Episode: 1176
Title: HPR1176: Intro to editing the Open Street Map 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1176/hpr1176.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:03:56

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Music
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This one's going to be covered in edits, hopefully you won't hear them.
I'm Poki and I'll be your host for today.
Today I'm going to get into a topic that probably should not be gotten into in an audio only
podcast, but I'm going to give it a go because this really should be done by someone in
a video cast, but I haven't really seen it done and I don't really have any interest
in doing that kind of thing, so I'm going to try an audio.
And today I want to talk about the OpenStreetMap project and specifically how you can contribute
to the OpenStreetMap project and how you can edit the map.
I think of it as the map because it's one map that we all share no matter where you are
in the world.
You're on the same map and it is the same map data and it is your map, it is my map, it
is our map and it is our responsibility now to keep this thing accurate and up to date.
So I want to talk about editing it.
The first thing to know about editing the map is that you do not need any special hardware.
It really, really helps to have a nice comfortable mouse that fits your hand, but you don't need
anything else.
I know you've probably heard on podcasts or read somewhere that recording traces is useful
and uploading traces and all that kind of forget about that for now.
We're not going to talk about that here in the United States.
I really can only speak for the United States because I haven't edited much of the map
outside of the United States.
In fact, I think the only thing I ever did that was outside of the United States was to
add the Peter64 International Remote Control Helicopter Pat and Airplane RC runway.
Oh, I f*** it all up.
Outside the United States, the map data is the same, the map works the same way, but the amount
of data that's there and the quality of the data that's there is a different country
to country.
It looks like a lot of the European countries are very well documented, perhaps entirely
by hand.
A lot of the Eastern block and Soviet countries seem to be entirely done by hand and very
well done parts of Australia where the Peter64 International Memorial RC airplane
runway is that seems to not be done so much by hand but seems fairly complete.
So I don't know, I can't really speak to it much deeper than that.
As far as the United States goes, a while ago the United States government commissioned
a map be made of the United States and it appears as if it is also periodically commissioned
updates to that map.
That data was public domain data right from the start.
So when the OpenStreetMap project came into existence at some point somebody wrote some
software that was able to extract the data from the US Geological Survey which was what made
that map and they were able to import it into the OpenStreetMap project.
So like instantaneously a large percentage of the United States was added to the OpenStreetMap
project and is fairly accurate as far as driving a car and navigation scales really require
it to be.
But when you get down to editing it and looking at things in real space with real measurements
things are off a little bit, not probably not enough to make a difference to anybody but
enough to bother someone who's as anal-retentive and OCD as I am so I go and try to fix those
little things while I'm working.
But if you want to edit the map and the map does need a lot of work even in places like
the United States where it's fairly complete there are a lot of things missing and even
where things exist a lot of the important data is missing and I think probably two of the
most important things that you can do at least in the United States to help the map and
edit the map and make it more usable would be to assign directions to roads that are one
way roads.
So you know saying this road is a one-way street and it goes in this direction as opposed
to everything by default being identified as a two-way street.
The other thing that helps that you can do that's also fairly easy to do is to identify
bridges and overpasses because by default whenever two roads intersect on the map the map
assumes that they literally intersect and in turn can be made and if you try to navigate
someplace with a GPS that's using the open street map data it could tell you to turn
off of an overpass onto the road under it which you don't want to do I promise.
But if before you left the house you had a look at the map and found it where those overpasses
were and identified those as bridges and more importantly identified the bridges as being
higher than ground level the map would then know that you cannot take a left hand turn
off of an overpass and it would route you to the correct exit for that highway or you
know some such thing.
So those are a couple of really important things and really they're fairly easy but they're
going to be hard to describe if I'm just trying to you know relay that to you over an
audio podcast.
So what I need to do while I'm talking is to do some editing to the map so I can describe
what I'm doing and what I'll need you to do in order to learn what I'm saying is to
go get an account at OpenStreetMap.org log in and edit the map with me while I'm talking
and you can edit your neighborhood I'm going to edit mine because it's going to be a lot
better if we work with something that's familiar to each of us rather than something that's
familiar to both of us because I have a hard time believing we can find something that's
so familiar to both of us that we can edit it.
So I'm going to wait here while you go create an OpenStreetMap.org account and log in
and you can pause this or skip to your next podcast and come back to this when you have
that because that's what we're going to need to continue.
Hey good job you're back and you made an account I'm so proud of you.
