[talk-au] Australian mapping Wiki

[Darrin Smith]

On Tue, 27 May 2008 22:46:16 +1000
Andy Owen <andy-osm at ultra-premium.com> wrote:

> > I have some gps traces with large long lines in them.
> > If my gps is turned on away from where it was turned off, my gps
> > draws a strait line between the two.
> > I have been keeping these private so as to not annoy other mappers.
> 
> My gps does that too. Out of curiosity, what are you using? I
> mentioned this on irc and wondered whether it would be possible for
> the osm server to filter out points that are too far apart. The
> response was that my particular gps/software combo (nokia n810 with
> maemomapper) wasn't common enough to warrant a fix by the people who
> would be in the best position to fix it. I do plan on fixing it (both
> in my gps software and in potlach), but I haven't had time yet.
> 
> I also now keep my traces private for the same reason, though
> sometimes I forget and accidentally make them public.

That's a real pity because working from a single GPS track WILL lead to
innacuracies. I've noted in numerous cases around the place where my
track I'm working on or someone elses uploaded is significantly (3 or 4
road widths away in some cases) different to a group of others for a
few street then re-aligns itself. 

You really need to get as much confirming information from other
people's GPS tracks as possible to ensure they all are lining up right.
Forgoing that for the sake of a bit of uglyness in what is essentially
a working area rather than a finished product seems a little silly to
me. 

Secondly if you use JOSM at all for editing (which for a number of
reasons is much better for large scale editing) you will get those
lines no matter what you are doing because of the way it just grabs all
the tracks in the area you are working on as if they were one big
track. So you either turn the lines off (and miss the loosly sample
tracks details) or live with lines all over the place that don't make
sense which you just learn to ignore. :)

> Have you waited a week? The changes generally make it to the viewing
> map on a Wednesday at some time.

Either that or learn how www.informationfreeway.org works, goto zoom 12
over the area you want updated, highlight it in the browser and hit 'r'
will request an update via tiles at home which usually takes a couple of
hours to make it through the queue. It doesn't render quite the same as
the normal Mapnick OSM page, but for checking things look OK after an
update it's a much shorter wait :)


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=b