OpenStreetMap

stragu's Diary

Recent diary entries

If you are a user of OsmAnd Maps for iOS, you might have to refrain from using the current version (3.14) to edit OSM POIs. I just figured out that, after editing a bunch of POI opening hours in my suburb, the changeset also affected the locations of the POIs, even though I did not touch that.

It looks like the editor rounds the coordinates of the POIs to 6 significant figures, which might look like a move of only a few meters on the map, but the changes get more drastic as you move away from the equator and the meridian. I suspect people editing in Oceania and East Asia will see more obvious changes.

In this picture, from data in eastern so-called Australia, the arrowheads roughly show where the POIs should be, and the green line shows the longitude where they were moved:

An example of moved POIs

OSMCha shows that close to 1000 changesets were created with version 3.14. Note that not all changesets will need fixing, because some of them will only remove a feature, and I don’t think polygons are moved. But we might need to review further.

However, version 3.14 is not the only one affected: at least versions 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13 of OsmAnd iOS also have the bug. See for example this node’s history, in which version 3.13 of OsmAnd iOS rounded the coordinates:

Example of change in history of a node, with version of OsmAnd iOS 3.13

I need to check with versions earlier than 3.10 still, but thought I’d put the word out already. If you use OsmAnd on iOS to edit OSM data, you might want to review your edits with OSMCha by using filters: use “osmand maps” in the “Editor” field. You might also want to stick to GoMap to edit OSM data until a new version of OsmAnd is released with a fix.

The OsmAnd iOS bug report is located here: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-iOS/issues/833

Apartment complex addresses

Posted by stragu on 30 October 2016 in English (English).

Recently, I have mostly been adding house addresses around my neighbourhood.

current focus on local addresses

One issue I am running into is that I can’t figure out the best way to set the address for an apartment complex.

I am currently trying to tag individual buildings with building=apartments, and an area that encloses all the buildings with the address tags (like addr:housenumber, addr:housename, addr:street).

current idea for an apartment complex address

However, I noticed that that does not end up being rendered in Mapnik. I am not trying to map for the renderer, but just thought that it is odd that the housenumber or the housename do not appear just like they would for an individual house, and therefore that I must be doing something wrong.

The OSM wiki is quite vague on the subject – would someone like to share their method?

"My business on OSM"

Posted by stragu on 4 October 2014 in English (English).

I am just reposting a blog post I just published to make it easier for people to just add their business to OSM.

“GoFLOSS – My business on OSM in five minutes”

My first OSM meeting

Posted by stragu on 16 December 2013 in English (English).

I organised yesterday my first OSM meeting, at the Brisbane Square Library of Queensland. Because of a lack of advertisement and the difficulty to access the library after hours, I ended up giving my presentation to a crowd of two attendees: my wife and a good friend. It was ok because it was my first try and it was a good way to give my presentation a go and get some feedback. My very good “students” got to do a tiny survey of the Brisbane Square and add a few POIs together, and this brings two new users to OSM! We’ll see if they end up coming back to contribute to the project a bit more ;)

Here is my presentation, for anyone curious or needing ideas for their own. Feedback would be very welcome!

Hopefully I can organise more meetings / mapping parties around Brisbane; I got a few responses from contributors who would have loved to join but could not make it, which is a great sign!

Another on of my projects will be to reorganise the big mess in the Brisbane events on the wiki - it gets very confusing.

Location: Brisbane City, Queensland, 4004, Australia

Hi all!

I had a few questions about how to map parking spaces. Here is an image of the zone, and coordinates are linked in the post:

The zone

There are two things: - The two parking lanes have the number of parking spots and the number of disabled parking spots. Should “Capacity” include or exclude the number in “Capacity:disabled”? - The highlighted point on the left, along Boggo road, is my attempt at mapping a single disabled parking space. I thought a point would be better than an area for a lone parking space, am I right? What do you think? The previous question applies here too: do I need to tag it with Capacity=1 and Capacity:disabled=1?

Cheers, and happy mapping! :)

Location: Dutton Park, Brisbane City, Queensland, 4102, Australia

Hi all

I was wondering: what exactly is Map Quest Open? So far, I understand that it is the side of Map Quest for contributing to OSM, but is there anything fishy about it? Or is it genuinely an effort to make people contribute to OSM with a different flavour?

I tried using it, and I like the fact that there is more space for editing (I can’t figure out how to get rid of the left pannel on OSM’s website when using Potlatch???).

However, I noticed something funny: the building type “Family house” is not recognised when editing in QMO:

Editing on OSM's website

Editing on QMO's website

Does it mean that there are a few tags that QMO doesn’t recognise yet?

Which in-browser option would you recommend to use for editing OSM, and why?

Cheers and happy mapping!

Hi community!

I was an active Wikipedia contributor for a few years, and I am now contributing to MusicBrainz a fair bit. Even though I had an account on OSM for some time, I just started mapping actively around my street, which needed some love (the suburb still really does):

Around my street

I was wondering a few things, if anyone feels like helping a newbie:

  • Should I use “name” or “addr:name” to add the name of a shop in the building’s data?

  • I see that my building outlines look pretty different when using the closest and second closest Bing backgrounds, which probably depends on the age of the photos, and how they are fitted together - which one should I use? Should I just stick to the closest?

  • Does one need to add the street manually in each address data, or does the database somehow automatically give the name of the closest street to the building when someone searches for an address? (i.e. will the query “85 Lewis st” return results even though the building doesn’t have anything in “addr:street”?)

You can have a look at what I did there:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-27.492626309394836&lon=153.03840547800064&zoom=18

Please let me know if there is something I am not doing right. I’ll probably have a few more questions later on :)

Really enjoying contributing!

Location: Buranda, Woolloongabba, Brisbane City, Queensland, 4102, Australia