You have made your first step to improving the map and we all here at Hacker Public
Radio appreciate that and applaud you so thank you very much for doing that.
Okay so once you log in what you're going to start with is a view of some section of
the map.
I believe you start off like right over some part of the Europe I don't know maybe even
one of the Britons who knows zoom out to the point where you can see enough of the earth
to pan around quickly and find where you live generally and keep zooming in until you find
where you live physically.
I mean literally go ahead and zoom into your street.
We're in the if you look in the upper left hand corner of the maps interface we're in
the view mode now and it's very important to be in the view mode rather than the edit
mode because you can zoom out much further in the view mode and you can move the map around
much more quickly in the view mode because view is all just pre rendered images so all
the server has to do is send the images to you and that can be done very quickly as opposed
to it sending you datasets and data points which your Java interface through your web browser
are going to have to render on the fly so it's a lot quicker to do it in the view mode.
So go ahead and find where you live and I'll give you a minute here and I'm finding where
I live and if you want to see where I live and you want to see what I've done to the map
you can go you find the USA and in the upper right hand corner or the northeast part of
the United States since we're speaking of map terms it's probably important to use the
cardinal directions you can find New Hampshire and in the southeastern part of New Hampshire
so the lower right find a blue line that is New Hampshire 16 and follow it from the Seacost
northwest until you find the city of Rochester so it's up beyond Dover it's up beyond
Summersworth though 16 doesn't pass through Summersworth and you find Rochester and you go
right to the dead center Rochester and that's where I live I don't live in the dead center I'm
going to tell you where I live but that's where I live and if you keep zooming in you'll see some
points in the map are fairly well detailed for instance the Rochester fairground if you zoom
further and off to the east of that there's the the Rochester commons a little running track
if you go to the west a little bit there's a Lowes Parking Lot a Lowes Home Improvement store
in their parking lot and some parking lanes there's an airport on the eastern side of town
southeastern side of town the Skyhaven Airport DAW is the designation for that if you know
about airports the hospital all that stuff a bunch of stuff I've put in and if you see that kind
of detail in Rochester there's a pretty good chance it was me in fact as at the time of this
recording anything in that graded detail was me I did that so you can get an idea for how much
you can do if you sit down and spend some time but for now let's pause the recording again
and find your house and then unpause it and we'll we'll get back to it or find a streak that you live
on okay so you found your street good job now you're probably zoomed in to about I don't know one
two or three zoom levels above the maximum so now's a good time to hit edit now you can you can see
there's a little like a little arrow next to edit uh edit being up in the upper left hand corner
of the map interface here and you can open that little pull down there and you got two choices and
edit with pot latch two in browser editor is in parentheses there is the first choice in the second
being edit with remote control uh JOSM or Markator not sure what that is I always use pot latch two
so you can select that manually or if you were just to click the edit and not the pull down arrow
it would select pot latch two for you now this is a Java interface so the Java is going to take you
some time to load probably JavaScript rather so the JavaScript is going to take a little bit of time
to load and then once that happens the map interface will open up and it's going to take a little while
to download the data set but what you will see first before the data set completes loading the
interface will open and then you will get satellite imagery so you probably noticed that you didn't
have any satellite imagery in the view mode but now you do have satellite imagery in the edit mode
which is the primary reason that you don't need to go out and buy special hardware and trace roots
and mark things with a handheld GPS unit to come back and do them at home you can do just about
anything that needs to be done with satellite imagery it's size I understand it's legal to do so
we're only using the images a reference you and I I mean while we're editing the map we're
only using that as a reference we're not actually taking the data of that satellite imagery
which is being provided by well you should have to say it but being at the moment so now you've
got that open you can see if you move your mouse around you can highlight probably different streets
perhaps even different objects on the map if there are objects in there but usually you'll
just see some streets if you click on one of those things go ahead and click on any one of them
it's fine what you'll see happen is that entire street or object will be highlighted
and the panel to your left will change and that panel will tell you what the object is at the
very top so in my case it's saying the name of my street just below it there's a pull down menu
that's got a lot a lot of options in it and at this point it's saying residential road from
mine because I live on a residential road and below that you'll see a series of six tabs there's
a star there's a check box there's an icon of a person walking there's an icon of a bicycle one of
a bus and one of a circle with a diagonal line through it for restrictions and when you have an
object like a street highlighted you can click on any one of these tabs and change the properties
of that object now it's most important the pull down menu there is most important because the
properties in those tabs are going to change depending on what's in that pull down but let's
assume for the moment that the pull down is correct and that you live on a street so then you can
