[Talk-GB] Landuse in greater london

[TimSC]

Hello people,

I have finished a personal project of mapping landuse in Greater London 
from yahoo imagery. The inner section (roughly underground zone 1) 
cannot be usefully mapped from yahoo since all the buildings look the 
same - houses don't have gardens that are discernible. Outside zone 1 to 
the M25, the map benefits from land use data. The effort has been on and 
off work since mid 2007 until yesterday! It took a while... I am 
surprised that people don't comment on how odd the map looks without 
landuse being assigned and work to rectify it. I also found many missing 
roads and other interesting features. I started in Dartford and worked 
roughly clockwise to get to Romford. I know people like to have highly 
accurate OSM mapping, but users also expect good coverage. That allows 
users to say "where the map is blank, there is nothing there". This is 
not very compatible with a typical mapper thinking "where a map is blank 
is where I should go mapping". The latter view is not sustainable as we 
move towards good coverage. We need other tools to track progress rather 
than coverage. Using source tags appropriately helps a great deal.

Of course I did not do it all, so thanks for those who did land use in 
this area. I hope people can use it as a basis for refinement based on 
local knowledge and survey.

The next step is to collect landuse data for the central area. I suspect 
if people used their local knowledge, a significant amount could be done 
with little effort. An alternative is to estimate it based on the 
features and road layouts, but this is would not be very accurate. Or 
does anyone have a better idea? Possibly a series of land use mapping 
parties for central London?

Regards,

TimSC

PS I have not done anything on tracing buildings recently, but I 
probably will soon.