London Borough of Hounslow - from Bedfont in the west to Chiswick in the east - is finally finished and the boundaries sealed off... or is it? What does 'finished' mean? Well, I think all named roads and footpaths are in there. Seems hard to believe I've physically visited every one. But I can't prove it. How do I prove there aren't odd streets I've missed? And how do I keep it finished with the new estates popping up everywhere?

It looks like the task may be changing from getting away from the computer and goingg out on a bike to a mix of hassling the council for information and writing scripts to validate my data against other people's lists, neither of which is inspiring. Or I could move on to more interesting stuff, like adding my own layers to use which local statistics based on LSOAs etc - which will need postcodes and more tedium :-(

Maybe I should just get back on the bike and go over the border to Southall, one of the few areas not to have been blanket covered by the armchair yahoo tracers...

I've started a new job in Central London, so I'll be dropping mapping in the western parts of London Borough of Hounslow for a while and concentrating on the bits I cycle through on the way to work. That means the new Feltham town centre and the southern part of Bedfont are going to stay uncompleted for now, unless someone else wants to wants to take them on. Instead I'm now filling in the last blank part of Brentford and then going on to the bits of Chiswick which have been drawn from yahoo but not yet labelled and completed on the ground.

I can't make up my mind what the best way to map is. I started out working on my bike in blank areas I didn't know that well. I'd try to find roads that chopped the area in reasonable size chunks, then cycle a chunk at a time, load into josm, and check against yahoo that I hadn't completely missed anything.

Lately I've been trying to map the roads using the yahoo data first. I'm finding that that:

* massively reduces the time needed to get an initial idea of the road layout

* makes the process of following the roads massively more boring, and leads to me just noting road names and not riding down them if I can't see anything interesting. Which probably means I miss interesting hidden footpaths, etc.

Taking longer than needed seems silly, getting bored doing it even sillier (where other people have already done the roads from yahoo in an area I was going to map, I don't feel like cycling it at all - it's like the interesting bit's been done).

There must be some better way of combining the two than either of the above. What is it?

There's a few of us picking away round the edges of Heathrow, but it looks like more using Yahoo imagery (which is a bit old for the area) than actually getting physically round the the area. Leaving quite a bit of it still blank. Which is a shame for several reasons: the Heathrow area tends to get used to illustrate articles, and that doesn't make osm look good; the Heathrow area is massively in the news over the new runway, and Sipson ought to be fully mapped before they start trying to bulldoze it - and it would be good for us if we had the best maps of the area showing people actually live there; and terminal 5 is launching soon and we don't have it yet...

But what to do about it? The geography means there isn't a single focal point for a mapping party. And some of the area isn't the most pleasant anyway - lots of fast roads and long-term planning blighted areas. Oh well, keep plodding on I guess. I may abandon my core Hounslow stuff and start doing the southern edge of Harlington and Hayes for a while.

I have a whole bunch of tags I need to propose: amenity=crematorium, shops=parade (a hard one, since a parade normally runs along one side of a highway only), amenity=village_hall, amenity=ambulance_station, etc, but it just seems too much hassle to follow them through, push them for votes etc. So I'll leave myself a note here that I need to do something about these some time...

I rang the mapping guy in my local council, and asked if there was any mapping info the council had copyright over. Apparently not. They used to do their own aerial stuff, but that's now outsourced; the rest is all OS derived. But he was quite interested generally (the council have their own GIS server, which seems very underused to me - at least the external part of it - but are being pushed to use google maps for their public-facing mapping. So once google go with map adverts, that's either the council advertising or my rates going up to pay google off). I'll probably try talking to them more; seems a good channel of communication to have, and I'm seriously confused by their policy on cycle routes, so can't really map them until I've talked to someone in the council a bit more.

Since I entered my little bit of Abruzzo Niccolo Rigacci added in all the towns in Italy. I went to have a look at the effect on Abruzzo... and discovered someone else has started mapping there! Brilliant, wish I knew who it is (all Potlach and anonymous). My guess is it must be a Pescarese...

Started uploading results of a trip to Abruzzo. Strange to be working in an areas that's a total blank canvas, as well as finding so many issues that are different from the ones I have with mapping in London. Above all how to use the gps when the best accuracy I ever get is 40m (so overlapping several streets!)