[OSM-talk] Removing home point cloud(s) from multiple GPX files

[Mike Harris]

The software "GPS Utility" www.gpsu.co.uk will do this automatically in two steps for any gpx track. Select track, then from 'tools' menu 'generate track waypoints' then 'compress track'. User can set the 'error' i.e. the 'off-track' distance. It is also possible to view (and optionally tweak individual track waypoints) before committing the operation. There is a free 'lite' version of the software - but the shareware version is well worth the very modest price. Highly recommended to anyone with a lot of track, route and waypoint processing to do - and also a file format converter that is at least as good as GPS Babel. (I'm not getting any commission for this!).

Mike Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: David Ebling [mailto:dave_ebling at yahoo.co.uk] 
Sent: 17 April 2009 20:21
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: [OSM-talk] Removing home point cloud(s) from multiple GPX files


During the downtime I figured I should really catch up with cleaning up my huge backlog of GPX files and prepare them for upload. I have many many hours of tracks on my HDD that I have not uploaded because many of them are polluted with point clouds around my house and my relatives' houses. I am not happy to upload these for privacy reasons and also for data purity reasons.

I am not very command line compatible, and can't find *any* gui tool for Mac or Windows that will let me do this. GPX Babel only seems to let you remove points outside a radius not inside the radius, unless you use the exclude option which appears to be command line only. It also takes lat and long in an annoying format (decimal minutes, neither decimal degrees nor degrees, minutes and seconds.) It also seems only to be able to process one file at a time on the Mac version I've played with.

Is there any program out there that will do this easily? If not OSM would really benefit from one, as I think there are many people like me who aren't uploading GPX because cleaning them up is simply too much effort. Here's my idea for someone with more programming skills than me:

-A dialogue box that uses an OSM slippy map to draw circles of exclusion on the map, with a guidance note suggesting that they are near and covering but not exactly centred on your home/work/other point cloud locations.
-Ability to batch process that's user friendly -Output to a new folder -Ideally, upload direct to OSM, to be considerate to other users, perhaps over a specified time interval.

Any programmers out there want to take up this idea while we have some down time? :D Please? :) I'll upload lots of GPX files in return! ;)

Thanks,

Dave