Hi everyone! This is my first user diary here!

Recently I’ve began to map the area around the towns Le Thillot, Fresse-sur-Moselle, Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle and Bussang. I’ve lived in this area for a few years and still visit multiple times a year. When I pulled up the street map I saw a lot of missing features, badly-maintained maps and inconsistencies.

For example, importing the land register (Cadastre 2014) has given a lot of strange shapes (e.g. cutoffs in buildings when an area line cuts through it or non-orthogonal shapes). Although satellite imagery is often misaligned/warped in this hilly landscape, some buildings are obviously in the wrong place, too small, rotated, etc. It’s hard to fix these without good quality aerial imagery, but in some cases it’s easy to see what’s wrong. Not everything will be able to get fixed though.

Misaligned buildings in Le Thillot:

Driveways:

I’ve also taken upon me the responsibility to map the missing driveways in the area (also missing in the image above). As many of these building are freestanding houses, almost all of them have a driveway. Sometimes these driveways are quite long, and their absence on the map is prominent. These will be added. Other times, they are small, the buildings are close to the roads and they are so difficult to see on aerial imagery that it’s barely worth the bother to add them.

POI:

Furthermore, over the years many POI and amenities have been added to the map as single nodes. Maybe there wasn’t a building outline available back then, or someone simply didn’t bother to look whether the tags could be placed on an existing outline. Where possible (i.e. single use buildings), I will be moving the tags from the nodes to the building contours.

Addresses:

This is also a slight problem for addresses. Many addresses in Le Thillot and Fresse have been added through the land register data, which is great! What is less great is that the land register places the house numbers quite far away from the actual house itself (see images above and below). I will be trying to move the nodes into the contour where possible. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out which numbers belongs to which house, but with the aid of the land register and aerial imagery it should be possible in almost every case.

Misplaced addresses:

Many addresses are simply missing as well. To begin with, the villages Saint-Maurice and Bussang have simply not been mapped and very few addresses are in the map. Then, there are the addresses that are missing on the land register. For some bureaucratic reason, the house number on it are not often updated. This is for example the case in the street our property lies on in Saint-Maurice. Therefore adding all the addresses will need extensive surveying. I do not think I will be able to do this is the limited time I’m spending there.

Thoughts on nodes in buildings, or tags on the contour for addresses:

I would like to know what your thoughts are on the idea of using separate nodes for the address of a building or placing the address tags on the building outline itself (image below says more than a thousand words). I know several countries have different conventions for it. For example, the Netherlands place all addresses as nodes inside buildings because it is much more convenient with the continuous BAG imports. Luxembourg city places the addresses on the building ways, I’ve not asked them why. I’ve asked this question on the France user forum but I haven’t had a response yet. So, what are your thoughts on it?

Explanatory image for address tagging schemes:

Trails:

Finally, I want to map many missing tracks and trails in the area. I’m an avid fan of hiking, so when I saw how many paths were missing I thought “Hey, I can fix that!” That is the reason I signed up for OSM. The biggest problem with mapping these is that they are hardly visible on the aerial images (covered in under, not well defined) and the land register is way too inaccurate, not to speak of imagery warping in the mountains. They will need to be tracked extensively with GPS, so in case you’re passing through the area don’t hesitate to upload your tracks!
In the end I hope to use the OSMC Reitkarte scheme to map tracks in the entire Vosges with their respective markings. Many of the trails in the area are very well marked and sustained, but it will need close survey to map them all.

So, that was an update of why y’all were seeing high activity in this area by a new user. I hope that you will look in on me every once in a while to check I’m not making stupid rookie mistakes. Also, if you know this area or can spare the time to help surveying and tracking, all the help is more than welcome!