I added a new post on my general blog about displaying the routes a hiking trail is part of.

I haven’t had much experience in performing an import and the Orange County, California buildings and addresses is the first (and at this rate only) import I’ve instigated.

Other Imports

I assisted with a building import for Cupertino when I lived in Silicon Valley. And I added a couple of buildings in support of the Los Angeles County import a few of years ago. But in both cases my contributions were very small.

Most of my experience with imports has been in attempting to clean them up.

TIGER and NHD

Anyone who has edited in the United States will have run into “TIGER deserts” and I’ve spent my time in purgatory in those deserts. And if you‘ve edited in the rural areas of California may have run into some imports from the national hydrological dataset (NHD) which doesn‘t seem to be much better for water than the old TIGER was for roads. The two can interact in annoying ways. At least annoying to someone who has a desire to keep the number of suspect issues reported by Osmose down. For example:

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I have been a fairly avid hiker for decades would like to make sure that the trails that I use are properly mapped in OpenStreetMap. As I render my own maps this is doubly important to me.

But there is some ambiguity in how this should be done.

First, the OSM terms/tags of footway and path are not really used in my dialect of English. Second, OSM tag names and values are more code words, somewhat based on UK English, with OSM.specific meanings. It might be easier if something like “h1” were used as a value rather than, say, “trunk”. Then the baggage of your own local dialect of English would not get in the way.

We have sidewalks or walkways and we have trails. While we do use the word path we don’t use footway. At least not in everyday usage.

• Sidewalks and/or walkways are usually in urban or suburban areas. They are generally hard surfaced with concrete being the most used surfacing material though compacted crushed rock bound with an acrylic binding material may be used in more “park like” areas. They are level and smooth enough that you can easily walk on them with flip-flops while pushing a stroller.
• Trails are almost always multipurpose. While hiking may be the predominant use most trails are also open to bicycles and equestrian use. Within US Federally designated wilderness bicycles are not allows but trails are usually still shared use between equestrians and hikers. Note that while bicycles are allowed on most trails, it would be folly to try to ride them with anything other than a mountain bike. In addition there are trail systems specifically set up for “off highway vehicle” (OHV) use. They are called trails but you will find dirt bikes and other ATVs rather than hikers, equestrians and bicyclists.

OpenStreetMap Wiki

With that in mind we look at the various tagging defined in the OpenStreetMap Wiki that might be appropriate.

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I created this video last summer to show how I map a neighborhood.

And now I am seeing if I can create an “embedded style” link to it on my OSM diary using kramdown.

I’ve slightly revised my mapping and editing techniques since then but I think it is still a reasonable introduction or tutorial on using some Android tools and JOSM for mapping.

My native language is a dialect of the lingua franca of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I live in a culture that is notorious for being adamantly monolingual. But I thought I had some understanding of the issues of mapping names in a way friendly for internationalization.

It seems pretty clear cut when you read the wiki. Put the local name, in the local language, as the value for the “name” tag. You may also put it in the “name:<lg>” tag value too.

To be clear, I am not worrying about the legal name, short name, international name, alternate name, or other various names for a place. Just “the common default name” to put in the “name” tag.

I make paper maps for myself and if traveling like to have both the local name as I will find on signs and the name in English, if available, both rendered. For example:

काठमाडौ
Kathmandu

I may not be able to read the local language but I can compare the glyphs on my map with the glyphs on a sign to see I am entering a specific village. And if an English name exists, even if only (automatic) transliteration, I will have something to verbalize.

But my attempt to produce a map of a trekking destination in Nepal showed that it is not that simple.

First, the local mappers in Kathmandu and apparently throughout Nepal decided to put “Romanized” versions of their names in the name tag. I am not sure what “Romanized” means in this context as they did not specify what phonetics might be used when “Romanizing”. The current tagging of Kathmandu breaks Internationalization:

name=Kathmandu
name:ne=काठमाडौ

Please, please, don’t do this. It is specifically discouraged in the wiki. If a transliteration is needed, it can be done automatically by the data consumer. The tagging should be:

name=काठमाडौ
name:ne=काठमाडौ

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I’ve made a little blog post about issues rendering names on a map that might be of interest.

