I'm afraid of google. It's everywhere!

I couldn't make an account for the wiki because it uses google's recaptcha. Looks like the new ID editor uses google's analytics...

Not sure if there is an easy alternative for the captcha problem but one certainly could use some other user tracking software, like Piwik. Or any one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_analytics_software

Added geometry and attribute data for Sparta Community Airport-Hunter Field, near Sparta, Illinois. I flew out of here last year. Added Belleville RC Flyers Field, a remote controlled aircraft airfield run by the Belleville RC Flyers. Located between Scott Air Force Base and Belleville, Illinois. I visited there yesterday. Added geometry and attributes for the Julius J. Knobeloch Woods Nature Preserve near Freeburg, Illinois.

Updated geometry and attributes for Rock Springs Estates in O'Fallon, Illinois.

Updated geometry and attribute data for Litchfield Municipal Airport, Litchfield, Illinois.

I been using QGis with map data in portable mode for a while. I have finally gotten around to writing a how-to on my SourceForge site. Process is pretty strait forward with all scripts available in a download. Article is located here

Hi guys,

I've joined OSM several months ago and made hundreds of edits but I've made no diary here... Hmm.. let's say... in this very first note, i'll tell somehthing about me and my mapping hobby.

I was born in a seaside town called Vũng Tàu, which is about 125km southeast of Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a Sài Gòn). Life was peaceful until 2008 when I came to Sai Gon for college and work. . Hmm Saigon, frankly speaking, is a messy city, and even though it's a fast developing urban area in Southeast Asia, infrastructure are not really fit with the trend.. however, thanks to 'smart' anti-automobile policy of the govt, we don't really have serious traffic jams similar to nearby metropolitans like Bangkok or Jakarta. Most of us, well, around 80% or more, ride motorbikes to work and school everyday. And despite its inconveniences (distance, speed, weather conditions...), it brings more leisure on the road.

I like maps and geography since I learned how to read and write. Hmm,... when I was 7 or 8, I visited my neighbour, and suddenly got interested in a globe in his living room. I then asked him to see the globe and couldn't really kept my eyes out of it for 3 hours. Coming back home I told my Dad to buy a world map, and since then I started to look at it every day. Hmm, it was really unusual for a kid at primary school age who didn't like to go out for play sports or music~~, but he chose maps instead.

I developed mapping hobby when Google launched 'Mapmaker' project. At first I was really keen on contirbuting for the project, but then I discovered that Google Mapmaker was not smart enough.

• Community approval policy : Every edit needs approval from others in a voting system. This is a time consuming process, especially when there are not enough votes for your contributions.

• Lack of respect of differences : Some contributions which are out of concern of others, including supervisors can be turned down. Well, I spent two hours adding several paths in parks and a museum (Reunification Palace) in HCMC, and submitted them. The only answer I received was that 'pathways are good but they are UNNECESSARY, because our Maps features should focus on roads and the use of GPS when traveling'. I told them that even though it seemed cars don't use it, but 'pathway' can help describe the ways for walkers or visitors.

Moreover, 'pathway' is available in the toolbox, and we should make use of it . I then pointed examples of parks and university campuses elsewhere in the world, such as Georgetown University in Washington, D.C and riverside parks in Singapore. What I received was that 'Well, they are different cities, and we're in Vietnam, and we're different'.

Well, then I said goodbye to them because I felt that those conservative mapmakers do not respect me and my and turned to OSM a few months later.

All mappers, particularly newbies, should take a look at http://keepright.ipax.at/ for sources of maplint.

I've noticed two maplint trends in Oregon: a) A bunch of "This node is not a member of any way and does not have any tags." Presumably, this lint was left behind after The Great License Change redactions. It seems like it would be a good thing to have a bot go through OSM and remove points that fit this description. Why is that not a good idea? b) I've seen a lot of people creating areas (playgrounds, buildings) then giving one of the nodes the tags. No no no. I believe if a business occupies an entire building, it's OK to tag the building, not just a node. In the case of playgrounds, it makes no sense at all to create an area then tag a node.

Anyone seen trends in their area?

Ordnance Survey have just released their May 2013 version of OS Locator, the comprehensive gazetteer for GB. According to my calculations there are 5247 new entries and 3694 removed entries since the last release in November.

I've updated my comparison tool Musical Chairs with the new data. New entries tend to show up prominently in the "recent relevant updates" view mode for a few days after an update, so this is a good way of taking a look at what's changed in your area.

I'd suggest GB mappers take a look at their area, even if not for the purpose of mapping - new releases of Locator often reveal some interesting things about new building projects and developments.

The images on the following URLs show GPS tracks obtained using OSMTrack on iPhone4S. I get these tracks on the train (Yamanote-line) in Tokyo.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8411/8708922810_40a935b8d0_o.png

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8539/8708922902_4bc8453d24_o.png

It is strange that some part of the tracks seems to follow the road, instead of railways. I suspect that GPS data on iOS might refer road data (but not railways) of Apple Map and tries to snap on the nearest road when it is moving fast enough.

How do you think? Please try with your iPhone, if you have.

If my speculation is true, OSMTack on iPhone is no longer suit for OSM mapping.

New housing developments usually have one or more companies contracted to build homes (e.g. Lennar, David Weekley). Would this be a useful addition to the landuse/neighbourhood polygon?

Finding out fast who's modified the map is hugely valuable to review changes in areas you care about, to connect to new mappers or to just show how fresh the map is.

Unfortunately, the part of OpenStreetMap.org that's supposed to provide this functionality - the history tab - is functionally broken. I'd like to suggest here a straightforward way to fix it, punting on some of the hard engineering problems that fast browsing of historic changes bring with them.

