[Talk-us] We have less than a week left to remap!

[Toby Murray]

I don't think this has been reposted to talk-us yet. According to the
latest license change rebuild plan, the database will enter read-only
mode on March 27th for the license rebuild:
http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Rebuild_Plan

So that gives us a matter of days to do any more remapping. It seems
like the US hasn't seen a concerted effort to remap dirty data like
some other countries have. So here is my attempt to get that started.
I'm not sure if some people still don't know about the license change
of if people think someone else will take care of the important
things... But *everything* is on the chopping block!

Some highlights:

1) State/county borders. I've actually cleaned up a good chunk of
these and hope to finish in the next few days. I may have to reimport
some of the remaining ways. Anyone have thoughts on the best source
for this information?

2) The interstate system. I've taken care of about 4 or 5 states here
in the midwest but there is a large swath from Illinois down to South
Carolina that will become unroutable on April 1st. This will set OSM
back immensely in the eyes of anyone actually trying to use our data.

3) Specific cities: Los Angeles, Ausin, Seattle. Most major cities
have some unclean blobs in them but these are particularly nasty. User
blars has not responded to repeated requests for contact and I have
reason to believe he is intentionally ignoring anything OSM related.
His contributions are beyond huge in the LA area and really along a
lot of the west coast. Seattle is mostly affected by user Sunny who
has proven to be unreachable despite my best cyberstalking attempts.
Austin, TX is also largely affected by one prolific user but it has
actually gotten some attention so it isn't entirely doomed.

4) Shorelines. These were imported from a public domain source by an
anonymous user. I'm tempted to largely mark this with odbl=clean and
call it a day. Thoughts?


In light of this, I would strongly encourage everyone reading this
list to suspend your current mapping efforts and concentrate entirely
on license remapping for the next few days. It's not the most fun work
but it needs to get done.

Tools to use:

JOSM license change plugin. Select everything in an area and hit the
"License Check" button. Start deleting red things and replacing them
from clean sources:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Plugins/LicenseChange

Potlatch2 I think now has the license change layer enabled by default.
If not, go into the options and make sure "Show license status" is
checked. Again... remove anything with a red halo and replace.

Badmap. Dirty interstates are clearly visible:
http://cleanmap.poole.ch/?zoom=5&lat=41.12823&lon=-99.48465&layers=00B0

OSM Inspector. Good for drilling down and finding individual objects to remap:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=wtfe&lon=-100.24219&lat=40.17384&zoom=4

TIGER 2011 road name tiles. Used as a background imagery layer while
editing. Good to pull street names while remapping residential areas.
Just be sure to expand the abbreviations while you're at it.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_2011

I have also written two blog posts on my own remapping efforts. The
first focuses on interstates where there is existing clean data to
work with. The biggest trick here is making sure you don't break the
route relations. But honestly I wouldn't worry about it too much. As
long as the ways are intact, routing will continue to work. We can
come back later and clean up the route relations after the license
change.
http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2012/01/license-change-mapping.html

The second post is quite a bit more technical and I don't expect many
others to follow it really. It was useful in that area of LA but it
involves some traditional GIS tools, data analysis and a little python
coding. For this type of work, most people would be better off using
the TIGER 2011 road name tiles listed above.
http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2012/03/remapping-using-tiger-2011.html

Honestly, it is kind of late to be sending out this email... I
probably should have done it a couple of weeks ago but hopefully we
can still make a meaningful dent in the dirty data. At least this
whole process is almost over...

Toby