DECC's (source=DECC) entire list of UK oil wells (they confirmed it was public domain data yesterday morning), and mapping the park next to my house.

There are now 11,015 disused oil wells in the OSM database around the UK and a further 500 active ones. Unfortunately there is no official tag and they won't show up on the map, but the data is there (man_made=petroleum_well) for anybody interested. They have other data too, but it doesn't appear to be of much use for us.

I'd put off mapping the park by my house for so long because of its complicated pathways, and the sheer number of different tags it has (maze, bowling greens, play area, band stand, gardens, etc.) many of which were new to me. It's still not entirely correct, but good enough (the major pathways and features are all in, if not entirely accurate). Unfortunately the name of the park is rendered directly over the tiny bandstand in Mapnik. I have filed a bug report for this to be fixed, but I don't know how easy a fix it is.

A lesser achievement was taking my new bike out for a spin yesterday. It's a joy to ride, not terribly fast but nice low gears for getting up the Bradford hills. I'm hoping to have a chance for a decent length ride this weekend.

I did something silly today and imported a bunch of data from a government released shapefile before spotting the Crown Copyright. To be fair the rest of the site talked about non-exclusive usage and making data open to the public, whilst the disclaimer of it all being Crown Copyright was hidden away.

I've removed the import I made, have contacted the relevant agency requesting to use their data, and have generated a map to show the data which I aim to import if given the go ahead.

I'm really hoping we get the go ahead on using this data, since it covers all UK oil wells both current and disused. The map I've generated shows all the active ones, whilst there are 11015 disused ones which could be added if desired. There are also other interesting oil-related shapefiles which might be interesting.

Finally, there are no official tags for oil wells. Canvec suggests that man_made=petroleum_well is how it should be tagged, but that isn't official and doesn't get rendered.

I downloaded the GNS data for Turkey and converted it to gpx in order to assist the adding of missing villages around the Kalkan area. I've added some where I'm somewhat confident, but the GNS data doesn't match up to what's on the ground very well so I've given up for now. I'll probably be using it as an aid whilst I'm out there mapping, but not as a source in it's own right.

Whilst I had the area open, I've done a bit of tidying up and fixing of tags which have been added since I was last there - I'm rather pleased to see bits added in to the West of Kalkan, even if they did take a bit of tidying up.

Also, there's a big rectangle of water being rendered in Mapnik but not Osmarender, Cycle Map or NoName at the location I've set this diary entry to (the area I've actually been working on is way off to the WSW). Can somebody fix this and/or tell me how to?

In South Wales there is the town Haverfordwest and the city St Davids. Mapnik renders St Davids and not Haverfordwest when zoomed out, which is correct behaviour. However St Davids is only a city because it has a cathedral, in all other aspects Haverfordwest is a more important place and is the principal town of the county. Once you do zoom into Haverfordwest, the name of a suburb (Alberts Town) seems to take priority over the town name at certain zoom levels.

There are similar issues with rail lines and train stations. The data available doesn't say which stations are the important ones, and whilst I could theoretically pull data from somewhere on number of trains per day it still wouldn't be entirely accurate and the map wouldn't be entirely open.

So, suggestions on fixing any of this would be appreciated.

Whilst at a meeting last night I realised I was in an easily accessible yet unmapped part of the city, and so returned after lunch to try and map it all. It was a larger area with more densely packed roads than I imagined in the dark, but still I've made a start and can return on Wednesday afternoon when I'm next due in that part of town.

Cheap batteries are not worth the cost savings - the no-name AAA batteries I took with me as I was rushing out the house turned out not to work. Luckily I've taken to hiding spare batteries in places I frequent, people get confused when you ask to use the batteries they didn't know they had but it means they stay unused for emergencies such as today.

I need to get round to either fixing or replacing my bike before spring, there are plenty of open street bugs around the area which I can't be bothered visiting on-foot but which could all be quickly closed by bike. Plus if I'm to cycle to Turkey this summer...

New camera would also be good, probably selling my good one and getting a cheap Canon. That way it's small and doesn't look expensive, yet with CHDK it'd be better quality than my current one.

