[OSM-talk] Mapping Reading, some impressions

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

RobertS bullied me into mapping Reading (no, really), so we organised a 
mapping weekend and since then I've been doggedly editing and tweaking. 
Here's an osmarender of the work done so far:
http://tom.acrewoods.net/files/osm/reading_large.png

Here are my impressions of OSM, whinges and all (disclaimer: people work hard 
on this, you're all volunteers, etc. I know, so I do mean to be polite and 
I'm really amazed at the work put in so far)...


I first heard of OSM from SteveC at Open Tech last July, and showed a vague 
interest in Robert's work in Bedford. My relevant backgrounds are in free 
culture and green politics. I'm really into the idea of Free geodata, and 
I've wanted to produce some specific maps of Reading for a while (nice cycle 
rides and ethical spots). So that's what brought me into it.


The weekend was great fun, a relatively easy way to produce useful free 
content in a sociable context. Since I do a lot of walking and cycling around 
Reading it's also not too much bother mapping other parts, though doing it 
meticulously is a bit boring! :o)


The web applet sucks. Really. Look at Reading and still almost nothing shows 
up, the tiles are empty. This made it really difficult to persuade less geeky 
people, who loved the idea, to get involved with the mapping weekend. Now all 
I can show them are my osmarenders, which aren't nearly as impressive as an 
attractive slippy map they can search. I've trawled the archives a bit so I'm 
glad to see that people are aware of how much it sucks.

Another slightly rubbish feature is the search bar. Separating city and 
ordinary search is confusing, and this is made worse by the fact that city 
search isn't immediately visible on the homepage. Search for 'Reading' 
or 'Southampton Street, Reading' (fairly standard, I would have thought) and 
you get lots of street names with no indication as to where they are. 
Postcodes produce no results. If it must have these limitations, make them 
clear on the front page.


JOSM - dialogues have a habit of collapsing into titlebars, and I've asked the 
author to allow large/small GPX dots per layer, but otherwise it's great.


osmeditor2 - slow and jerky, I've just used it to help trace physical features 
like rivers, lakes and woods, based on sketches 'in the field'. Contours 
won't show up. I can't work out the node/segment/way tools either, JOSM seems 
much more intuitive.


Osmarender is nice, though it has many obvious flaws, such as:
* road joints can mess up and look, well, disjointed
* road names usually overlap with the casing
* road names go nuts in enclosed spaces :)
* abutters are OK, but look really messy in residential areas where you have 
roads just slightly farther apart than the rendered blocks
* pub labels make a mess rather than finding a neat way to fit in

I'm guessing that some of those bugs would require a Turing machine to fix :-)

It's also not very clear how you make additions to the map features file. I've 
got a growing customised file, based partly on the SVG Symbols wiki page, 
with definitions for woods, tracks, post offices, parking lots and pubs. The 
result can be seen in the render I mentioned at the start of this email. How 
do I help expand the osm-map-features.xml file? Where do I go if I have a 
suggestion but I don't know how to execute it? (e.g. cemetaries could be 
green with religious symbols in light grey, but I can only get the green 
background) The wiki isn't very helpful.


On a related note, the "Proposed features" page is similarly opaque. How do 
suggestions enter the official page? Should I just go nuts 
adding "sport=canoe", "freefood=cooking apples" and anything else I come 
across to the wiki and then tag them as such through JOSM, leaving it to 
someone else to move the idea to the official list?


Front page - stick some pretty maps up there, like the featured maps on the 
wiki, until the slippy map is up to scratch. Somebody said that before, I 
thought I'd second it!


Wiki - other than what I have mentioned already, it looks like it's getting 
ship shape :) My only bothersome bug at the moment is that when I uploaded a 
new version of the osmarender that's displayed on the Reading page, it 
updates when you view the image but not in the thumbs shown in the page. 
Hmph.



Overall... I'm a bit of a dork, so playing with tools and digging around the 
wiki don't phase me too much. I've had fun, and I'm almost ready to finally 
produce the maps I've always wanted. Thanks, keep up the hard work, and I 
look forward to finding a tool that will produce tip-top renders without 
countless hours of tweaking in Inkscape.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their 
transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the 
name of the betrayed ideal (Fromm – Beyond The Chains Of Illusion)