blogs.openstreetmap.org is useful. It includes all diary postings and several other OpenStreetMap-related blogs. It’s where I found this post.

Particularly interesting or noteworthy diary posts often end up on (WeeklyOSM)[https://weeklyosm.eu/].

I never tire of seeing progress like this. Nice visualisation too! Keep up the good work. ☻

I’m in favour of mapping permanent/fixed pools (with access=private). It’s a useful way of gauging the affluence of an area. Also, in some places I think public health authorities have used OpenStreetMap data to identify private swimming pools to inspect for mosquito breeding.

You seem to be referring to aligning an OpenStreetMap way to the corresponding real-world feature. I’m talking about making the nodes that form the road appear in straight line (avoiding slightly “wiggly roads”, if you will).

In JOSM you can select a way and press “L” to arrange its nodes in a line. This works well in places laid out on a grid. Note though that if a road joins another at a non-90 degree angle, you will either need to select the nodes you want to align with the lasso tool, or select the way and then, from the Selection menu, choose Select Way Nodes. Then deselect nodes of the way that you don’t want to align.

It’s great seeing progress like this ☺

One tiny critique, if I may … several streets such as Birch Street, Elm Street, and 17th Street could benefit from being straightened.

Thanks.

Great, I love seeing improvements like this. Please keep it up :)

What an incredible streak!

I managed about a year and half, and then one day I actually made a change in JOSM and even drafted a comment, but clean forgot to upload it!

I hope you feel better soon ☺.

Welcome to OpenStreetMap and well done on your achievements so far ☺

As for mapping buildings and POIs in one go or in stages, it depends on what you’re comfortable with. Personally I’d rather have the buildings in place first, as it makes it easier to position the POIs more correctly, but experiment and see what works for you.

Mapping all of Odisha is ambitious. Go for it! Even if you can’t complete it all, or if it takes a long time, you’re still improving the map in the meantime.

Perhaps also contact an experienced mapper in India like contrapunctus (more focused on the New Delhi area, but still) for advice and support too.

It’s great to see the map improving in India! (Haven’t been to Bhubaneswar or Bengaluru, but I’ve used OSM to navigate in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai.)

Thank you for all the comments, they’ve been helpful and interesting. I’ve added smoothness=intermediate and wheelchair=limited.

I broadly agree, but would like to point out that for those willing to use JOSM, UtilsPlugin2 provides the very useful Circle Arc tool. I use it a lot.

I like iD. Without it I most likely would have never started editing OpenStreetMap. But I advise people to learn JOSM. The investment will soon pay back.

Thanks for the NSI tip, I have just set that up ☺

I’m a huge of circle arc too, I wish more people would use it.

Thank you for taking the time to improve the map in Chennai :) I was lucky enough to visit the city for a few days in 2019 and enjoyed using OpenStreetMap there.

For OverpassQL documentation, are you aware of Leigh Dodds’ excellent Overpass tutorial? He is also building a collection of useful Overpass queries, see the “for local mappers” section as an example.

Congratulations on your excellent progress in 2021. Thank you for working so hard to improve the map in Ireland.

200,000 map changes in 60 days is incredible–it has taken me years to reach 212,000!

Great work. I never get tired of seeing improvements to the map like this. Please keep up the good work!

Thanks for your efforts. It’s great to see improvements to the map like this.

I notice you’re using iD. iD is a great way of getting started with OpenStreetMap editing (without iD, I likely never would have started editing), or for making quick changes, but for adding addresses, JOSM is much better.

JOSM takes a bit of getting used to, but it’ll pay back quickly.

The buildings tool allows you to easily and quickly draw buildings or change the shape of existing ones. See Mapbox’s fast building tracing article for a good explanation.

The JOSM Terracer plugin is a huge time-saver for adding terraced houses to the map, or even splitting buildings containing two semi-detached houses. You draw the outline for the whole terrace (rather than for all the houses) and then “terrace” that by entering the start and end numbers.

Another really useful tool in JOSM for address mapping is the “coloured streets” style. It colour codes buildings and the street they’re on (addr:street) in the same colour, letting you easily see at a glance which buildings do not have an addr:street or may have an incorrect addr:street. See also my diary entry about the coloured streets style.

JOSM’s validator can also help spot mistakes, like accidentally duplicating a house number on a street.

Rory McCann made a useful video showing some advanced building mapping tricks for JOSM.

I’ve also been adding lots of addresses in Cheltenham and without JOSM it would take many times longer, and the results wouldn’t be as good.

You can pretty easily do this in JOSM though. Simply select all the housesnumbers and buildings on a street using free-select, then press Ctrl-Shift-J to merge all the ADDRESS nodes with buildings.

Are you referring to this diary entry? I see the bit about free-select / lasso, but not about joining address nodes to building ways. Did I miss it?

In my version of JOSM, Ctrl-Shift-J switches to rotation mode. I have utilsplugin2 enabled.

Effectively, yes. The correct OSM terminology is nodes, so it is a file that effectively contains multiple housenumber nodes.

OK, I see. I usually place house numbers on the building ways themselves (it seems neater to me), so I suppose your app won’t be able to do that until if/when you start using OSM data. I understand that complicates things though.

As for Vespucci’s prediction logic, I don’t know how it works, but here is how mine works:

If the housenumber is an integer, I simply increment that integer. If it isn’t, I strip the housenumber of all of the non-integer characters, then increment the resulting integer.

This works, for example, to increment “26a” to “27”, but it won’t work for something like “19-100” to “19-101”.

Thanks for the explanation. Given a few house numbers, the prediction in Vespucci handles odd and even numbers correctly too, which is useful.

This app currently doesn’t work with OSM data, I don’t see much reason for it to right now.

So the output is a .osm file which effectively just contains markers? For example, if I add numbers for three houses in the app, I’ll have to add those numbers to the houses again in JOSM?

Hi,

This looks like a promising way for improving address coverage in OpenStreetMap. I’d probably lean towards “Address Mapper” or similar as the name. (I’m not sure about the “Housemapper” suggestion since the app presumably isn’t limited to just houses.)

I have a few other comments:

• The address prediction logic in Vespucci works reasonably well. Have you looked at that?
• Please support switching to a keyboard so that house names can be entered too.
• You mention you want to add direct upload to OpenStreetMap. What happens with the data now? Also, I’m unclear if this is just adding markers, or actually changing OSM data directly. (Sorry if I’ve missed something.)
• For imagery, can you use Editor Layer Index?
• It would be great if the app could also support splitting buildings (like Terracer, and also splitting on arbitrary points, and at half way along one not necessarily straight edge).

Thanks :)

It’s not really an algorithm for detecting mismatched addr:street–it’s just a visualisation tool. Detecting the mismatches is left up to users for exactly the sort of reasons you mention: sometimes a property might appear to be on a particular road but is accessed from a different road. There are so many edge cases with addressing.