[OSM-talk] about GPX tracing of NPE maps

Simon Hewison simon at zymurgy.org
Fri Nov 10 19:53:32 GMT 2006


Thought I'd just mention a few 'gotchas' I've found whilst tracing 
(mostly railways) on the out-of-copyright New Popular Edition maps.

Don't blindly believe that any feature is the same. Always 
cross-reference with another copyright-free or acceptably licenced source.

- Many railways have been removed and pulled up since the 1950s, check 
that you're not recording what is now a footpath (or a housing estate) 
as a railway.
- Rivers, especially meandering rivers over floodplains move course by 
hundreds of metres
- Main roads and secondary roads get reclassified, re-aligned, or removed.
- Forests and woods may grow or shrink, or disappear. New woods may have 
been planted since.
- I have yet to see a single roundabout on the NPE maps.
- Canals get silted up, or restored.

Features which tend to stay the same: Churches, Ancient sites, 
crossroads, farms (where they haven't been built over)

Always tag features sourced this way with something like "source=npe", 
since you may well not be uploading genuine GPS traces to the 
openstreetmap server.

-- 
Simon Hewison




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