[HOT] Squared buildings

Thu Apr 14 16:54:12 UTC 2016

In JOSM you can search "building nodes:-7" or less which screens out the
huts.  I don't especially like doing it in a mass way but when you're met
with 200 unsquared buildings you need to tackle it in some way.  You can
further refine it by mapper name before hitting the q button.

Either prevention which is the ideal or we need to think about what to do.
At the moment we have many many buildings which are not squared.  Perhaps
someone has a tool they could use to count how many.  The options for
validators are avoid projects that map buildings.  It's easy and quick for
validators to do this from their point of view.

The validators can do an individual correction on each building, I don't
think we have enough validators to do this.  Quality is also an issue, I
recently sampled part of a fully validated building project and on the
sample I looked at there were 600+ errors found in JOSM validation, 200+
crossing buildings, multiple crossing ways etc.  Two validators names I
recognised their tiles seemed fine but some names validating I didn't and I
suspect that's where the errors were located.

Bulk squaring is an option, the other option is do nothing.  The buildings
are roughly the right size in the right place.

Which was why the original question was is squaring buildings essential?

The new building tool for iD sounds an excellent way to prevent the problem
and has my full support.

Cheerio John

On 14 April 2016 at 10:06, Severin Menard <severin.menard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This would be IMHO an horrible practice, for the complex buildings skilled
> mappers took the time to map + basically all the round huts.
> As a common OSM rule is not to tag for the rendering, a new one should be
> not to distord the data because of the shortcomings of an editing tool. ID
> should propose a building tool or automatically propose to square the
> buildings to anyone having drawn a surface and tag it as a building.
> Basically it is IMHO a few hours of code vs tons of hours for validators to
> clean the crappy data. I had a brief discussion about this with someone
> from Mapbox during the Nepal activation, when it was obvious the higher
> proportion of new mappers was producing data with lower quality than usual
> during activations. People from Mapbox, please consider to improve iD in
> this way.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Severin
> Le 14 avr. 2016 11:44, "john whelan" <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>> I think we are agreed that squaring individual buildings is a hassle for
>> the validators.
>>
>> Do I hear that selecting all buildings with less than 7 nodes and
>> squaring/resquaring them all at once is acceptable although not ideal?
>>
>> Thanks John
>>
>> On 14 April 2016 at 04:15, Jo <winfixit at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It would be far better to add a tool comparable to buildings-tools
>>> plugin to iD. We should have proposed that for GSoC2016... well, maybe next
>>> year.
>>>
>>> Jo
>>>
>>> 2016-04-14 9:47 GMT+02:00 Suzan Reed <suzan at suzanreed.com>:
>>>
>>>> JOSM is the tool to use, I agree. However I did become somewhat of an
>>>> iD power user and so I just tried to square a number of polygons at once
>>>> rather than one at a time. I tried many variations including selecting all
>>>> of them and then trying to apply the “s” tool and grouping them. Nothing
>>>> worked. Maybe the iD team could add that to iD? Then new mappers could then
>>>> square all their buildings in one go when the mistake is pointed out. It
>>>> would be quite useful. Squaring buildings in either iD or JOSM is a
>>>> thankless and tedious task.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers!
>>>> Suzan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 11:01 PM, Ralf Stephan <gtrwst9 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I might be missing something but what's wrong with selecting all
>>>> buildings in JOSM via Search (check if there are huts selected or 45-degree
>>>> buildings of course) and then do a mass orthogonalization? That would be
>>>> part of a validation workflow and could even be automated.
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 7:48 AM Jo <winfixit at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> If you want a building squared at 45 degrees in JOSM, for some reason,
>>>> you can start with a closed way with 8 nodes, then use the circle tool.
>>>>
>>>> Or you can press 'a' twice, allowing you to add the next part of a way
>>>> at 15 degree angle intervals. It's possible to create really nice geometric
>>>> shapes using this method.
>>>>
>>>> One has to know the tool one is working with.
>>>>
>>>> When people insist on working with iD, it's necessary to tell them
>>>> (over and over again) about the importance of doing the extra step of
>>>> squaring the rectangular buildings. For one thing, it makes using JOSM's
>>>> extrude tool easier, if it's needed to improve the building.
>>>>
>>>> I understand that, as a validator, it's extremely tedious to square all
>>>> those buildings, even when using the todo plugin and pressing ]q]q]q]q]q]
>>>> hundreds of times. You could invalidate the tiles which contain mostly
>>>> unsquared buildings. Or you could just leave them alone, post a remark to
>>>> the user and validate the tile anyway. Better that than becoming burned out
>>>> as a validator.
>>>>
>>>> I've been trying to get people to understand how much work it is to
>>>> validate their tiles, when buildings are not squared by creating
>>>> screencasts and posting a link to it in the comment field. This was rather
>>>> effective, but it still is rather time consuming and there are always new
>>>> users coming in, which, for some reason, were not trained with JOSM the
>>>> power tool, but with iD instead.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway, those screencasts were also meant as a way to show people the
>>>> advantages of using JOSM, but I don't know if I have been very successful
>>>> at getting them to start using it. It's hard to make people switch to
>>>> something new, which is why I'll be teaching only JOSM, this Saturday (also
>>>> because I don't know iD all that well, ofc). I failed to follow up, as I
>>>> moved on to other projects that gave me more satisfaction (as a validator).
>>>>
>>>> Polyglot
>>>>
>>>> 2016-04-14 4:15 GMT+02:00 Suzan Reed <suzan at suzanreed.com>:
>>>> How about showing people how to map a building and square it right at
>>>> the beginning of mapping? It’s all one motion for me.
>>>>
>>>> Just a suggestion!
>>>>
>>>> Suzan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 7:05 PM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 4:52 PM, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> Seeing 200 unsquared buildings by one mapper on a tile makes me think
>>>> they weren't using JOSM and the building-tool.  I could be wrong, the same
>>>> mapper also left behind three area=yes squares that just happened to be the
>>>> same as a building image.  Again it is perfectly possible to do this in
>>>> JOSM to draw such a shape and tag it area=yes, though why anyone with JOSM
>>>> and the building_tool plugin would do such a thing I can't imagine.
>>>>
>>>> I'm asking a pragmatic question given that I'm seeing so many unsquared
>>>> buildings when validating is it essential they be squared?  and if so how
>>>> do we get squared buildings?
>>>>
>>>> From my experience with hosting Missing Maps and HOT mapathons many of
>>>> the mappers are first time contributors. We try to get them mapping as
>>>> quickly as possible. After a period of time we introduce new techniques,
>>>> such as squaring buildings and copy paste. The behavior you observed may be
>>>> the lack of training. If its possible to find out if the mapper attended an
>>>> event and if so who organized it to give gentle constructive feedback to
>>>> the host. (Hopefully it wasn't one of ours)
>>>>
>>>> Clifford
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> @osm_seattle
>>>> osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
>>>> OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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