OSM is about groundtruth - what is really there. We can deduce some geometry from sources such as aerial imagery, but to get detailed information requires a survey. A GPS track is still about geometry - a survey needs more information to be recorded than just a GPS track. Your drivers are not likely to stop to record this information, so you still do not have enough information to routinely use a tag or tags to extend OSM. You could add a note asking people who are prepared to survey the site,or who already know the area, to add tags to help with your problem.

Access tags may not help. A building may have a service road with a ‘private’ sign. The gold standard of OSM (a ground survey) would lead to a tag access=private. Would that help you? I feel that in reality most private roads are accessible to delivery vehicles.

Surface tags would help you understand whether your vehicles could be used on that track. I wouldn’t drive a largish road vehicle on a surface=ground on a wet day, but I’d confidently use a track with a tracktype=grade1 and probably tracktype=grade2.

I’m still a bit skeptical that a set of map tags can completely describe all of the real world situations and trust that a decent driver will work it out best. The CEO I most respected in my working life said to me that everytime we hire a pair of hands we get a free brain that we should always find a way to trust.

Did you check the data of the article?

I’ve already found one example following this and adding a ‘Little free library’ on a road node.

SPAM Shame a lawyer stoops to spamming a volunteer community’s diary instead of paying to advertise

How do I know it’s spam? IT IS NOT ABOUT OPENSTREETMAP

This diary is about how people have added to, used or improved OSM.

You just want to freeload on a volunteer community to save advertising dollars. Shame on you.

SPAM

All measurements are approximate. Everything is open to edit and so may be improved in the future. If you knowingly add something roughly right then a commonly used tag to show that it needs updating is fixme. This works well.

Spam.

There are parishes in North East Lincolnshire - I added them from the only reliable and licence-compatible source we have, OS Boundary Line open data.

Sorry, that should have been ‘three roads where there are only house names’.

The laws might exist but if they do they are often ignored in the UK.

According to the censuses from 1841 to 1911 only one road in the village I live in had a name (which has changed twice since), and only then after about 1881 when the post office was moved to that road. Only the houses there had numbers. Not all houses in the village were even named. In a small village people just knew were everyone lived.

Today there are three roads where there are only house numbers, two are unadopted, but one is a main thoroughfare (B1231) with not a number in sight. Houses newly built on that road have names and no numbers. The planning applications make no mention of numbers.

A near-by village (Ellerker) has street names but very few house numbers at all. I have helped the parish council add all the names to produce a map for local deliveries. The lack of numbers is repeated in many small villages in the East Riding and I expect more widely too.

Welcome to OSM. I live near Hull, UK. I’m continuing to improve the city’s map which I thought I had completed in 2008 😃

That web page is copyright, so you can’t copy data from it into OSM. You can use it as a list to survey for yourself of course.

I hope you are not going to repeat the all the stuff in tagging@ mailing list.

Which postcode layer and in which editor? I just tested ONSPD, Codepoint and OpenNames in JOSM and they work for me. I wouldn’t use OpenNames yet, I’m still not sure how good it is.

Retiring does not mean you end up with free time!

What is really odd about the variable quality of the OS OpenData is that the high-quality, paid-for OS datasets (that we can’t use in OSM) don’t have any of these mistakes. You would expect that the OpenData is derived from the quality database, so how do these mistakes emerge? Then there’s the occasional variation between the OS Locator and OS StreetView names. There must be a manual process to introduce these mistakes, or a manual intervention to deliberately introduce them.

@pieren since the OS licence requires attribution (which OSM satisfies), easter eggs could be useful for OS to find unattributed use.

To help you understand OSM I suggest you do a little mapping. Look at the map around your home or somewhere you know well and see what is missing. Then try adding it, looking for the tags to use and the way the geometry works. This will then help you understand tagging a little. You need this knowledge to understand the rendering process of converting tags on objects into a rendered object.

Good luck

I agree that voting is (and always has been) a stupid way to proceed. There are no approved tags, so how can any one vote to approve a tag or tag scheme?

I agree with Richard. I do not agree that consumers drive the approval process. Data consumers quickly understand that all OSM data needs parsing before it is used, either as it is loaded into, say, a database for use or as the data is actually used. This allows any grouping of tagging to be made, for example in one render I have I’m only slightly interested in landuse so I group landuse=residential, retail, commercial, industrial etc all as the same render. It’s easy, I only write the code once and use it any time in the future I want it. Tools like osm2pgsql with the ability to pre-process with LUA is a good example of this process. OSM data is often combined with data from other sources, such as elevation data, other open data or private data. This will never be in OSM format, so processing to combine them will always be needed.

Wiki fiddlers usually don’t seem to understand this at all.

Some of the tags proposed are simple, useful and should just be used. So no voting is needed, only documentation so other people can choose to use the same tags. Some tagging schemes are not simple at all, sometimes producing a rival scheme to an existing set of tags. Then data consumers have to deal with both schemes. That’s not too hard, write the code once and use it over and over. The real problem is that mappers are then confused and some take up positions in rival camps. Mappers are out most precious resource, anything that confuses them is A Bad Thing.

I feel most of the tag approval process is well meaning, but the idea that simply ‘voting’ to ‘approve’ a change to an existing tag scheme means that must be adopted is short-sighted and even arrogant.

A mass edit, justified by a wiki vote, is not something I like. We want OSM to be used. Not all OSM data consumers follow OSM closely, indeed I’d hope that they don’t need to be glued to OSM. They won’t follow the minutiae of the mailing lists or wiki (who can blame them?). Hacking around with existing tagging schemes that is then implemented by a mass edit is going to break the system used by some consumers of OSM data. They will fix it, probably fairly easily, but not before their broken system has been noticed, reported and reduced the confidence in OSM data both by the data consumer and their clients.

The voting system has been criticised for years. What do we need to do to remove this damaging process?

The tagging mailing list is wonderful. It keeps most of the pointless, circular discussions about tags that no one cares about off the other, more useful lists.