just cycle through those tabs and there'll be six tabs there now if the object we're not a street if
you clicked on a swimming pool for instance or a pond you might not have six tabs you might only
have one tab or two tabs or any number of tabs it's going to depend on the object it's going to
depend on what it says in that pull down so while you have your street selected go ahead and click
on the arrow in that pull down menu just below the title but above the tabs you can see you have
a bunch of tabs on the left hand side and those are general categories so I have on in those tabs
it says roads paths transport water natural barrier power places and sports and leisure is the
last one and you can click on those tabs you're not going to change anything go right ahead you can
click on those tabs and scan through and see the different items that are available to you under
each of those categories so under roads it's going to give you different types of roads different
classifications of roads from motorways which in the states we call highways all the way down to
tracks which would be like paths or four wheel drive you know tracks through the woods and stuff
so you've got all kinds of different selections there right below those paths those are typically
footpaths or cycle paths or some other such thing and you can click through those you can even
select one and change it and go ahead and you can change your road to a primary link so that would
be like an on ramp to a primary street and you'll see that your road the color of it probably
changed because the colors indicate how major or minor the road is so you've changed it no problem
because you haven't saved anything what you'll see at the top now is that the save button
has become active it was grayed out before the help button is still active and the undo button has
become active which was also grayed out before so go ahead and click undo now that puts it back
to the road that it was now you haven't changed anything even though you're in a live edit mode you
haven't changed anything you're safe you you have maintained the integrity of the map just the
way you found it so good job you but it's probably more important since we're here not to maintain
the current integrity of the map but while we're here let's improve the map so what I like to do
and we'll start off let's add something to the map and I'm just going to show you how to add it
not that it needs it at this point at least it probably doesn't need anything added but we can add
things that aren't even strictly necessary so if you look in the map it's and in the map interface
itself not in the left hand panel but in the map panel in the upper left hand corner you'll see the
scale controls there so there'd be a plus for zooming in minus for zooming out and a magnifying glass
that's labeled find place I've never used the magnifying glass go ahead and feel free to experiment
that in your own time for now I would like you to hover over the plus and you should get a pop-up
dialogue there very small one by your cursor mine says zoom in currently 19 and I would like you to
click plus or minus until yours says zoom in currently 19 what that means is that or Z19 rather not
just 19 what that means is that you're at zoom level 19 and for most of the map that I have worked
with 19 is the most you can zoom in and still have satellite imagery you can zoom in further
I'm not even sure how far you can zoom in you can go in closer but you won't have satellite imagery
to help you so what what you would need at that point is some special hardware that could record
traces and specific plot points that you put in there and that kind of thing but since we're
only working with the with the satellite imagery go ahead and zoom in the most you can while
still having satellite imagery and that may not be the same for you mine is 19 because it's a
fairly well-imaged area of the earth I think there are other parts of the United States that aren't
as well mapped so you might not be able to get into 19 you might be stuck at 18 or 17 or
lower other parts of like Europe and stuff I've seen don't seem to have any satellite imagery so
you might not be able to do this part of it is easily as as all of us but for those who can
zoom in on their own neighborhood go ahead and zoom in the most that you can and I want you to
find somewhere in your neighborhood a neighbor's house who has a really easy to see driveway
something that you can you can readily identify as their driveway something that sticks out and
is easily identifiable and we're going to add some data to the map we're going to tell the map
where that neighbor's driveway is so take your cursor and move it to the end of their driveway
furthest away from the road now this could butt up against their lawn or a fence or the house
or garage doesn't really matter because those items the house and their fence and their lawn
aren't on the map yet even though there's imagery of them things that have imagery aren't
necessarily on the map so we don't have to worry about those yet down the road years from now when
we have filled in the map enough that we're adding houses and sheds and garages and trees we
can worry about that but for now while we're working with roads still it's okay we'll just add the
driveway so go ahead and at the point of their driveway that's furthest from the road right in
the center I want you to click your mouse once what that does or sorry that'll unselect the road
if you still had the road selected if nothing is selected then go ahead and click in the middle
of their driveway down at the very end furthest from the road and you'll see that it adds a
point on the map and it has changed your cursor into what looks like a fountain pen now if you move
your cursor around you'll get a red dotted line that follows your cursor around from your cursor
back to that point and the left hand panel has changed all that's in there now it says no tag set
and the pull down says unknown that's fine you can if you want to change the pull down now but
but let's let's first finish adding the driveway now if this is a very straight driveway
