[Openstreetmap] osm-editor: can now directly add new data to OSM!

[nick at hogweed.org]

Hello everyone,

Revision 700 of the Subversion archive, and I would like to announce that 
osm-editor has been hooked up to OpenStreetMap itself.

Using osm-editor you can now grab tracks and waypoints from your GPS, edit 
them, and upload them direct to OpenStreetMap. You can also download existing 
data *from* OpenStreetMap, though note that you cannot yet modify it.

You can define track segments to be one of several types (footpath, cycle 
path, road etc). This information will be uploaded to OSM along with the 
segments themselves. Freemap-OSM (http://www.free-map.org.uk/osm/; see 
earlier this week) will display different type segments with different 
colours and symbols. You can also define the type of your waypoints to 
represent pubs, villages, churches, restaurants etc and upload the to OSM. 
Freemap-OSM  will shortly (within the next few days) show such points of 
interest with an appropriate icon.

A caveat or two: occasionally the application has crashed while uploading 
large amounts of data to OSM, so best to save data before you upload it, and 
keep the amount of data you upload relatively small.

A few technical details:

osm-editor takes advantage of the new 0.2 API key/value tagging system. You 
can partition your GPS track into multi-node segments representing streets, 
roads, paths etc and define their type (path, road , cycle path etc). When 
these multi-node segments are uploaded to OSM, they will be split into their 
constituent two-node segments and each two-node segment tagged to indicate 
the type that you gave the segment. When the "street" type is supported in 
the API, each multi-node segment will be treated as an OSM street.

 When your waypoints are uploaded to OSM, they will be treated as OSM nodes 
and tagged with their name and type.
(e.g. <node lat='xxx' lon='yyy' tags='name:Red Lion;class: pub'/>)

Next on the plan for osm-editor is to rewrite the internals so that they more 
closely follow the OSM data model of nodes, segments and streets. I also 
intend to allow users to modify OSM data with osm-editor, however I (or 
Steve) will need to write an extra API script on the OSM server-side to allow 
OSM to accept a complete XML file of nodes and segments.

Nick