[Openstreetmap] map walthamstow - CANCELLATION (from me at least)

[Lars Aronsson]

Tom Carden wrote:

> How do you know what is a road, and what is not, without 
> knowledge of the area being mapped?

In most cases that I've seen, it has been pretty obvious.  So far 
the European map is dominated by Sxpert's tracks spanning the long 
roads from Grenoble in France to Kirkenes in Norway.  Anyway, in 
some cases I could be wrong.  For example, what I see in tracks 
and draw as maps might be a temporary detour and not the main 
road.  In that case, nothing should stop someone with better 
knowledge from correcting the map.  That's the wiki principle: 
edit this map.  Sometimes in a wiki, writing an incomplete entry 
on something is a way to ask a question to the other users.

> I've been sketching some ideas for how to work out where 
> activity is happening.  Apart from the uploaded GPX feeds, can 
> you think of a way that would make sense to report on edits?  
> By session (e.g. Lars added 53 points and 23 segments at 
> dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm)?  By location (e.g. 300 points added today 
> within 2 km of lat/lon)?  Images?

Yes, this is a tough question.  Perhaps logged in users could see 
color coded traces of recently drawn roads, with green for those 
drawn in the last 24 hours to red for those added or modified in 
the last 30 minutes.  Or you could select that you only want to 
see one user's contributions, similar to the "user contributions" 
link in the wiki,
http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=LA2

This doesn't answer how to tell which user drew a particular 
segment.  But for that you would need some kind of "show history 
of this object", like the wiki's history tab, which is available 
for all objects, old and new.

One thing that could also be useful is to find out where there are 
tracks that haven't been mapped.  If a track point is, say, more 
than 200 meters from any line segment, it could be displayed in 
red.  If I upload a new track log, parts that overlap with 
existing drawn roads will be hidden, but the new parts would be 
red (if I'm logged in).

> New applet ETA: August 1st.  Fingers crossed!

Hope I can show it to people at Wikimania on August 4-8 then.

I think that Sxpert's long roads through Europe will be good for 
pulling new contributors into OSM, when they see that their city 
is already "connected" to the big network, but not yet mapped in 
detail.  That's why I link as many city names as I can from my 
wiki page.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se