Social mapping
More from the dept. of maps that nobody else has (nyahhh).
Here is a map of East Dulwich Estate, yet again absent from most maps. The A-Z incorrectly calls it "Dog Kennel Hill Estate", which is the name of the main road it's on, and shows Albrighton Road without the footpath break in the middle, whilst most others show nothing at all! If only the software that rendered this image would show the estate name and be a bit neater :)
I've also started adding cycling data. Sustrans have a really awful online map service, whilst Transport for London and the London Cycling Campaign have produced some decent paper maps (that irritatingly lack any route numbers!) A chap in the OpenStreetMap community has produced this great cycle map with negligible fuss! So far I've been on a 40 mile bike ride with a mate to do a national cycle route through London, and doddling around my neck of the woods to start adding bits in:
I've been having lots of fun on my new Specialized bike that I got from this jolly nice workers' co-op in Brixton. I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks now, I hope to get some more estates finished before I go walking in Snowdonia, which is just going to be bliss after a summer in London!
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MJR - If you don't have a GPS then you can trace over satellite imagery if it has been contributed to OSM. But GPSes are quite cheap now, certainly cheaper than the computers required to see that something is missing from OSM.
OSM works fine on my Mozilla and Firefox browsers. You should consider upgrading your web browser if you haven't for a while.
Tom - MJR always has useful input to give on accessibility and localization. It might be worthwhile raising accessibility on the list. Accessibility can be important under European/UK law.
And an "I can't find what I want!" link on the front page leading to details on how to support the project might be good in addition to the "Help" link.
Is it possible to get at the satellite imagery for Somerset with free software? I don't understand the instructions on the OSM site.
A GPS wouldn't be cheaper than my computer - I already have the computer and it was a business expense, which a GPS wouldn't be.
The tiled map works fine here. The JS one also works with options changed, but consumes more power and is fiddlier to control with a shaky hand. I don't know whether the JS map will work on the (very old now) handheld or the TV.
I don't think the aerial photography, from which Yahoo! has granted us permission to derive data, covers Somerset yet. If you can't afford a GPS (which you can pick up for around £60 brand new) then you can't, at the moment, do much to amend and improve the map in Somerset unfortunately. Maybe in a year or two the coverage will be better. Or you could help organise a mapping party for the county, so lots of experienced OSM mappers will come down with spare equipment and do as much as possible over the weekend. There was such a party in Devon this weekend.
The web site developers have apparently been working on a solution both to the "no JS" and the "not slippy please" problems.
It's not simply "can't afford" (although there is much else I can spend £60 on, including bicycle parts), but more that I don't know what GPS units are both ethical and suitable for OSM. For example, how do I enter the road names? Does that mean I need a GPS with a keyboard? Or is it only possible with the specialist software listed on the OSM wiki? That looks like a choice between Flash (does it run in gnash?), Java (does it run in GCJ?) and Windows (another few hundred pounds), or bugfixing-it-myself, which I don't mind, but it's another thing to sort out before I could start fixing the map...
This is very different to anything I've done before and there doesn't seem to be much help. I guess it's obvious to the people doing it and maybe most people get involved through meeting other OSMers, so it's not really explained to outsiders. I've had the hairy eyeball in the past for trying to find out whether a GPS involves toxic-e-waste, Special Enterprise Zones and so on. This stuff is hard enough to find out for computers, but at least there's some data on them.
I could try to get a mapping party here, but won't that be difficult if Devon's recently been visited? Also, it's rather like begging software developers for features, which is very demotivating.
Any links I can watch for news about the solution both to the "no JS" and the "not slippy please" problems, please?
Some people have put quite a lot of work into the beginners' guide on the wiki, I suppose it still isn't easy enough yet. Then again OSM gains lots of new contributors every week, and whilst we can't know how many people are put off, it's not like it's impossibly difficult.
To answer your specific questions, you don't need a GPS with a keyboard for road names. You can either take photos as you go along, use a voice recorder or (as I do) just scribble down notes (I have piles of zany hand-drawn annotated maps on my shelves). You then need to use either Potlach (which I think needs the proprietary flash at the moment, though gnash support is on the main developer's TODO list) or JOSM (which I think runs on free Java implementations).
On the subject of mapping parties, I guess it depends how interested you are in the project, and so how much time you want to put into organising it. A really well organised mapping weekend with lots of media work, a nice venue and the promise of a lovely weekend cycling or strolling around Somerset would doubtless attract a handful of people, although rural weekends are probably best done when the weather is still good and you need a couple of months lead time. Maybe come back to look at it next Spring and see where the project is in terms of tools, advice and coverage?
As for the two issues with the slippy map, I suppose follow that ticket you opened against OpenLayers. Tom Hughes from OSM said in an email discussion that "there is an outstanding ticket for this" so I'd look at tract.openstreetmap.org and follow that ticket.
The Slippy Map requiring JS, I suppose. But mixing up OSM The Project with one of the many possible representations of its data (even if it's the most prominent one) is a mistake. I'd suggest Mark to file a feature request on http://openlayers.org/ to see if we can get non-JS support somehow.