Finally, on the way home - lorry breaks down on side of highway=primary, blocking access to highway=residential but not much else. Two police cars turn up to see what's happening, park across highway=primary and thereby cause access=no, leading to traffic tailback for some distance around the ringroad. Hmm, maybe I think in OSM tags too much...

Given the updating of my UK Rail Map is now somewhat automated, it means as part of the monthly update procedure I can produce output such as this to show how the map is changing. There wasn't very much newly added over the three weeks between these files, which I'm hoping means that the uk rail map is fairly feature-complete.

I've produced this especially for somebody wanting to know how feature-complete we have the European rail network. Just looking at the rail network maps, even if I produced one for the whole of Europe, isn't going to tell us in any detail how complete things are - though it may give some obvious empty bits. I'm hoping a monthly output like this will be of use, and if I ever get routing working then we'll see what bizarre routes get generated.

Old New Difference
Files mapnik/ukrail.osm date: Sun Dec 14 15:35:52 2008 mapnik/*[railway=*][bbox=-6.5,49.5,2.1,59] date: Mon Jan 5 10:08:03 2009
Number nodes 104997 107320 2323
Number ways 12121 12448 327
Number node tags 0 0 0
Number way tags 32127 33331 1204
Waynode count 117838 120504 2666

Number active users: 127

http://kaerast.blogbound.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/newrail.png

I've been arguing with my partner the past couple of days about Flat Earth Theory. I'm sensing I'm about to be ridiculed here, but I actually quite like the theory of a flat earth. It doesn't affect my daily life, and I continue to believe that the earth is spherical, but the flat earth theory can be used as a step into challenging people to question the beliefs they have simply because scientists say so.

However, politics and conspiracy theories aside, I would love to render OSM data using the theories of flat earth in order to show what a flat earth would look like in great detail. I'm expecting this to be far beyond my capabilities both in terms of coding and in terms of the maths involved, however it's something I would very much like to have a go at doing (presuming of course nothing more sensible comes up for me to work on).

Talking of more sensible work, we're planning a Big Brother treasure hunt around my city centre. Last month I put in a Freedom of Information Request to the local council requesting details and locations of CCTV cameras to which they responded with a list of cameras, all with only vague locations. I appear to have found a small amount of funding for printing and prizes, and we are due to have a meeting tomorrow to plan details.

The city centre OSM map is mostly complete in terms of roads, and so we should be able to give people an A4 printout of the area with the list of cameras on the back. Points can then be given for each camera found, with bonus points for each extra useful bit of information (unlisted cameras, photographs, type, coverage, etc) and possibly some bonus points for cameras we don't expect to be found (bad descriptions or in outlying areas).

Hopefully this will all lead to complete mapping of all surveillance=public in Bradford within a couple of months.

I've spent the past day or so working on my open rail map. I've built a little Gnewsense server which will re-render everything once a month, and it's currently rendering to zoom level 15 [which may be a little too high if I'm to increase coverage area].

osm.blogbound.com is my little borrowed server which does all the rendering, and http://ukrail.blogbound.com is now the home of the map. Thanks to blogbound for allowing me to use up lots of disk space and bandwidth...

Currently my main issue is that I have to do a complete re-render every time something changes. I can't see a way of only rendering changed tiles, even though I am sure there must be a way of doing so. Ordinarily I suppose it makes sense to render everything, but the rail network is now somewhat stable and therefore doesn't need constant re-rendering.

Done as much mapping as possible over new year in Walberswick, Suffolk. There is still quite a bit to be done in the village but it's starting to look ok. Quite a few residential streets need adding in, and there are rather a lot of unmapped footpaths to be added. The neighboring town of Southwold needs quite a lot of attention, and is considerably larger than OSM suggests.

Today I added all the bus_stops on the X6 route between Huddersfield and Leeds. I planned on doing the same on the return journey too, but the gps signal on the return bus was even worse than the first. I'm contemplating adding in a relation for the X6 route, but since it probably wouldn't be used I'm not sure I can be bothered.