you can go directly from that point you can bring your cursor over to the road and hover over the
road for a moment don't click anything else yet hover over the road for a moment in which you'll see
is the points on the road that exist will appear all of a sudden and they'll be blue well
they're blue on my road my road is white and there's blue points that appear if I move back
off the road the road stays white but the blue points disappear what that indicates to you
when those blue points show up is that if you click on the road at this point you're going to connect
your first point with the road and the map is going to draw a line between those two points
and those two lines will then be connected and intersected if you were to click off the road or
next to the road they would not intersect and they would not connect but since we know a drive
ways connect to streets and roads it's okay so go ahead and hover over the road until those blue dots
appear and then go ahead and click now what you'll see is your active point your previous point has
moved the original one has stayed put and there's a yellow highlight or at least on my map it's yellow
you might have different colors I don't know if you grown might work different than Firefox and
if you're doing on windows might be different than Linux I don't know but you'll see that there's
some sort of connector between the two and that red dotted line is still following your cursor it's
still following that that little fountain pen now if you don't have a very straight driveway that
you've selected going back to the road instead of clicking on the road and if you did click on the
road go ahead and click undo and it'll bring you back you'll just have that that original first point
so now you've got like a curvy driveway going down to the road go ahead and click on another point
closer to the road that's still in the middle of that driveway and you'll get the same thing you'll
get another red dot and you'll get like a highlight between the two of them and you'll still have
that red line following you around the screen wherever you put that cursor oh I got it back up for
a moment so if you place an original point and then you select another point and you undo the
second one so that you only have one what you may wind up with is like a grade out if you
undo it you'll wind up with like a grade out dot on the map a little point on the map you can
select it but you can't really do anything with it all you can do is slide it around you might go
to label it I can't even slide mine around which you want to do is highlight that go down to the
bottom right hand corner of the map and you'll see a little toolbar there and then the upper left
hand part of that toolbar is a garbage can go ahead and click that garbage can get rid of that point
and you can start over you can make a new point with the red line that follows your pen around
so we should all be caught up by now so for those with a curvy driveway we'll have that one
dot that you started with next dot some point down the highway highway excuse me the driveway
and then you can keep clicking points like that curving down that driveway following the driveway
until it connects to the road you can be as detailed with that driveway as you would like
or you can be as sloppy as you like you're still adding data to the map that is more or less correct
you're still helping so don't kill yourself trying to make it so accurate that you cramp your wrist
dragging your mouse around make it as accurate as you feel like making it it's still better than it
was when you started you're still doing good work for the open street map project and for the
community that uses it so yay you again once you have connected your one end of your driveway
and follow it all the way down the driveway and connected it to the road go ahead and move your
what's still a fountain pen here if you want to get your fountain pen back to a cursor you want
your cursor back which you can do is go to the upper left hand corner and click save that's really
the only way to get it back so go ahead and you can do that now go ahead and click save and now
it's going to open a dialog window says save changes and it's going to ask you for a comment
you can tell the open street map project why you are editing the map now what map you have made so
you can put added driveway it's a very important driveway to kind of want to know why you
added it added driveway is why you added it so go ahead and put that and then click save
that'll go away and now you'll see that your driveway has been added to the map but wait a
minute it doesn't look like a driveway it just looks like a black line so how are we going to fix
that go ahead and highlight it you'll see your cursor will change to a little pointer finger
click it once to select it now your highlights back and your points are all back and your tags
still say no tag set that's why it doesn't look like a driveway hasn't been tagged as a driveway
to tag it as a driveway open that pull down where it says unknown on the left roads is the correct
one it's the one that opens by default so you're fine there and if you look in the bottom left it
says service road go ahead and click service road you know a driveway doesn't seem like a service
road but trust me for now once you click that the pull down will close and you've got your tabs back
for identifying our roads under the original tab or the star tab the one all the way left it says
type of service road and the pull down says unset open that pull down and about the middle one
and mine anyway says driveway go ahead and select driveway and now it's a driveway now hit save
again there you go your neighbors cut the driveway on the map and it's all because of you it
probably looks a little different than the road because the map will render driveways a bit narrower
than a regular street so it won't really include it you don't have to name a driveway unless you
really want to I don't know what you would want a name a driveway for but that's it you've just
added something to the map a line in fact there are three kinds of objects that you can add to
