For the past 10 months, I have been without a reliable net connection, which has precluded any OSM work. I am slowly restoring that service, and hope to resume soon. The cause of this was a common occurrence, and not one I enjoyed, nor do I want to expand about it. Onward !

While doing all my editing, I was getting warnings concerning attempts to abbreviate the suffix on a name (e.g. ‘St’ instead of ‘Street’). Earlier today, I was traveling out of town. The person I was traveling with had her Google based navigation software operating in voice mode (i.e. it would speak the name of the turns and how far it was to the next one). At a particular intersection, it said we should “turn left on Main Saint”.

That was the moment when fully realized how automated software could misconstrue a name suffix, by not fully understanding the context it was written in. Time to make sure I get every one of the fully spelled out.

The first pass of street renaming (and generally cleanup) for High Springs has begun. These corrected names are a result of photographs taken on 1 May, and the GPS data being cross-referenced to maps with the old street names. In some cases, the old data was poorly coded, and a correction has been attempted. Many more streets remain to be updated. Note that all street directions are now based on a county coordinate system, and not the center of High Springs.

After a 6+ year hiatus, I have resumed working on OSM entries, for my local area of travel. Mostly this covers Gilchrist, Levy and Dixie counties in Florida, with occasional visits to Gainesville (Alachua county) and Ocala (Marion county).

Mostly finished with Dixie County as far as converting the logging roads from ‘residential’ to ‘track’ (there were hundreds). I have also added as many of the abandoned rail beds as I could locate via the satellite images, in conjunction with common sense as to where logging occurred (1909-1930s from best information). Some of those old railroad beds have now become the major access roads to the southern parts of Dixie County, along the Gulf coast. Still need to do a few areas in north central. Also remaining to be done is to assign 911 street names to all those roads back in the woods.

Some of the roads, from the older TIGER files, have poor positioning. In some cases the relationships of roads to other roads, is totally wrong when compared to the satellite overheads. It isn’t merely a matter of roads being offset, they were poorly defined in the first place.

Currently trying to clean up the eastern half of Dixie county. Using overhead imagery, the more recent 2012 census BAS plots (usually correct, but not always) and the local county property appraiser’s online map/parcel display. Some combination of the three usually yields the ground truth.

working to establish all known businesses between cross city FL, old town FL, fanning springs FL, chiefland FL, trenton FL and bell FL.

I have noted that some business types, and government buildings, have no appropriate type icon in potlatch. Not sure if this is a shortfall of potlatch, or the dictionary of available types in OSM.