OpenStreetMap
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/26/137646147/the-gps-a-fatally-misleading-travel-companion?sc=fb&cc=fp
Will a Garmin route cars along tracks and dirt roads by default? Is it an issue with compiling the map to garmin format?
Should we tag tracks as 'motorcar=no' if the track is for jeeps and 4 wheel drive vehicles?
For summertime use, the whistler cross country area is used for walking, biking, and horseback riding. Does adding a 'highway = track' tag to the ways in this area mess up the piste routing and rendering?
It's offically a new country.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14089843
Their govenrment lists some maps as well.
http://www.goss-online.org/magnoliaPublic/en/states.html
Also, wikimapia seems to have the state boundaries which make up the new country.
http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=9.7740246&lon=28.7402344&z=6&l=0&m=w
I saw a road that was a bit of a mess, so I tried to clean it up. There were 2 paths overlapping, so I performed a few cuts to a way to cut the duplicate overlapping stuff, so now, 'The Castings' is split into 3 parts.
Merging the center part of 'The Castings' creates a zig-zag road which is worse.
It seems that the merge feature is trying to merge the ways toe to toe, or head to head, rather than head to toe.
I can now draw small round objects like water tanks without glitchy behaviour.
Thanks for fixing it guys!
... should be great for finding those secret mountain biking trails.
Some things I noticed.
1. Theres a lot of users in my area who took the time to sign up, but didn't actually make an edit. I'm sure they wanted to add to OSM, but didn't want to use the editor for whatever reason they had (ie, didn't want to break the map, confusing editor, etc)
2. Other apps and websites are what have been dropping those hated bug icons visible in our editors. (skobbler, mobile apps, etc)
What if OSM.org had it's own 'feedback' button, so that people can say things like "'Joes Coffee' here" "No, this street is called this" "road connects here" "private road".
Google has it's own 'report a bug' feature. We should have our own 'report a bug' feature.
I think human written notes would be better than the mobile app generated bugreports which have generic 'wasn't routed the right way' type of comment.
Currently, it seems that the west half of UWs Ring Road is translated 1 km to the south-southeast.
osm.org/?lat=43.46981&lon=-80.54275&zoom=15&layers=M
However, the zoomed in view shows it normal.
osm.org/?lat=43.4731632471085&lon=-80.5459079146385&zoom=18
Is this a rendering bug, or temporary glitch? I find it hard to believe that it was sloughed off to the side since April. The way history shows it was last edited in April 2010.
osm.org/browse/way/24636861
Sometimes, we see odd translations of ways...
1. First, let potlatch 2 draw an incorrectly sized circle for you.
Basically, I start at the top of a circle, and draw 8 points, 45 degrees apart.
Then I hit the circle icon. This will typically give you a circle a totally different size from what you roughly sketched out.
2. Move that wrong sized circle next to the circular object you're drawing.
3. Press the 'copy parallel' button. As you move the mouse, a circle copy of a different size will be made.
Just move the mouse till the copied circle is the right size.
4. Move the copied circle to the right spot. Click on a circle segment (not a node) and drag it to the correct position.
Here's my suggestion for fixing the circle tool.
First, it should calculate the centroid of the points in the polygon you used.
Add up the X' coordinates, and divide by the number of nodes. Add up the Y coordinates, and divide by the number of nodes. Unless you're drawing a circle on the 180th meridian, this should give you the correct center point.
Second, it should calculate the average radius. Calculate the distance from the centroid for each point in the polygon, and divide by the number of points. Voila, average radius.
Use a 'for loop' to create a new set of points at radius r and incrementing the angle.
Judging by the behaviour of the current circle tool, I'd guess it's trying to do a 'curve fit', but it's acting up for me.
Looks to me like they were a couple hundred feet vertical separation.
osm.org/edit?editor=potlatch2&lat=49.09094&lon=-122.91175&zoom=17
I'm assuming that the good bing imagery is from Orthophotos from 5000 feet or so.
osm.org/?lat=54.4338226318359&layers=O&lon=-128.772125244141&zoom=9 (Osmarender shows the logging roads well)
Added a ton of logging roads, lakes, and some rivers/lakes/ponds to the Kitimat,Terrace,Rosswood valley. Went for the tracing of rivers instead of the import from Canada's Geobase - for fishing and navigation, you really only need the larger rivers.
The Skeena River is the second longest river in BC. The Kitimat Valley is a Tree Farm, and it has grown back twice already, and the logging roads there are like a maze, which makes an OSM map handy to have in a GPS.
I'll try to remember the old placenames.
I'm interested in getting the waterways imported for the Terrace Kitimat to Stewart area imported. osm.org/?lat=54.5498657226562&layers=O&lon=-128.930053710938&zoom=8 because I'm familiar with this area.
How do people do it (the bulk import)? Is it like running a script?
When they do a bulk import, is it a lot of work?
It`s been almost a week since Zenfunk invited us to map out Bamako using Bing imagery. A lot of work has been done. There`s still a couple of unmapped pockets, some mapping in progress, and a few spots that are hard to map because you`re not sure what you`re looking at. There`s some QC checks to do to make sure roads don`t go over cliffs, thru rivers, and nodes connected.