the map you can add points which are just a single dot if you had selected a single dot and it's
save you'd have that you can add lines like you just did and those lines can stand on their own
or they can intersect and connect with other lines which is what we did here and you can also add
objects that have shaped to them so had you drawn you can go ahead and do this find a neighbor's house
that's just a rectangle you know not a complicated shape and click on one of the four corners of
that rectangle you get your dot back you get your red line following your cursor take your cursor
and click on another corner of the house did not the opposite corner but the one on adjacent corner
how you got two red dots and a yellow line and a red dotted line that follows your cursor around
so go ahead and add the other two corners now you've got four corners of a house but only three lines
because you haven't connected it yet but if you bring your cursor back to the original dot and hover
over it you see a little you might see a plus sign means you're you're not close enough yet but
you'll see a little black dot on the lower left lower right hand corner of your points are here
that should still look like a fountain pen click on that original dot and that object is complete
the map knows it's complete and it's giving you your cursor back it's no longer a fountain pen
so now you've got a rectangular shape made of three red dots and some yellow highlight but it still
has no tags and it's not an object so we need to label it as a house and save it but before that
let me show you one neat trick and the lower right hand corner of the screen you have that little
toolbar again there's a garbage can there's a couple of arrows that say reverse direction
because it doesn't know that it's not a road yet you could still have directions for a road
right now I have grayed out a pair of scissors and a chain and a button that says show more
and like you to click that show more button if you have it if you don't you should have another row
of icons but I want you to have two rows of icons there now I have on mine a grayed out button
that looks like three dots connected by a line on the next button if I hover over it says make
circular it's a bunch of dots connected by lines that are in a circular shape another one that
says make right angled with Q in parentheses and it looks like four red dots making a square with
lines and the one on the very far very furthest right on the bottom row says create parallel way
so what I'd like you to do is click on the one that says make right angled the one that looks
like a box but when you click on it hover your mouse there look at the house you just drew and
then click that button and watch it happens there you go it put right angles between all your dots
so your house now is rectangular shaped on the map as well as in real life so that's a little more
accurate that's just a neat trick it can do that with all kinds of polygons with right angles so
keep that in mind that it doesn't necessarily have to be a rectangle I only suggested it for
ease of use for this tutorial so let's label it and save it you can do this in in any order you
could save it now if you wanted to and then label it but you'd have to save it again or you can
label it now and then save afterwards so go ahead and click the pull down for unknown and now
because it's a shape you'll see you have a lot more options than you did when you had just align
or a single point because there are more categories that a complete shape can be labeled under go
ahead and find the one down the left hand side it's buildings and click on buildings
then you can look all see now you haven't changed your your tag yet inside that window for
buildings there's all kinds of different categories there one of them is not house but the closest
thing to a house that we have here is buildings go ahead and click on building now that'll close
and under the basic tab there's another pull down building type if it is one generic building is
what I have labeled but if I open that pull down so go ahead and open that pull down you'll see a
list and this is much longer than the list for the type of service roads that you had so go ahead and
read through that and what I have because I've picked a neighbor of mine they have a family house
so I'm going to I'm going to select family house here and now I'm going to in the upper left hand
corner again click save now their house has been added to the map it gets a little purple color
and a little gray outline only if you hover on it it's probably got it anyway but you can't really
see it till you hover so now you know how to add lines to the map you know how to add polygons to
the map and you can add points to the map as well it's the same procedure I'm not going to cover
that too much now that's about as much as we need to get into that so if you can see from your
street here from your map interface if you can see a road that you know is a one-way road
and it's not labeled as one way go ahead and select that if you can't see that go ahead and
select the driveway again your neighbor's driveway that you just drew so for the road it's
going to say a taper road for the driveway it's going to say service road and if you look down
under that star tab it's going to say one way and un-set so go ahead and click that un-set
pull down and it'll open up and it'll say one way two way one way reverse or un-set so what you
can do is select one way and see what happens it's drawn arrows on that so now that indicates to
the user of the map which way the direction of traffic flows if that's incorrect open the path open
the pull down again select one way reverse and you'll see the arrows have changed directions
now if that is a one-way road and you've just correctly identified that in the correct
direction go ahead and hit save if not if this is still your neighbor's driveway and it isn't
a one-way road you can open that pull down again click two way because you know it's a two way
where you can click undo until it says un-set again because un-set defaults to two way
anyway so it's it's going to be fine and then since you've changed it to two way you have to
