Hi!
OpenStreetMap is a map that anyone can edit and anyone can freely reuse. It has a huge ecosystem, and can thus be a bit confusing to edit or to work with.
I thought that having a weekly thread to ask all beginner questions would be nice for everyone interested, so - go for it!
If you know the answer to a question, please answer (so that I don’t have to answer everything).
@pietervdvn this is amazing! Do we have something like this in the communitu forum in Discourse? 😃
@arnalielsewhere @pietervdvn@lemmy.ml
I don’t think so, but I don’t frequent community.openstreetmap.org/ much.BTW: did you know that the post you answered to actually came from Lemmy? It is an alternative for Reddit
Hello! I was editing my city, and I noticed that the satellite images are outdated (several months, almost a year). I would like to add some things, such as bike lanes and pedestrian crossings (zebra crossings). Should I make edits on an outdated map, or should I wait for updated images?
I gotta work with 5-year old satellite images in Portugal x) but it’s not too bad if you have a great knowledge of the city you’re editing in. Surveying would be the best course of action
That doesn’t sound too old to me! The satellite images in my area are from 2020. There have been some infrastructure changes since then, but in general construction takes a while so a few months shouldn’t change much. If you’re working in an area you know, as another commenter mentioned, you’ll be fine working from this imagery.
Also, unless you know there is new imagery coming, I don’t see any point in waiting because for all you know none will come for a year or more!
That really depends on the situation.
Some possible approaches:
- Have a look on mapillary, they are a streetview-platform where you can also upload pictures to. Sometimes they have up-to-date images
- Zebra crossings and cyclepaths don’t change every year, so I guess it is not that bad? Unless you know major reconstructions have been done
- Go out and survey instead (also see the first bullet point)
- Ask other mappers in your city what they think.
I’m doing sidewalks in my area and unfortunately there isn’t much convention to go off of. At a crossing where there are traffic lights but no specific pedestrian signals, should I be putting a Traffic Signals node on the pedestrian crossing? If so, at the corner, or where it intersects with the road?
In general, is there documentation somewhere for best practices for discrete sidewalks, and their associated curbs and crossings? I would like to get this right from the start, in a way that makes the data actually useful for people with visual or mobility impairments.
Thanks!
Whelp, this is the beginners-question chat! This is already quite advanced what you are doing there!
You will find more information on the wiki page on sidewalks and the crossings page. However, there is no consensus on how to do it. Some map it as discrete way (but this is a lot of work, duplicates some data such as streetnames), others map it as tag on the road. Both approaches have advantages and drawbacks; for some real-life situations it makes sense to do it one way and it others the other makes a lot of sense. And there is a grey area where neither approach is a good fit…
Not to mention that this is done differently in some countries due to OSM-tradition, different legal implications or forms of the sidewalk… So, good luck with this journey!
Believe it or not, I started last week. :)
My area has been doing sidewalks as separate ways, though very little is complete. I’ve already filled in more than a square kilometer of sidewalks with all their crossings and curbs, but just encountered my first intersection with this sort of weird grey area crossing where there is a traffic light but no pedestrian signal.
Well, that is impressive! Personally, I only map sidewalks separately if they are clearly separated by a decent amount (>1m) over a longer stretch of pavement
What would be the best iphone app to use open street maps. Especially for tourism. Meaning can support offline navigation and search, hiking, walking in the city and so on?
Thank you!
Try OsmAnd or Organic Maps. The first one has many features but is less user friendly.
Didnt test them yet. Just wanna say how much im in love with lemmy! So far nice people. Found something that actually interests me, someone offers actual help. I ask a question, get a nice relevant and helpful answer literally one minute after. No snarky smartass comments or jokes.
Amazing.
And thank you!
Is there a way to map temporary changes? Mainly thinking about road under construction and such, but also even more temporary ones like streets being blocked of due to large events.
The rule is that we don’t map temporary stuff (such as events).
However, nothing is truly permanent. So, it depends a bit. If you have road works lasting for one week, feel free to map them and to restore it as not-working a week later ;)
Road works lasting >6 months are typically mapped - at least in my experience. There are no hard rules about this though and there is no consensus in the community. At last, have a look to the lifecycle prefixes: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lifecycle_prefix