Filed http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/956
Closed as invalid. Well, that worked well(!)
A-Z maps don't always show the latest changes - are you sure you have the most recent A-Z and the footpath break in Albrighton Rd wasn't installed very recently? However, they are notoriously incomplete - they omit things like width restrictions, one-way streets on other than main roads, and turn bans and the like (other than on their large-scale city centre maps). Such maps often show dirt tracks as proper roads (Sunningvale Avenue in Biggin Hill - the top bit that goes off the main road past the airport, not the lower bit that the buses run on - being one example I found out when trying to drive a 7.5-tonne truck down it).
Yeah, in this case it's a definite mistake because there's a great big community centre in the middle of the road and always has been. I'm not sure if it's a deliberate mistake to catch copiers or an "innocent" mistake, but it does annoy me that housing estates get particularly bad coverage in most commercial maps.
As usual for OpenStreetMap, it isn't usable on Any Browser. Also, OSM is mostly incomplete in North Somerset and some of the few roads it shows don't exist...
What do you mean by "not usable", Mark? Not a very constructive comment. Some IE users have complained about regressions in the past, and the Cycle Map doesn't do too well in Konqueror at the moment. As for North Somerset being mostly incomplete, you could always fix it or just sit tight and wait. Honestly, what do you expect? I suppose GNU/Linux was mostly complete in under three years...
Oh, and WTF has GNU/Linux got to do with OSM? Are you just being gratuitously offensive because I dared to suggest that these cycle maps are far worse than Sustrans's if you're not an able-bodied city-dweller?
No, you're the one being gratuitously offensive, you didn't actually make that complaint explicit. The link to GNU/Linux is pretty straightforward... OSM is a community project, so whining because cycling coverage is poor in a particular area barely a few weeks after a cycle map is set-up is pretty daft. Go and stick it in yourself, wait for someone else to do it or convince Sustrans to release their route data under a free license so we can all make better maps than the one on their hopeless web site. Don't have a GPS? Oh well, I don't have C++ skills so I'll just have to wait until KDE programmers implement my most desired features...
As for the requirement of JS, you're being deliberately absurd when suggesting that it won't work in ANY browser. Now you've explained your specific reasons for disliking slippy maps I'll post it to the discussion list to see if we can add a "static" tile browser as an option on the front page.
The barrier to entry of KDE may be knowing C++, but learning C++ is a relatively cheap and healthy learning experience, IMO.
The barrier to entry of OSM is owning a GPS, it seems. Getting a GPS seems a relatively expensive and unhealthy shopping experience - or is there an affordable non-sweatshop non-toxic-e-waste one that I've missed? GPSes are a confusing market for the newcomer, OSM's help site doesn't seem very helpful to the non-GPS-owner and it doesn't seem like GPSes get freecycled often around here.
The complaint wasn't just that OSM cycling coverage is poor here - that would be excusable in such a new project - but most of the roads are missing, even some A-roads. Without a GPS, I can't even see how to start contributing. Sustrans is far from hopeless by comparison.
Finally, as another comment has already pointed out "Best Viewed in Any Browser" is a long-running web campaign. Thanks for the reminder that it's really September!
I suspect "ANY browser" != "Any Browser" - the latter being a remnant from the old www.anybrowser.org campaign.
I do, however, find this argument pretty amusing. Nine years ago, in a Usenet flamewar, I told MJ Ray I thought Linux sucked, not least because it had no equivalents of the apps I used. His response was "If that mattered, would any other system have ever succeeded? Ask us that Q again in a few years." Well, if you believe it for Linux, you should believe it for OSM.
I didn't remember that, but then, that was a different MJ Ray writing in 1998's comp.sys.amstrad.8bit "Why is Linux shit?" thread, in many ways...
That's actually a good view in one way: it may well be that OSM will become the best map in the future. Now, if they made it easier for more people who are unhappy with the current map options...
Notice I didn't ever tell you to shut up. Posts like yours saying, essentially, "I want Quark, Illustrator, Vision, and MacWrite Pro equivalents" has probably helped motivate Scribus and others (I can't remember what your Vision did!), but it didn't matter that they didn't all exist at that point in time, if you see what I mean.
By not usable, I mean it won't work! However, it seems that there's a non-JS version of the main map at http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~ojw/Browse/ which is a big leap forwards. Just needs cycle route data.
Even when they work, slippy maps are awkward for other reasons, including how bloody hard they are for people like me (my hand shakes, quite badly sometimes) and difficulty of linking and printing. It's really disappointing to see so many map providers rushing to mimic google, just when google itself has started offering limited tile map functionality.
As to fix it: how? No "fix it" link on http://www.openstreetmap.org/ and browsing Help & Wiki: Beginners Guide seems to suggest GPS is the only way that would work here (too many recent changes for NPE maps, incomprehensible Yahoo instructtions) and I don't have a GPS.
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