That's probably the last of my mapping in Yorkshire this year, I have a list of Bradford CCTV cameras [1] to add in but that requires visiting them all - a) because I'm unclear as to ownership of the list and b) because the locations aren't exact anyway.

Saturday I head off to Wales, possibly mapping a really annoying missing part of railway line [2] which I think is tunnel / big embankment and therefore no gps signal.

Then I'm in wales for a week, hopefully mapping some of Haverfordwest and then I'm in East Anglia for a few days hopefully completing Walberswick (which would make our version better than Google). But time, weather and family will probably hamper efforts.

[1] http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cctv_coverage_and_information_4
[2] http://kaerast.blogbound.com/ukrail/?find=littleborough

The last of the tiles for my uk rail map are uploading now, and it's looking rather good.

http://kaerast.blogbound.com/ukrail.html

I've not gone to a very high level of zoom because it's taking forever to render tiles, and I want to learn what to do with it next - ie. how to make it searchable and routable, how to only render changed tiles in the future, how to find a spare server for rendering/hosting this, etc.

I've just got a reply back from a freedom of information request I made to my local council regarding their spending on mapping.

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/spendature_on_maps

There's a little under half a million people in the area covered by Bradford City Council, which works out at around 27 pence per person on mapping fees. There are 180,000 households in the area which works out as 77 pence per household - which seems higher than other councils in the UK.

They have also failed to explain where the money comes from, giving the usual "we don't keep track of what income goes where" but do state that council tax only covers a small amount of their total expenditure which might in itself be worth another look.

Meanwhile I'm rendering tiles for my uk rail map. I don't have a decent spare machine to do the rendering on, so the resulting slippy map is unlikely to be updated very often. However, the static map I occasionally generate is online at http://kaerast.blogbound.com/ukrailmap.png.

Today I started moving a Drupal website from using google and gmap to openstreetmap. Ugh, the process is ugly and horrible using existing modules - to the extent that it would almost have been easier to just write some php from scratch. However, the first step of displaying locations is now complete.

It took installing the mappingkit module (http://drupal.org/project/mappingkit) module, specifically the Map assist, map client, map context, map layer, mapping kit, openlayers map client and wms modules.

Then a context is needed, just let it create the default ones and then edit to your location (I just need a bounding box covering UK)

Then a layer is needed, just create one and don't argue about the fact that you're never going to use it.

Then you need to ensure your data is available through a public geo-encoded rss feed.

Then you can use map assist to create a macro for the map.

Finally, you can edit the macro to use a sensible zoom and center setting. Leaving me with: [map context="node/37/context" baselayers="osm,none" layers="1" 1="georss|event/feed|events" zoom="8" center="-1.28264,53.57226" width="700" height="400" /]

I really dislike javascript and openlayers coding, so I'm not the person to make this much simpler and I'm really not looking forward to switching the geoencoding modules to something open.

I've been tidying up the uk rail network today, and I must say it's looking better for it. I've fixed incorrectly tagged lines all over the place, with just a few left I need to query - railway=incline being one.

I've rendered a very big map of it, which made finding the stations not attached to railway lines easier and the train geeks then saw it and pointed out "shouldn't there be a line/station there" so I added in a couple of openstreetbugs.

There's a discussion on a new tagging schema for rail which I like the look of. It should end up less messy than the current situation, from what I can tell. See osm.wiki/Talk:Key:railway#New_tagging_schema...

If anybody wants a copy of my uk rail map, pm me - at 4Mb it's rather too large to just host publicly at the moment.

I've just added a load of stuff around the university area. GPS reception is terrble, and so I've added pathways and buildings the best I can, but I want to keep revisiting this until I'm happy with it.

I also added a few streets on the way which were bugging me, there are more in that area that need adding but I would like to concentrate on inside the ringroad for now. The bit around the Town Hall needs some work doing, and there is also all the openstreetbugs that are listed.

I want to set myself a deadline for completing inside the ringroad, but I'm unclear as to how much still needs doing - it doesn't look like much, but I keep finding bits which haven't been mapped properly. We really need to spend some time looking at what is and isn't mapped in Bradford.