I’ve been diligently putting some truly boring information about my local High Street. Removing shops that don’t exist, adding new ones and adjusting opening times. It’s a shame businesses do not feel the need to do it themselves on OSM. I was wondering why is this, but then I realised that none of the navigation application I am using displays this information. I can check it on the Every Door and that’s pretty much it. Google Maps, by comparison, makes it really easy to see it and at the same time warns you of closing times, which makes it really practical in urban setting.

Having made comparison to the Map-That-Cannot-Be-Named, I realised how inaccurate Her* data is for my immediate neighbourhood. I’ve looked up some other places and though it would always take me more or less to the right location, the exact positions or addresses were off by quite some margin. At the same time, kudos to the interpolation heuristics that can find approximate addresses even in the absence of good data.

Especially that I am now realising how difficult addressing is. In my naivety I always though of streets as linear objects, with Hausdorff dimension 1 and ordered house numbers perhaps with an odd/even partition. Couldn’t be more wrong. I need to file a request to change the name of Dale Lane to Fractal Lane or Hausdorff Street (strasse?) to celebrate its many dendritic offshoots and arbitrary switch from consecutive ordering to odd/even ordering.

*Maps are feminine, right? Just like ships or cars.

… is what I am doing these days.

I’ve installed Terracer in JOSM software and I am learning JOSM along the way a bit. I also got Every Door on my mobile. It is much more versatile for correcting information about amenities than StreetComplete and at the same time still quite convenient to use.

Most of my tags still come from StreetComplete though. I find it particularly rewarding to answer questions for disabled or visually impaired people. I regularly see two elderly people on my local high-street and I see two kids, boy and a girl walking with sticks and I do hope that maybe one day the detail that people are putting into OSM will make some viable navigation apps for them. I also learnt about traffic lights with vibration mechanism underneath.

The difficulty is arbitrariness in tagging buildings. On the estate I live there’s a very old house which my wife describes as a “farm house”, but there’s no farm here any more and the building is used for residential purposes. I also learnt a very reasonable distinction between house, terraced or semi-detached house. I’d like to follow the tagging “building=house” “house=semidetached” or other to be more specific.

And how difficult must be to be a postman! Corner houses are particularly tricky. I came across semi-detached corner houses which seem to belong to different streets. There’s also lots of houses with names and no numbers and I think quite a few new blocks which do not exist on OSM. Will need to review with aerial imagery. I know of the offsets, but the GPS on my mobile is very unreliable so haven’t figured out yet how to correct it yet.

I guess this is the strength of Google car. Hardware on the car and some algorithmic heuristics can probably capture a lot of that detail in a completely automated manner. I checked hardware guide for OSM and maybe I will consider some bluetooth GPS device as my mobile is not very reliable. If there was a software we could install for a dashcam of our cars, but I guess it would be incredible hard to write considering all the privacy concerns.

I started exploring using Land Registry data to help with this process, but it will take time as I’ve never worked with GIS before.

Right! I finally started using OpenStreetMaps.

Thanks to a friend who pointed me to Magic Earth I now have a viable navigation system which uses OSM data and thanks to StreetComplete I am slowly learning about tagging. The multiplicity of apps is not ideal, but a staged approach to OSM concept is clearly necessary. My previous attempts to become an OSM users failed because I was overwhelmed by complexity or perhaps I should say expressiveness.

In the foreseeable future I will be just using StreetComplete to improve my local area, but I am already seeing some issues that require more in-depth changes. Also, there are some edits that I have already submitted, but after reading the wiki I do not believe them to be accurate any more.

Here are a few topics I need to chase:

• terraced houses - the terraced houses in my area are all lumped together. They are not divided up, so assigning numbers requires usually a comma separated list. I would like to fix it and break the rows into single terraced houses with one number each.
• I need to figure out how to mark multiple buildings belonging to a school, church or a care home for elderly.
• terraced bungalow houses - I am guessing they are terraced houses as bungalow definition clearly states detached. My area has many rows of single storey houses
• I may have messed up some bollards by marking them as fixed, whereas in fact some are removable with key. Will need to keep an eye on this and maybe learn to use Vespuchio to fix those in the future.
• Sometimes I am not entirely sure whether a road is asphalt or concrete with some coarse aggregates inside. I was assuming it’s asphalt as that’s what we typically put, but maybe I should take some photos and ask someone who knows better.