I find that OpenStreetMap has the most current and most accurate data for hiking trails. But I also find websites and apps that use OpenStreetMap data like OpenTopoMap and CalTopo take a fairly long time, often months, to update. Some apps, like AllTrails, don’t seem to update their copy of OSM data at all (the OSM attribution by AllTrails is really buried too but that is a separate issue). Other apps like OsmAnd and Maps.me update frequently but either don’t show elevation (Maps.me) or are fairly complex with formatting other than what I like (OsmAnd).

I really like the look of the older (1950s through 1970s) USGS topographic maps that I was raised on. So for hiking I use Avenza Maps and I load in geo-referenced PDF maps that I render myself using publicly available elevation data and OpenStreetMap extracts. This allows me to have a current map I can use offline that looks good to me.

When I am planning on hiking in some far distant place I usually prepare by generating Avenza compatible geo-referenced PDF maps for the area. I start with looking at the area in JOSM with the various OSM compatible aerial imagery. I get a feel for how well the area has been mapped and sometimes make corrections if there is a glaringly obvious mistake or omission. Once I am comfortable with the data in the area I run my map generation scripts.

Next spring I will be trekking through some Himalayan villages in Nepal. My first step in getting ready for this trip was to revise my map generation scripts to handle internationalization. Once I fixed my scripts I realized that about the only names in the area that have Nepali names on them were those along the border. Those seem to be dual named in Nepali and Chinese. My guess is that it is politically expedient to have the name tag for Mount Everest be “珠穆朗玛峰 - सगरमाथा चुचुरो” rather than in only one of the two languages.

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Actually, failed is too strong a word. Annoyed or disappointed is better.

I am on a vacation in Bilbao which is a lovely city with friendly people, photogenic streets and very good food. But I can’t use Osmand or Maps.me to find streets named in any of the tourist guides of even by the locals including the very nice staff at our hotel.

Why? Because the directions are in always in Spanish/Castilian and a year or so ago the many of the name=* tags for the streets here were edited to remove the Spanish names and have only the Basque names.

I have been consciously observing street signs and they are consistently are in both Basque and Spanish. Usually with Spanish on top. It is my understanding that OSM multilingual tagging calls for having all languages on the signs tagged. I have no issue with replacing the Spanish with Basque on the default name=* tags. But the Spanish names should have been put into name:es=* tags. That would allow visitors like myself a chance at a much better experience.

Imagine being able to find the street given to you by a friendly local who assumes, correctly, that you speak no Basque.

Not that it would have helped much with Maps.me as I don’t see any setting in that app to specify display or search on anything other than the default name=* tag. Osmand does have a setting for specifying the language but I don’t know how well it works as the data is not in OSM for it to work with.

So here I am with a wonderful looking OSM based maps with an amazing number of points of interest. And I have apps that can give me detailed directions once I figure out where I want to go. But I am reduced to using Google to find my destination and then I need to compare the street geometry to see where the location is on my OSM based map.

Maybe not a “fail” for OSM, but definitely annoying and disappointing.

Here is my excuse

On the road

As a child in the 1950s and 60s our family visited my grandfather’s beach house every summer. When we drove west on US80 from Arizona we often ate at the Major’s Coffeeshop in Pine Valley for a late lunch as that was the first cool spot to stop at after crossing the desert.

I recently moved to a Southern California beach town and had to make a number of trips to Southern Arizona and so was retracing this old route, now on I-8 rather than US80. On one trip I wondered if the Major’s Coffeeshop still existed and if the food there was still decent. Looking up “Major’s Coffeeshop”, “Major” and even “Pine Valley” on OsmAnd (offline mode) turned up nothing. Not to surprising about the coffee shop not showing up but a little curious that “Pine Valley” did not show up.

But there was a freeway exit sign pointing to Pine Valley so we took it to see what we’d find. Sure enough, about 1/4 mile from the freeway on the old road was the 50+ year old sign for the Major’s Coffeeshop with a small addition on the bottom for the current name, Major’s Diner. We had lunch (adequate and average) and went on our way secure in knowing OsmTracker would show where we stopped and having a receipt that showed the address so I could add it to OSM.

When I pulled the area up in JOSM the building was missing so I added it and added the tags for the address and that it was a restaurant, etc.

We have a problem here

But I noticed that there were a lot of nodes sprinkled through the area with addresses. Curious as to why “Pine Valley” did not come up in my search on OsmAnd if there were address information in the area I looked at them. They all were tagged with addr:city=”San Diego”.

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