Open Street Map expansion project

mackerski

Sponge Bob wrote: »

This means all the road network around Galway City needs doing again

How so? It may be that some sections will benefit from retagging, but that's small fish compared to the original survey. From my own knowledge, I'd have said there was possibly a bit too much tertiary in the area, but that's something that's fairly common on the Irish map and can all be sorted out in time.

It's not nearly as important as capturing roads that we don't yet have at all.

GeneHunt

Mackerski or someone very familiar with OSM,

I've come cross a few different places in the last two weeks on the OSM site where the road or street is in twice ie one street overlaid on top of the other. In one case I had my sat nav routing me up a oneway street the wrong way, I later logged in to OSM site to update the street to a oneway system, but it was already tagged as a oneway street after a few minutes I discovered the problem, a second street under the first one (not oneway), which my sat nav was probably using! At first I thought it was the second mapper had mapped the street over the first - thinking the first street is now gone, but I have just discovered another place just now. OSM Potlatch wouldn't show the "way history" for this road. Could it a server problem or two mappers working in the area offline or two mappers uploading data from a editor package (JOSM)?

undo

Two mappers concurrently adding their own versions of the same road would produce two ways with separate nodes, not two ways sharing nodes.

What you are seeing is most likely an error on the mapper's/editor's side. One case where this might happen is when uploading with JOSM and the upload stalls/times out somehow. If you try uploading again, it will upload some of the ways twice, in exactly the same place. This happened to me just two days ago and I had to clean it up manually.

Whenever you find such errors, feel free to fix them or report them on OpenStreetBus for one of the other mappers to fix.

GeneHunt

Thanks Undo for that,

Whenever you find such errors, feel free to fix them

Thats what I'm doing now, is fixing it.

So it could have been ME that did it tonight. :eek:

Sponge Bob

Galway alone has about 6000km of Local and Regional Roads. Here is a detailed map of all PUBLIC roads in the county that you may use as a reference to tell you where to go with your GPS. Only roads taken in charge are shown.....not all public roads because not every public road is taken in charge.

There are lots of private roads too ...housing estates not taken in charge etc etc. Also office parks and industrial estates. You will notice all the housing estates in Barna are missing from that map for example. They are private roads. Barna has been well done on OSM and these estates are shown as highway=residential

R Roads Orange on the map, also well done. Zoom right in and the thickness of the lines should show the Local Primary roads

Please note that placenames west of the City are officially/primarily in Irish and use the Name Tag for the official name and then again in name:ga with the English version in an name:en tag , for clarity. Check them off this.

http://www.pobail.ie/en/IrishLanguage/ThePlacenamesBranch/PlacenamesOrders/file,9047,en.doc

ceret

Sponge Bob wrote: »

But the problem is that they ARE classified

I think there's a misunderstanding here. OSM started off in the UK, so most of the terms are UK inspired. (e.g. 'highway', think of 'Highway Code' which is their Rules of the Road). In the UK there are roads whose classification is 'unclassified' (they get a U code) (wikipedia source). So the UK OSMers said "If it's an unclassified road, then use highway=unclassified". In Ireland we had to transpose the UK road system into the Irish one. And we had to think "What sort of roads does the UK government call unclassified and what would that road be here?". The most logical answer is that the high numbered local (i.e. L) roads are the Irish equivalent of UK's unclassified (i.e. U) roads.

undo

GeneHunt wrote: »

So it could have been ME that did it tonight. :eek:

No worries there... everyone breaks things sometimes. That's normal. As long as you do more good than bad, you are contributing to the community .

undo

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Please note that placenames west of the City are officially/primarily in Irish and use the Name Tag for the official name and then again in name:ga with the English version in an name:en tag , for clarity.

Yep, that is the correct way of tagging such roads. There will be an OpenStreetMap in Irish very soon (it is actually up and running already but I do not think the URL is meant to be made public quite yet). Once that becomes available, you will be able to explore the whole country and see what it looks like in English and/or in Irish. Try that in Google Maps .

mackerski

GeneHunt wrote: »

Ma
I've come cross a few different places in the last two weeks on the OSM site where the road or street is in twice ie one street overlaid on top of the other.

Usually this happens as a result of a failed upload (due to network failure, buggy editor or server problem). Problems of this sort are generally rare, but a few of us have experienced them recently.

De-duping these cases is fiddly, since you need to know the editor tricks to select a specific layer. But if you (or anyone) becomes aware of such a case, just make it known here (or on IRC or the mailing list) and an experienced mapper will be pleased to fix things up.