Background

To recap if you're new to the issue, here's why the history tab doesn't work today: virtually anywhere in the world you'd like to see the latest changes of a particular area on OpenStreetMap, what you'll actually get is large-scale changes whose bounding box happens to intersect with with the area on the map you're viewing while not actually impacting any data in the area you're viewing.

This is a well known problem in OpenStreetMap and people like Matt Amos, Ian Dees and more recently Paweł Paprota have worked on coming up with a solution for this issue.

The underlying engineering problem is Hard: changes to OpenStreetMap are organized in changesets, each one of which can contain up to 50,000 edits and whose modifications can be geographically huge. Querying all changesets that actually modified data in an arbitrary bounding box of the world and displaying them in reverse chronological order is computationally expensive while at the same time it should happen in milliseconds to satisfy a web request and allow for fast browsing.

Fixing the history tab

At the Chicago hack weekend Tom and I created a prototype that completely punts on the expensive problem of fast browsing for the entire changeset history. The approach we've taken is essentially to present you with a map and a list of the latest changes on visible elements first, then only reveal the history of an element when you click on it.

Conceptually, this is very straightforward and supported by existing APIs, computationally this is dirt cheap. This is not actually a novel approach in OpenStreetMap (most editors do something like that) but it is viable as an alternative to today's history tab.

The prototype doesn't do any data processing itself and is actually just a simple HTTP and JS application hosted on Github pages. It uses the OpenStreetMap API's map call. The latter means it is querying OpenStreetMap in an unefficient way, but this is a comparatively simple problem to fix. It could just as well query a very simple tiled data source.

Check out the result for yourself. I think it is already a very useful browser for exploring changes on OpenStreetMap. With few iterations this could be much faster and a viable fix to OpenStreetMap's history tab.

• Prototype: http://osmlab.github.io/latest-changes
• Codebase: https://github.com/osmlab/latest-changes

Related conversation on [dev] list can be found here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2013-May/026891.html

I'm in Haiti learning more about a project we are doing with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team to map the north and northeast departments.

If you caught one of my earlier diary entries, you'll see I've been toying with old discarded mobile devices which have built-in satellite navigation receivers, looking at ways to turn them into fully-fledged free turn-by-turn Sat-Nav devices, for both driving and OpenStreetMap work.

Well, having found some free, previously-mentioned software, Navigator Free, I encountered a strange issue with a HTC Touch Pro2, where despite having an in-built tilt-sensor, it wouldn't rotate the screen display from portrait to landscape, except when the built-in keyboard was opened or for just one or two particular applications.

Turns out that this device and the Windows 'phone software it shipped with doesn't support the sensor for application rotating as standard.. a fact I didn't account for, assuming that if you shipped a device with a sensor in it, you'd make full use of it...!

I found a way around this, and wanted to pass it on as it'll work for this and a wide-range of similar devices; download and install the free "G-Config" application (aka BsB_G-Config.cab) to the phone, and you can have it "learn" the applications you wish to display in landscape when the device is rotated, solving the problem in a stroke.

See http://www.xda-developers.com/, specifically this forum post; http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=487991 to download the application.

Took me minutes to "fix" once I'd found this, and hope it might be of some use to other OpenStreetMap editors using similar devices.

Regards

From the Atlantic 38000 historic maps to be put online. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/oh-the-places-youll-go-38-000-historical-maps-to-explore-at-new-online-library/275438/

Please update the Navigator Maps so that the names of the street in Buhangin which were corrected and the streets in Green Meadows Subd Could be found and shown. Why is it that the street name found in the Navigator Maps is still erroneos inspite the fact that we have already corrected the matter. Please update so that the correct names could be seen. Thank you

Within the last few days I have mapped a golf course and added a veterinary surgery. As you zoom out of the map the golf course disappears, while other golf courses are still visible! Also the poi I added is not appearing at any level. Why?

writing quickly;- I began to add some internal code names for the rails starting around Didcot.

I also was looking at adding some basic uprn code to some buildings

I'll explain lattter more on this.

With thanks to Rovastar, I can't believe I missed off some service roads from my recent mappings; I'd mapped some parking areas, but not connected them to any highways, leaving them in a kind-of "limbo".

For some reason, I'd got it into my newbie head that I didn't need to map "across pavements", even though I could see the new ways I'd created didn't link to a "main" way...

Must be the medication... ;-)

Anyway, Rovastar very kindly added them in for me on one example (as below), and I've now gone back and added them in on some other mappings I've done and missed them from.

Great advice from them too; go and look at another example of something, before mapping a new instance of it yourself, as you can pick up lots of tips from other people's work.

Regards

Read the BBC article where cellphone data was used to see how bus routes could be made more effective... noticed a osm map in the article. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22357748

I discovered some new (anonymous) "notes" which are not very specific. Something like "addresses are missing here" or "add buildings please". What should we do with such "notes" ? is there any policy specifying how we can decide to close a "note" (which cannot be unclosed afterwards) ?

Would anyone be interested in developing Topo type map of the british isles aimed primarily at hikers with me? A lot of the maps out there are aimed at motorists and cyclists and I think one fine tuned primarily for hiking would create a lot of interest! My goal is to set up a website and enable users to download the map for Garmin hand held units and also to be able to install the map for use in Basecamp and Mapsource!

Hello there, I am trying to find and download onto a GPS as many GPS points as I can for the Lycian Way walk from Ovacik to Hiscandir... Does anyone know if this is possible on OpenStreetMap? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Harvey