save button back again go ahead and click save you have now updated the map with a driveway that
is correctly labeled as a driveway on which traffic goes in both directions so I mean
hooray you seriously this is this could be the greatest community activity you've done today and
I don't want that the significance of that to go under-appreciated I want you to know that I
appreciate that and and you should too and I know clatu does because clatu loves community
appreciation and community work so you're all right in my book and in clatu's too I'm sure of it
now let's get to doing something just a little bit more complicated I want to show you how to
add a bridge this is really important for people who are navigating and this is just as important
as labeling one way streets so let's let's go back to the view mode because we're going to pan
around for a little bit and it's much quicker to do in view mode so in the upper left-hand corner
above the save button click on view please
you'll see that your scale has not changed much you're back in the map mode the viewing mode
so you don't have the background anymore the satellite imagery but your road or your driveway excuse
me that you just drew in there is gone you can't see it the reason you can't see it is because
you're looking at cached data the map is now updating itself the the server that the map is on
is now re-rendering the images of the map that include the data you just edited and it is doing
that at every scale and that that that data and that rendering is now propagating through the
server or servers if they have more than one I really don't know and it's going to take a few
minutes to get to you so don't worry that you can't see it you probably won't see it immediately
you can see it later if you're in a rush to see it you can refresh the page that you're on
but you cannot specifically do it by clicking the refresh button because all that's going to do
is refresh at scale 19 on the exact coordinates that you're on which may not be exactly what you're
looking at here but if you highlight the portion of the address bar that is not openstreetmap.org
and then delete that so that all you have is openstreetmap.org and hit enter it will refresh that
page correctly and you can now zoom in and zoom out and hit refresh and it should eventually
update that street and update that data you just did and show the driveway and there it is in real
time that driveway has appeared now at a scale that's somewhat less than 19 on my map anyway but
since I don't know the scale and view mode it doesn't matter but I can now see the driveway
and I can see the house that we added so let's move on so we're back in view mode I'd like you to
zoom out until you can see find a major road in your neighborhood so I can go back to if you were
to look back at my neighborhood in Rochester which you know you may or may not want to do
you I can go back to the Spalding Turnpike which is New Hampshire 16 NH 16 that's the major
road I'm going to use it's a it's a highway and on the map it's labeled as a what did I say it
was called they don't call it a highway they call it a that I don't know motorway maybe something
like that but I'm going to use 16 because I know there are bridges and overpasses on 16 but if you
can find road near your house something that you're familiar with where you know there's a and you
might not even know there's a bridge because you might not think about it because you go under it
or over it so often it's not even occurred to you that it is a bridge but try to find something
will wait here will wait for you you can pause the recording while you find a bridge near your house
where one road passes over another road or even if a road passes over a railroad track or a river
that's all fine too I'd like you to find a road that has a bridge on it though go ahead and
pause it find a bridge and then unpause it please okay so now you're looking at a road with a bridge
on it go ahead and zoom in as far as you can still in the view mode with that bridge in the center
of your screen you can you can double click on it and it'll zoom that works in a view mode that
doesn't work in the edit mode so zoom all the way in on that bridge and then when you're at the
highest zoom level with the bridge in the center of your map window click edit again or open the
edit pull down and click on potlatch 2 I never tried potlatch one I don't know what XR or if I
did I don't I'm sure I did but I don't remember it was so long ago but it wasn't too too much
different than this so the reason you zoomed all the way in is because as long as it takes the
open potlatch it takes even longer to pan around at a low zoom level with the map open because all
that map data has to render inside your browser inside this JavaScript engine after it's downloaded
all this data and it's an awful lot of data once you're in the potlatch window and it's all opened
you can zoom in further so remember how we do that we hover over the plus sign and click it to zoom in
until you don't have satellite imagery anymore and then zoom back out by one or stop where you know
there to be satellite imagery in your neighborhood like I said in mine it's zoom level 19 so what
you're probably going to notice if you just have imported data from the US Geological Survey is
that these roads are probably not exactly where they ought to be the line on the map might go down
one lane to the road instead of the center or it might might be off the road completely I'm pretty
anal about this stuff and I will highlight that road and I'll grab the little red dots that
indicate the points in the road and I will drag them until they're in the center of the road
before I start editing a bridge because I want the road to be in the right place you can really go
nuts doing this so you're going to have to learn how to determine what a sensible point is to stop
drag in this road to the center of the road what I'll usually do is go off in one direction and do it
until like maybe it crosses the road again or where it should cross the road again or
where it doesn't you know if I drag it to the middle of the road it doesn't look like it's making