EvilMonkey

I have been on OSM just under a year, I have added a few local roads and I'm always unsure weather to tag them unclassified or tertiary

Some people earlier in the thread said they use josm and don't upload their gps traces to the OSM servers. I use JOSM and load my local gpx files too, but i always upload the traces to OSM as well. It helps if someone else is editing that area after you. And if there are many traces of the same road then the road can be more accurately mapped by moving it to the centre of the traces(averaging the traces) rather than just relying on one trace.

@GeneHunt I use keepright to look for possible errors in the data like those and fix the ones i know are wrong.

marmurr1916

Sponge Bob wrote: »

May I point out this wiki factoid

You certainly may! A fine piece of writing!

IrlJidel

For users to be able to contribute high resolution and untainted tracks they need to be able to do 2 things:

1) Increase track log interval

see this link for screenshots for a secret way to enable 1-sec tracklogs on some Nuvi devices

Or there's a pdf available here


this info is also available at osm wiki

2) Turn off 'lock on road' feature

Usually if this is turned on then your trace will be tainted as it will be altered to follow garmin's/navteq's map data.

However, it looks like the Nuvi 255 is fine:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nuvi_255

"I've noticed that while my Nuvi is logging a trace the car icon on the screen tries to lock onto existing roads but the trace data itself is real."

For other Nuvi's
"Locks to roads on the map: not much use when mapping changing environments. It can be put in "off road" mode, but then it also does not do routing. "

GeneHunt

EvilMonkey wrote: »

I have been on OSM just under a year, I have added a few local roads and I'm always unsure weather to tag them unclassified or tertiary

I'm also unsure on what tag to put on some local roads, especially when there's no road number signs to be found, I tend to tag local roads as unclassified if they only connect one local road to an another local road and I tend to tag them as tertiary if it connects to a town or village. However I wouldn't worry too much about the tag at this stage as it can easily be changed when a road number sign appears on the ground.

Some people earlier in the thread said they use josm and don't upload their gps traces to the OSM servers. I use JOSM and load my local gpx files too, but i always upload the traces to OSM as well. It helps if someone else is editing that area after you.

That would be me! You made a fair point about uploading traces, however my sat nav is set to trace all the time and if I want to trace a road not on the OSM map, I remove the memory card with the OSM map on it (my Garmin NT Maps are on another card!) and with no card in it, the sat nav defaults back to a basic internal map with only a few N roads on this map and it doesn't "snap" to those N roads. I do know of the hidden record method, but I find it pain to activate on the move (to many screen clicks) and then having to convert the file afterwards. I don't recommend this method to others as other sat navs may not like it. I tested this method a number of times before using its traces. If you are using the record method grand, its one trace line and I have no problem with that, but my traces have sometimes a straight line across the map from one power off point to another power on point somewhere else and I don't want to upload those kinds of errors.

It helps if someone else is editing that area after you. And if there are many traces of the same road then the road can be more accurately mapped by moving it to the centre of the traces(averaging the traces) rather than just relying on one trace.

I disagree on you moving roads by your "averaging the traces" method because as Mackerski mentioned earlier sat navs can "snap" to a road on its map and if this map is anything other than a OSM map or if the location of the road is out by a few meters on the OSM map, this will continue to taint the OSM map, just because there are lots of traces of a road doesn't make them right, your ONE trace could be the right one!

@GeneHunt I use keepright to look for possible errors in the data like those and fix the ones i know are wrong.

Thanks for this link, jayzus it's a great site to find errors, I'll be bookmarking that one.:)

murphaph

How long does it take for Potlatch to update to the database? I tried to add a newly built footpath/cyclepath from the northern end of Ederstsaße to the end of Weigandufer/Teupitzerstraße here but the main map is still the same. I'd like to be able to help out and tweak the map. It just goes to show that even in Berlin where it's pretty well mapped, there are always things to add....

Nevermind, it's updated now. How can I indicate on the map that it's a shared cycleway/footpath?

mackerski

murphaph wrote: »

How long does it take for Potlatch to update to the database? I tried to add a newly built footpath/cyclepath from the northern end of Ederstsaße to the end of Weigandufer/Teupitzerstraße here but the main map is still the same. I'd like to be able to help out and tweak the map. It just goes to show that even in Berlin where it's pretty well mapped, there are always things to add....

Nevermind, it's updated now. How can I indicate on the map that it's a shared cycleway/footpath?

The Database update is instant (important because others may edit at any time) but the rendered map will take anything from 5 minutes to a lot longer to update.

For shared foot and cycle ways (and note, Irish mappers, there's no such thing in law here, apparently), you choose whether it's mostly cycleway or footpath and tag for that. Then you grant access to the other mode with either:

foot=yes
or
bicycle=yes

The issue of access to ways is actually a lot more fine-grained than this, so for anybody who wants to know a bit more:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Access

ceret

undo wrote: »

Yep, that is the correct way of tagging such roads. There will be an OpenStreetMap in Irish very soon (it is actually up and running already but I do not think the URL is meant to be made public quite yet). Once that becomes available, you will be able to explore the whole country and see what it looks like in English and/or in Irish. Try that in Google Maps .

