My target was to finish mapping a patch local to me in Nottingham, bounded (roughly) by The Wells Road, Woodborough Road, Westdale Lane West/East and Carlton Hill. It took 7 months & is now complete.

I’m a careful & thorough kind of chap and thought that I’d done a good job. Nevertheless, I was really pleased to recently come across OSM Inspector, which is provided by Geofabrik Tools to be able to quickly find a whole range of errors. There is a wiki page for it and, naturally, it provides virtually zero help in using the tool. I’ve used it for just a couple of days, so here is…

An Idiot’s Guide to OSM_Inspector

or, OSM Tools Considered Useful After Mapping

1. Open OSM Inspector in a browser of your choice
2. Type your desired map location into the Search box & click search
   (for me “nottingham”)
3. Click on the desired link from the Results box
   (for me, “Nottingham, East Midlands, England, United Kingdom”)
4. You will now dimly see your desired location on the map
   [my view in your browser]
   (there is a slider next to the Base Layer option box which will adjust the contrast of the base map)
5. Click the ‘+’ and/or drag the map until you have the correct territory before you in the screen
6. Click on the View dropdown & choose “Addresses”
   (there are a lot of other options, but that has been my activity all this year)
7. Click the “Buildings” checkbox OFF to allow the errors to be seen
8. Click on an error within the map to show that selection in the RHS selection panel. If you use JOSM & have the RemoteControlPlugin installed (not needed if > v3715) + JOSM is already running, then clicking on the icon will switch JOSM to the current view + load the data (I haven’t tested that yet). Icons are also provided for iD + for Potlatch2.

It was mostly very useful for finding + fixing errors in my mapping. I found only 2 useless aspects:-

• It shows all addr:* tags that are placed on nodes (rather than within a building way) - probably best to switch these off as well if you have a lot of entrances
• Misformatted housenumber gives false errors: anything other than a single number is shown as an error. Whoops.

Coda:

RemoteControl Plugin:

There is zero need to load this, unless you are using JOSM prior to version 3715, as it is now a part of JOSM Core. However it does need switching on:-

1. Press f12 (or: menu: Edit/Preferences)
2. Select Remote Control button (LHS)
3. Switch Enable Remote Control checkbox ON

So far, that has worked well but is a little spooky since the map feature loads all by itself without any other imagery nor other defaults (I initially just loaded JOSM but did not load any imagery nor download any data; the view on remote changes if you do that first).

PS
There weren’t a lot of errors but, naturally, there were some. OSM_Inspector allowed me to quickly find & fix many of those errors.