too abrupt or ridiculous a turn from you know from the next thing down the road so that's what I
usually do and I'll just stop it at some point and then I'll get back to editing my bridge
once you're satisfied that your roads are straight enough and where they ought to be and that you're
ready to to edit your bridge or to edit them and really it's only very important right now
if you consider important that the road be down the middle of the road so to speak
that's really only important that the one you're going to put the bridge on is where it ought to be
because you can do the other one later and it's not going to affect your bridge so go ahead and
highlight the road with the bridge on it and what we're going to need to do is tell of the map
that the bridge and the two sections of roads surrounding the bridge have different data sets
but they're mostly the same data sets they're only slightly different and how we do that is
we split the road into first two and then three pieces what I like to do after splitting them
into three pieces I'll usually delete one piece so that I can add more plot points to make the
road more accurate and I can put a plot point right at the end of the bridge and then put
another plot point right at the end of the bridge or else follow the bridge if it curves I don't
have many curvy bridges in my neighborhood but I do a plenty of bridges and then you know I'll
connect them all back together merge them back together so that I know for sure that all of the
pieces I want to work with will have the same data set but that all the points are where I want
them to be where I want to split the road and then I will split the road it'll retain the data sets
and then I'll just change the one that says bridge so here's how I do that find the nearest
two points to your bridge they might both be off to one side they might be on either side they
might be within your bridge any of those things is okay so find the one that is closest to your
bridge highlight your road that your bridge is on find the nearest point to be a red dot and this
may be way off the page or on that you might even have to change your zoom level and zoom out
to find this but that's okay find the nearest point to your bridge select that point you're
going to highlight it and your tags are probably going to go away because that point probably
doesn't have any specific data usually it's just a point on a road and the road has the data
when you get that point and it's highlighted on the bottom right hand toolbar see that you now
have scissors they were grayed out cover the scissors and it'll say split way you want to split
the road at that point and make two different roads at that point you're not going to disconnect
the roads they're still connected the map is still going to tell someone they can drive from one
to the other because they share that common point so you're still okay now you want to find the
next closest point to that bridge it may be on the section of road that's still highlighted or
it may be on the section of road that just de-highlighted itself when you selected it doesn't
matter find the next nearest point to that bridge highlight that point and split it with those
scissors so now you have three different sections three different distinct sections of the same
road you should have one long section going off in one direction one long piece of road section
of road going off in the other direction and one relatively short section in the middle highlight
that relatively short section in the middle because that's going to be your bridge even if it's not
over your bridge that's going to be it so highlight that and click the trash can to delete it now it's
gone now you have two points two pieces of road do not intersect so select either one of those
two roads that remain if either the pieces that are left overlap the bridge select that one and
that'll that'll be the one to work with first so select that piece of road select the very last
point now don't click it but you can drag that point backwards to make the section of road shorter
until you're at the very edge of the bridge so you're not on the bridge on the piece of road as
it's about to touch the bridge and then if the other pieces on the bridge also the other piece of
road go ahead and select that road and drag it backwards until it's also off the bridge and put
right at the very edge most bridges that I've seen satellite imagery of you can see the imagery is
detailed enough you can see a distinct line where the bridge ends and their normal pavement begins
they're usually called expansion joints it's like a rubber strip that goes across the road because
the bridge is kind of expanding contract with heat the map doesn't care about that you don't have
to either right now but you can usually see them and that's usually where I like to put those points
or if it's a very narrow bridge and those points may not show up sometimes I'll put it
a line it up with the the end of the abutment if I can see the abutment as well as I can see
those expansion joints doesn't really matter not that critical what's critical to you and I right
now as we're editing this map is that each of these sections of road is either lined up right
with the edge of the bridge or off the bridge but you know somewhere down the center of the road
and if you're way off to one side of the bridge or the other rather than dragging the point closer
to the bridge just simply click it once to select it which will give you back your your fountain pen
looking cursor and your little red line that follows around and draw some points connecting back
to the road you can put these points as close together or as far apart as you deem necessary
you're in charge of this project it is going to be as accurate as you feel that it should be
and as accurate as you feel like spending time to make it so that's okay make sure that you put
the point right at the edge of the bridge right where you want your bridge road delineation to be
and then continue drawing that line across the bridge you can put points on the bridge
especially if it is in a straight bridge go ahead and do that follow the center of the bridge