It's me that's done the "OpenStreetMap as Gaeilge" and I'm proud to announce the grand unveiling. It's based on the same map data as the main website, and it should be updated every day. That's version 1, we'll be updating it a bit more, adding new features etc. Any questions, ask me. LINK: OpenStreetMap as Gaeilge: http://www.technomancy.org/openirishmap/

murphaph

mackerski wrote: »

I think there's been a misunderstanding here. Nobody is suggesting confining the map to the local primary roads. Quite the contrary - we want to map every cow track and footpath.

The discussion, as I understood it, was whether a particular class of local road should be mapped as tertiary or unclassified. All of them should be mapped. Those below L5000 as tertiary, those above as unclassified.

Should I change Aylmer Road to unclassified do you reckon then? It is L6003 (I added that just now, but it was (and still is) tagged as tertiary, despite having recently received this L number on the signs at the top and bottom of the road. I really wouldn't call it an unclassified road in the sense of something that leads "nowhere". It is in fact quite busy with traffic in the mornings and evenings. What do you reckon? It could be that the guidelines for Ireland do indeed need tweaking, to better match the UK roots of OSM. Perhaps any metalled road should be tagged as tertiary and only unmettaled roads tagged as "unclassified". Using the L5000 border seems not to work with the example given above. Thoughts?

mackerski

murphaph wrote: »

Should I change Aylmer Road to unclassified do you reckon then? It is L6003 (I added that just now, but it was (and still is) tagged as tertiary, despite having recently received this L number on the signs at the top and bottom of the road. I really wouldn't call it an unclassified road in the sense of something that leads "nowhere". It is in fact quite busy with traffic in the mornings and evenings. What do you reckon?

A definite maybe...

murphaph wrote: »

It could be that the guidelines for Ireland do indeed need tweaking, to better match the UK roots of OSM. Perhaps any metalled road should be tagged as tertiary and only unmettaled roads tagged as "unclassified". Using the L5000 border seems not to work with the example given above. Thoughts?

I should point out at this point that I wrote those guidelines

But they do reflect discussion among the most active Irish mappers, many of whom tend to hang out on the IRC channel. Our adopted schema does shadow the UK one very strongly. They use tertiary for C roads and unclassified for U roads (which actually do have numbers, as our L roads do).

What is pretty clear in all our discussions is that all local roads should be either tertiary or unclassified. Since there are three grades of local road, it's also widely accepted that the primary ones should be tertiary and the tertiary (heh) ones unclassified.

This left us with the secondary local roads a little unclear. Since Ireland is, in many places, quite tertiary-heavy, we opted to assume that the secondary local roads should be deemed unclassified until such time as that began to seem a bad idea. Specifically, we had in mind the possibility that people (as you have) would find secondary local roads that seemed more significant for traffic (we coined the terms "routy" and "routiness") than suggested by unclassified.

Personally, I think that routy local roads, even if they are secondary ones, should probably be tagged tertiary. Once the L numbers are tagged we can always generate automated stats anyway to find and (if we choose) retag roads that seem to conflict with whatever tagging norms we settle on.

Perhaps in cases where you depart knowingly from the documented tagging norm it would be worth adding a note tag, something like:

note=Tagging as tertiary as this is a significant route for traffic

Does this help?

murphaph

mackerski wrote: »

Does this help?

Yes Dermot, that helps. I won't be a major contributor to OSM in Ireland, not living there and all, but when we do visit, it'd be nice someday to have a fully open source map to load into a GPS. In the meantime I'll try to help out when we visit. We do actually drive boreens when we go back to Ireland, so can you point me towards a resource to get started with trace logs (on the GPS mentioned below).

At present we only have a TomTomGo something, and from what I understand these haven't been hacked yet, so OSM maps can't be loaded into them, is that right? We're considering an upgrade GPS and I would like to ensure it can be used with OSM maps, can you recommend one?

I much prefer the look and feel of OSM tbh (much richer) than other online maps or GPS ones.

mackerski

murphaph wrote: »

At present we only have a TomTomGo something, and from what I understand these haven't been hacked yet, so OSM maps can't be loaded into them, is that right? We're considering an upgrade GPS and I would like to ensure it can be used with OSM maps, can you recommend one?

I much prefer the look and feel of OSM tbh (much richer) than other online maps or GPS ones.

