[OSM-newbies] Locking tags is it possible?

[john whelan]

Very briefly and this is probably the wrong forum Ottawa has decided to
release its data.  They had a Hackfest last Saturday attended by around 80
programmers where a number of people showed applications like a Google map
that showed drinking fountains on it.  This apparently is wonderful and the
city is talking about putting up $50,000 to encourage other wonder apps such
as which park you can walk your dog in.

My background is big databases with a bit of GIS twenty odd years ago when
we decided it was too expensive.

To me these Google apps are Mickey Mouse.  I'd prefer to see a City hosted
OSM server with businesses marked on the map.  Let's stop giving money to
Google.  In Ottawa we don't have a large number of OSM people wondering
around mapping, we've imported a lot of data from CANVEC of high quality.
I'd like to tap into those 80 programmers and turn them round to OSM but I
need a couple of levers.  Getting something to show on the map is another
issue, I can put playgrounds in but they only render sometimes, never mind
businesses.  Yet if I can get the businesses in then the city has money.

To them OSM looks down their nose at what they are doing.  They are fairly
well organized on the hype side.  If I can flip the city now is the time to
do it before it commits itself into the Google world.  The 200 odd people
who have been mapping in Ottawa before mainly I suspect from satellite
photos and dropped roads in 100 meters from where they should be have been
not done OSM any favours on the demonstrating data quality side of things.
>From an application point of view the tag data is just not good enough to
process by program.  Setting up new servers and importing everything fresh
from CANVEC and other sources would give the programmers something good
enough in the tags to program against.

I've now met one other person in Ottawa who dabbles in OSM and he's one of
the group on the opendata side.  Even he has reservations about bus stop
quality.

Cheerio John

On 29 April 2010 16:02, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 2:31 PM, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > So I think what we are saying is that I'd have to either have an
> > OpenStreetMap map that others couldn't edit or find another format.
> Ottawa
> > happens to be bilingual, currently we have an OpenData group building
> shiny
> > mini applications over Google. Google doesn't do French road names, but
> two
> > OpenStreetMap servers one using English and the other French could.
> That's
> > a fairly big lever here.
>
> Two servers may be overkill, but this can be done.  Why not render an
> OSM base map with no text labels.  Render text label overlay layers
> for each language.  Allow users to select their language of
> preference.
>
> > Technically we can import the entire road network from CANVEC and we can
> > import a lot of other city data as well.
>
> You might be thinking of different cities than I am thinking of.  Has
> Ottawa selected and published their license yet
>
> > If roads were tagged with speed limit then an application could compare a
>
> You can add speed limit tags to OSM.
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Maxspeed
>
> > GPS trace to the listed speed limits so you could get a feeling of
> > confidence your teenager hadn't been tearing around at high speed when
> they
> > borrowed the car.  This would be the killer app if it could be done.  It
> has
> > the potential to lower the accident rate but not if a teenager can raise
> the
> > speed limit tag.
>
> What is stopping you from creating this killer app?  Er, this "keeping
> kids from killing themselves app"?
>
> You can add maxspeed tags to your area of interest.  You can collect
> gps tracks from your spy logger implanted in the brain of your kid.
> You can match gps track to maxspeed with, I don't know, clever postgis
> queries?  And you can keep an eye on local maxspeed tags with your own
> server watching changesets, periodic extracts and compares,
> itoworld.com OSMMapper, or other services, or even this existing
> rendering of maxspeed
>
>
> http://maxspeed.osm.lab.rfc822.org/?zoom=18&lat=45.41872&lon=-75.69931&layers=B0T&input=maxspeed
>
> Why do you have to declare, "maxspeed is so critical that nobody
> should change it without passing a test first?"
>
> > The current OpenStreetMap of Ottawa is unsuitable for the purpose, the
> tags
> > are not consistent, the data is of uneven quality to say the least and
> there
> > are issues with displaying POIs.
>
> Did you know that you can fix that?  Have you spoken to the earlier
> contributors in Ottawa to tell that how you feel about their
> contributions?
>
> > I'd like to have a reason to recommend the city put up a couple of
> > OpenStreetMap servers to serve GIS applications but based on what I'm
> seeing
> > its probably better to go Google Map applications because I can currently
> > present no killer application for an OpenStreetMap format server.  Pity
> when
> > you're at the pivot point, OpenStreetMap would seem to be a hobby map not
> > one to run GIS type applications.
>
> Re-read my multi-language suggestion above and see if you have your killer
> app.
>
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