For me, the hard part is trying to figure out when roads turn into tracks, roads turn into alleys, and alleys turn into pedestrian paths.
osm.org/?lat=12.61385&lon=-7.95185&zoom=17&layers=M
When I first looked at this densely packed neighbourhood, I thought it was walkways and paths.. then I spotted a car... and changed my paths to lanes.
The Bing imagery is great.
Some walking trails that could use some mapping out:
- Barnet Marine Park - DONE The overpass walkway is mapped out. Are there any more trails that it's connected to? DONE
- George Derby Conservation Area - Major trails done, some minor trails in woods.- There's some intermediate hiking trails in this park. Probably best mapped out in spring when it's warmer and there's more daylight. Unmapped area is mostly on West side of the park. This will probably take 3 hours.
- Robert Burnaby Park - Major trails done - has a couple km's of walking trails. Done.
- Forest Glen Park - Burnaby - 3 or 4 km's of walking trails in parkland.
- Discovery Place conservation area. about 1km of trails in here. This is just west of BCIT.
- South Burnaby walkways. Near Boundary and Carson road, there's a ped overpass, and some walking trails as well as grass tracks in the Matheson Crescent area.
- Deer Lake - there's a trail starting from Brantford Avenue. I suspect it goes northwest and connects to the deer lake trail network. may be a difficult hiking trail.
DONE (by pnorman)- New Westminster - there's some riverfront trails that run from Cumberland south to Front Street along the river in a park setting. approx 2-3 kms.
- New West - DONE Queens Park - I think there's some more walking paths that could be mapped out.
- Aldergrove Lake - There's 20km's or so of cycling, walking and horse trails around aldergrove lake regional park. I cycled it once.. but can't find my gpx track.
- Campbell Valley Regional Park. There's lots of horse trails around this park. Cycling not allowed though. I think this would be a good park to map out for a 'mapping party' or organized mapping event.
Surrey - Tynehead park. I think this place has a lot of trails yet to be mapped out. (nov 27, mapped visible tracks from yahoo imagery)
osm.org/browse/changeset/6293665
I think this is due to importing from the govt of Canada, but Canada got their routes from individual municipalities, so if the engineer in the municipality didn't connect nodes in their drawing, then we end up with bad routing when you have OSM in your GPS.
osm.org/?lat=49.252838&lon=-122.907122&zoom=18
Deleted node.
osm.org/browse/node/814490914/history
Sometimes 'connectivity fix' scripts break things for routing. One case is due to human nature (not tagging a bridge for several reasons )
User 1 (me) adds a pair of trails, but doesn't specifically add a bridge.
User 2 (someone else) does a 'connectivity fixes' run, and ends up connecting 2 trails which aren't really connected.
This then results in a map website creating a route which has a user cycle halfway across a bridge, and then jump 50 feet below to a walking trail because it's a 'shorter route'.
I've since tagged that section of bike trail as a bridge, but have seen other issues where mapping websites generate routes that have users also jumping off bridges.
I think most of it comes down to human nature. You map out a track but forget, or don't realize that you actually crossed a bridge when riding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqXSFOHE4os
Discusses why early explorers thought they were running into Asia instead of America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qXLEopuKGk&feature=sub
"A General Approach to Discovering, Registering, and Extracting Features from Raster Maps"
a lot of technical stuff in this google tech talk.
He goes through some image processing tasks.
It's interesting as it relates to mappers.
When I went to University, people would use the hallways of buildings as warm pathways to get to where they wanted to go.
Is mapping a pedestrian pathway through a building ok? I think so, because the path thru the building is part of the route of getting from point A to point B.
BCIT's campus is an example of what I mean. To get to the other side of the campus, you HAVE to go through SW1.
I think putting a shortcut through a building is ok.
Edit: It seems to be a feature of editing software that does things when trails get split.
1. What happened to my trails?
I find that some of the trails that I added a year or so ago no longer have my name on them. At this time OSM is having a debate over the 'gpl like' license and requiring people who use OSM data to attribute the database, yet the trails that I added now seem to have someone else's name on them and the contributions I made are not attributed as per the creative commons license.
An example is the central valley greenway
I added osm.org/browse/way/36058157/history back in June last year, but when I click on the Central Valley Greenway now, I see it's got a new number, osm.org/browse/way/41769632 and someone else is credited. I see the same thing at Mundy park, Delta Watershed, Burnaby mountain.
2. Where's my bridge?
Deleted, that's where. osm.org/browse/way/58568202/history
I went and re added it. It sucks that it went missing though.
It's a downer to see my local trail not have my contribution on it any more, and to have seen that bridge get deleted.
My advice to those of you using JOSM or other programs.. don't delete other people's contributions. Merge the data without destroying the attribution info.
Basically, don't take an eraser to someone else's trails and slap your name on it unless you're removing a completely inaccurate track (>30 meters accuracy) with a more accurate track (an average of several GPX traces for example)