Right - well, I've never owned or used a Tom Tom, as their TeleAtlas maps are a poor choice for Ireland, but in response to earlier posts on this thread I dug up the following:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TomTom

The tracking tools listed there will all solve the logging problem for you in one way or another. Consider the practicalities of use from your own point of view, but for OSM, you need one that either doesn't "correct" based on the onboard map at all or that allows this to be switched off.

Also consider that the easiest log file format to deal with is GPX, so either you'll want to pick a tool that already produces this or be prepared to use something like GPS Babel to create it out of raw NMEA or whatever else you can get.

You'll see there there is some kind of support for the loading of OSM raster maps onto Tom Toms, but I'm not convinced you'd find that very satisfactory and routing won't be an option (except using the existing commercial map).

As to other devices, if you want it to support OSM maps, Garmin is the smart place to be. Saturn and Media Markt are currently selling a widescreen Nuvi device with text-to-speech (speaks road names) for EUR129, but any map-capable Garmin device (including those built for hiking) will support the Garmin maps we generate. These are far from perfect, due to the fact that the format isn't fully reverse-engineered. However, they are routable. The biggest drawback is the (mostly) inability to search by address. If you don't mind pointing to your destination on the map or picking it from the address book then you'll be fine.

Note that Garmin outdoor devices are good at logging (they allow 1s intervals and lock-on-road can be disabled). Nuvis often need a secret incantation to do so, usually don't allow the interval to be set and often (usually?) lock on road without the option to disable this.

Amtmann

Has OSM changed the way it appears? This is how it opens for me now (see attached). I prefer the old appearance. Can I revert?

Sponge Bob

click on + symbol (to right INSIDE browser) and tell us what is ticked, normally mapnik i think with no overlays

Alun

Click on the little + sign in the top right hand corner and you can change the Base Layer. You seem to have Osmarender selected, choose Mapnik instead.

Amtmann

Sponge Bob wrote: »

click on + symbol (to right INSIDE browser) and tell us what is ticked, normally mapnik i think with no overlays

That worked. It was on "osmarender", whatever that means.

Aard

Just on the topic of the appearance (the rendering?) - I like the "Osmarender" for general viewing, but prefer "Mapnik" for the details. Also, the "Cyclemap" is good for relief view. Is there a way to combine the views to have, say, a relief view with heavy lines for rails and major roads?

Sponge Bob

Not by default in a browser I think, you would need to write a new render code of the codebase like this guy did

http://www.lokigo.de/dummy/index.php?id=15

and someone in Serbia did one I can't remember.

IrlJidel

Aard wrote: »

Just on the topic of the appearance (the rendering?) - I like the "Osmarender" for general viewing, but prefer "Mapnik" for the details. Also, the "Cyclemap" is good for relief view. Is there a way to combine the views to have, say, a relief view with heavy lines for rails and major roads?

This site allows you to select Mapnik/Osmarender/Cyclemap with an optional relief layer

http://koenigstuhl.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/osm-wms/europe.html?zoom=11&lat=53.29828&lon=-6.33838&layers=00B00TTT

larryone

Furet wrote: »

That worked. It was on "osmarender", whatever that means.

osmarender is a rendering tool that produces SVG, whereas mapnik generates raster images from vector data.
I think most people agree that mapnik produces a prettier map =0)

PrzemoF

GeneHunt wrote: »

I tend not to upload the .gpx file from my Garmin unit to OSM site, I instead use the Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM) (which is one of many types of software you can download to edit OSM) and I open my .gpx file with JOSM, zoom in the area where you have traced (drove/walked with your GPS unit) then download the backround map for that zoomed area from OSM (which is very easy).

I'm using the same method, but I'd suggest to upload gpx files to OSM anyway. Multiple traces of the same road make verification if the road is really in proper location much easier. Just go to a main road (i.e. Cork South Ring road) and download all gpx traces for that road to JOSM (or turn them on in Potlatch) and you'll see what I mean. I fixed a few sliproads and a roundabout location yesterday using multiple traces. If you have 10 traces showing that a roundabout is shifted you can be sure it's shifted. But you can't say the same thing with just one trace.

Happy mapping,
Przemo

IrlJidel

ceret wrote: »

It's me that's done the "OpenStreetMap as Gaeilge" and I'm proud to announce the grand unveiling. It's based on the same map data as the main website, and it should be updated every day. That's version 1, we'll be updating it a bit more, adding new features etc. Any questions, ask me. LINK: OpenStreetMap as Gaeilge: http://www.technomancy.org/openirishmap/

This "OpenStreetMap as Gaeilge" layer is also available at http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/.

Just click on the "+" in top right hand side of map and under Overlays unselect the default "Common Name (name)" and select "Ainm Gaeilge (name:ga)" instead.