I've been having fun playing with the OS StreetView raster data. I've been tweaking roads around my house and lining up woodland with it. It's also great for building outlines (if not terribly detailed) but so far I've restricted myself to doing buildings in industrial estates.

The University of Warwick is now looking a lot better too.

It's not perfect data but it's useful for when I'm not getting a chance to get out and about with my GPS device.

As some of may know, OSM recently collected it's very first set of aerial imagery from a privately hired plane. It's all happening because Stratford-upon-Avon is hosting the big AGI GIS conference (23-24 Sept) and this makes an excellent showcase and will improve the map of the area a lot. If this is news to you then read up on it at the list posting. The flight was paid for by ITO World and Traveline and the photographs were taken by John R. Peterson.

We now have a huge selection of images from the area where some are very good quality vertical shots and some are much more angled shots. Some people have already started rectifying some of them and stitching them together to be used as a background in the editors. However, given the spectrum of quality someone requested that we find a way to tag all the images in terms of their suitability so that the best ones can be laid on top of the less good ones.

To this purpose I wrote a script in PHP so that people can view each image and tag it according to its suitability. You can visit it at http://milliams.com/verticalitymetre and help out rating the images. You can see statistics of the images rated so far as well as view the ratings on a map.

Get tagging and if anyone has any ideas for improvement then let me know.

Phew! It's hard work tracing houses. Even worse, one can spend hours tracing a few roads-worth of houses and then you zoom out and it all seems insignificant!

Every little helps though. It makes the map look nice and thorough and at least it makes collecting house numbers easier.

Heh, apparently Widley Farm has got lots of cats! http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/368337780