nickjohnston's Diary Comments
Diary Comments added by nickjohnston
Post | When | Comment |
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No more daily changesets | What an incredible streak! I managed about a year and half, and then one day I actually made a change in JOSM and even drafted a comment, but clean forgot to upload it! I hope you feel better soon ☺. |
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100 OSM mapping days | Welcome to OpenStreetMap and well done on your achievements so far ☺ As for mapping buildings and POIs in one go or in stages, it depends on what you’re comfortable with. Personally I’d rather have the buildings in place first, as it makes it easier to position the POIs more correctly, but experiment and see what works for you. Mapping all of Odisha is ambitious. Go for it! Even if you can’t complete it all, or if it takes a long time, you’re still improving the map in the meantime. Perhaps also contact an experienced mapper in India like contrapunctus (more focused on the New Delhi area, but still) for advice and support too. It’s great to see the map improving in India! (Haven’t been to Bhubaneswar or Bengaluru, but I’ve used OSM to navigate in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai.) |
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How should I tag paths suitable for off-road wheelchairs and mobility scooters? | Thank you for all the comments, they’ve been helpful and interesting. I’ve added |
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Road Curve Mapping Tips | I broadly agree, but would like to point out that for those willing to use JOSM, UtilsPlugin2 provides the very useful Circle Arc tool. I use it a lot. I like iD. Without it I most likely would have never started editing OpenStreetMap. But I advise people to learn JOSM. The investment will soon pay back. |
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My JOSM plugins and tag presets for ease of use and better mapping | Thanks for the NSI tip, I have just set that up ☺ I’m a huge of circle arc too, I wish more people would use it. |
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OverpassQL for downloading bus roads and bus stops data into JOSM | Thank you for taking the time to improve the map in Chennai :) I was lucky enough to visit the city for a few days in 2019 and enjoyed using OpenStreetMap there. For OverpassQL documentation, are you aware of Leigh Dodds’ excellent Overpass tutorial? He is also building a collection of useful Overpass queries, see the “for local mappers” section as an example. |
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Goodbye 2021, and setting the targets for 2022 | Congratulations on your excellent progress in 2021. Thank you for working so hard to improve the map in Ireland. 200,000 map changes in 60 days is incredible–it has taken me years to reach 212,000! |
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Revising urban blocks in Wrocław - a GIF collection | Great work. I never get tired of seeing improvements to the map like this. Please keep up the good work! |
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June 2021 Residential Build. Riverside Estate, Colchester UK | Thanks for your efforts. It’s great to see improvements to the map like this. I notice you’re using iD. iD is a great way of getting started with OpenStreetMap editing (without iD, I likely never would have started editing), or for making quick changes, but for adding addresses, JOSM is much better. JOSM takes a bit of getting used to, but it’ll pay back quickly. The buildings tool allows you to easily and quickly draw buildings or change the shape of existing ones. See Mapbox’s fast building tracing article for a good explanation. The JOSM Terracer plugin is a huge time-saver for adding terraced houses to the map, or even splitting buildings containing two semi-detached houses. You draw the outline for the whole terrace (rather than for all the houses) and then “terrace” that by entering the start and end numbers. Another really useful tool in JOSM for address mapping is the “coloured streets” style. It colour codes buildings and the street they’re on ( JOSM’s validator can also help spot mistakes, like accidentally duplicating a house number on a street. Rory McCann made a useful video showing some advanced building mapping tricks for JOSM. I’ve also been adding lots of addresses in Cheltenham and without JOSM it would take many times longer, and the results wouldn’t be as good. |
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I've almost developed an alternative to Keypad Mapper 3, Streetcomplete and Osmpad for adding housenumbers |
Are you referring to this diary entry? I see the bit about free-select / lasso, but not about joining address nodes to building ways. Did I miss it? In my version of JOSM, Ctrl-Shift-J switches to rotation mode. I have utilsplugin2 enabled. |
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I've almost developed an alternative to Keypad Mapper 3, Streetcomplete and Osmpad for adding housenumbers |
OK, I see. I usually place house numbers on the building ways themselves (it seems neater to me), so I suppose your app won’t be able to do that until if/when you start using OSM data. I understand that complicates things though. |
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I've almost developed an alternative to Keypad Mapper 3, Streetcomplete and Osmpad for adding housenumbers |
Thanks for the explanation. Given a few house numbers, the prediction in Vespucci handles odd and even numbers correctly too, which is useful.
So the output is a .osm file which effectively just contains markers? For example, if I add numbers for three houses in the app, I’ll have to add those numbers to the houses again in JOSM? |
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I've almost developed an alternative to Keypad Mapper 3, Streetcomplete and Osmpad for adding housenumbers | Hi, This looks like a promising way for improving address coverage in OpenStreetMap. I’d probably lean towards “Address Mapper” or similar as the name. (I’m not sure about the “Housemapper” suggestion since the app presumably isn’t limited to just houses.) I have a few other comments:
Thanks :) |
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Whitechurch, Co. Cork map update | It’s not really an algorithm for detecting mismatched |
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Whitechurch, Co. Cork map update | Great work! I never tire of seeing improvements to the map like this. Recently I discovered the JOSM Coloured Streets style. This is really useful for address mapping. I wish I’d discovered it earlier. It shows streets, buildings, and address nodes on the same street in the same colour. This makes it easy to spot buildings tagged with the wrong Since I’m probably not explaining it well, this screenshot should help: Ashcombe House, Outwoods, and Beechwood are in pink and therefore have an As with any other JOSM style, it’s easy to toggle on and off, or to temporarily hide by switching to wireframe mode if the colours become overwhelming or distracting. |
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(EDIT: Only available 2023 onwards) High quality imagery of buildings and HOUSENUMBERS (!!!) available in London! Why is no-one talking about this? | @Richard: thanks for the correction. I’m glad to be wrong in this case :) |
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(EDIT: Only available 2023 onwards) High quality imagery of buildings and HOUSENUMBERS (!!!) available in London! Why is no-one talking about this? | I share your enthusiasm for improving UK address coverage, but alas I don’t think these maps can be used. The maps themselves are out of copyright, but the company who digitised them seems to assert copyright over the images. |
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Initial Mapper Experience | Great work! I never tire of seeing such progress on the map, and it’s all the more inspiring when it’s from a new mapper. When I started mapping, I often wasn’t sure how to map things. I’ve found chatting to other mappers on IRC (particularly in #osm-gb) very helpful. There are some very experienced mappers in that channel. Specifically for terraces, I think it’s better to have each house within a terrace mapped separately. For rectangular-shaped buildings, it’s quick and easy to do this with JOSM’s Terracer plugin. Adding addresses can be fiddly when the terrace name differs from the street name (see SK53’s interesting article about this), but this isn’t OpenStreetMap’s fault. Our world is complicated and messy, and if OpenStreetMap is to accurately reflect it, some complexity is unavoidable. Please keep up the good mapping! |
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Three years with OSM. | Hi John, Great work! I’ve had a look around Sheffield on the map and I see lots of your work. I spent a long time adding public rights of way around Cheltenham, though not quite as systematically or rigorously as you. The sheer number and total length of rights of way in England never ceases to amaze me. In Gloucestershire alone, the total length is longer than the entire coastline of England. It would be good if you could add the For anyone else reading this, a few years ago I published an article about mapping Britain’s paths in OpenStreetMap. Nick |
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Updating the North Carolina Mountains-to-Sea Trail | Excellent work. I’ll probably never walk this trail (or even a significant part of it) but it makes me happy to see so many hiking trails being added to OpenStreetMap :) |