[OSM-talk] Potlatch update and tiger cleanup tools

Peter Miller peter.miller at itoworld.com
Sun May 11 09:06:02 BST 2008


It is great to see Potlatch continuing to develop more and more useful
functionality (see. http://potlatchosm.wordpress.com/ for details).  Undo is
of course very handy and also the way to see the background through the
ways. I am now using Potlatch so much that I am forgetting how to use JOSM
and only use JOSM for a smaller number of jobs that I can't yet do in
Potlatch.

 

The new feature in 0.9 that I don't think is quite right is the ability to
easily drag a way. In my experience it will be done in error 99 times out of
100. If that mistake is done by someone who doesn't notice or who don't know
about undo then the data is damaged. Last night I moved the section of the
UK coastline instead of adjusting a single node. Can this function be made
harder to access by mistake please?

 

For tiger cleanup (the motivation for dragging ways) I have a few other
requests:

 

When one deletes a selected node on a way can Potlatch then select the next
point on the same way, so one can hit delete again to delete a sequence of
nodes in order (currently it selects the way itself).

 

When a node on a way is selected then can the up and down arrow keys be used
to move along the nodes on the way. Can the left and right keys be used to
move to different ways connected to the same node. The combination of the
above three requests will allow one to navigate around the model in a
topological way rather than a Cartesian way that should be very handy.

 

A way of bulk-deleting unnecessary 'in-between' nodes on the ways in the
view where the node is associated with a single way, has no other attributes
and where the direction of the way hardly changes at the node or where the
nodes are very close together)? This would make a huge difference to the
efficiency of editing some parts of the USA which have bonkers numbers of
nodes on curves (Washington DC is very bad in this respect), and also where
spurious nodes are added to completely straight ways between junctions
(again Washington DC is bad here). This sort of batch-cleanup before
starting to edit manually would be very helpful. Possibly it should first
show visually what it intends to remove and then do it when one selects
'ok'.

 

The ability to drag a junction (where ways meet) to its correct position and
then have all the other in-between nodes scale to fit that new junction
position. This would be very handy for wiggly roads where the scale and
positions are both off, which happens quite a lot. I understand that
TeleAtlas used this approach when then imported Tiger.

 

A xxx_link tidyup function. Many areas have links of the wrong type. Once
one has got the main road network sorted one would ask Potlatch to set the
road classes of links correctly, so a motorway_link that connects a primary
road to a secondary road would be changed to 'primary_link'. Again this
would save a lot of tedious manual work with a simple algorithm. 

 

Finally in regard to Tiger cleanup Alan Miller as an 'unbraiding' script.
Could this be included in Potlatch?

 

Regarding the release process, could Potlatch in future go though a 'beta'
release process where it is available initially from a different URL so
people can try any changes out and sort out wrinkles before it goes on the
main site?

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

Peter Miller

 

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