if it is a straight bridge you can make your next point all the way at the other side of the bridge
but the goal here is to connect those two pieces of road back together the only reason we split
them and moved points and moved stuff around the only reason we really did that was so that we
would have two very specific points one at each end of the bridge so once you connect those back
together again click save again and it'll look to you like you have one continuous contiguous road
but if you highlight a piece of that road which you'll see is that you know you have two separate
sections of road this point I like to select one of those sections hold down my control key
and select the other section of road it's a multi select and then in my little tool bar down
to the right at the bottom right hand corner of the map I like to click that icon that looks like
a chain that is the merge ways tool what that does is ensures that the tags the complete data set
is identical for both of those sections of road so when it renders that road it's now selected as
one complete section of road and it just basically it just ensures that the data sets are identical
because all we're going to do is change one particular data point for a small section of that road
we want everything else to be the same so I like to do that okay so if you've deselected the road
make sure the road is selected now select one of the points that you've drawn or moved that's at
either end of the bridge the road will deselect the point will select and your tool bar down the
bottom right hand corner will allow you to have that split way tool again so go ahead and split
the way right at the end of the bridge and if it isn't selected still select the section of road
that includes the other end of the bridge select the point that you put at the other end of the
bridge and split it again now you should have three sections of road again you should have one
going off to one direction one going off to the other direction and one in the middle that is
exactly the size and place that you want your bridge to be all three still have identical data sets
they have exactly as many fields and exactly the same entries in those fields and we can we can
look at the fields a little bit later but they are the same they just happen to be three different
roads that but end to end the name is the same everything okay so while you have that piece selected
that is the bridge over on your your control panel on the left select the tab with the check mark in
it it'll be the details tab if you hover over the check mark it'll say details select that tab
and then go down to the entry that says bridge the pull down should say on set open that pull
down and select generic bridge unless of course you have a via duct or suspension bridge I don't
have a suspension bridge and I don't know what a via duct is so generic bridge is going to have
to be good enough for what I'm doing and it will probably be good enough for what you're doing
below that it says lanes you can select the number of lanes if you'd like it's not critical at this
point if you do decide to select the number of lanes it wants the total number of lanes not the number
in each direction so for instance you may have two lanes in one direction and only one lane and
the other direction that would be three lanes because it wants the total not individual not all roads
at all points have the same number of lanes so you wouldn't want to you wouldn't want to say it's
two in each direction because it isn't always okay but below that it'll say layer and the
it's like a slider and that slider should be in the middle on ground if you move it up one
notch it'll now be above ground which means it's above the road that it previously appeared to
intersect with and that's enough to allow a GPS device that wants you to get from one road to
the other to route you around instead of telling you to turn off of the overpass or turn on to the
overpass and driving to the bridge above me that should be enough to take care of it you can change
the surface if you like you can tell it that it's paved or if it isn't paved you can tell whatever
it is doesn't matter at this point you know I really was only concerned with showing you how to make
it a bridge because that's the part that's truly important to the navigation here once you've told
that it's a bridge once you've told it that it is slightly above ground or it may be way above
ground go ahead and put it as high as you think it needs to be that's also completely up to you
but once you've done that be sure to hit the save button in the upper left hand corner of the map
window and and save that data to the map that way when I drive through your town I'll know not to
drive off the bridge because my GPS will tell me not to drive off that bridge and I'm smart enough
to listen to my GPS no matter what it tells me so thank you very much for editing that bridge and
making your town and your this piece of your town just a little more navigable please
continue editing the map in your area it'll never be completely finished because there's always
more detail that can be added but do the things that you think are important if no one else is
editing in your area that makes you the supreme commander of map editing your neighborhood so
as the supreme map editing commander in your neighborhood go ahead and make those decisions you
don't really need to ask anyone there are certainly reference materials which you can check to make
sure that you're doing it in a standard way or in a way that's in accordance with what people
have agreed upon and you know that's certainly better than just winging it and making it up as you go
but even if you had to wing it and make it up as you go this particular editor that we're using
here potlatch has limitations on it that should keep you within you know a certain amount of boundaries
here if you'd like to add things to the map or label things in the map that you don't see already
you can do points you can do lines you can do geometric shapes you can give them all different names
that appear in that that little editor that's to the left there in that control window you can
if you deselect everything so nothing's highlighted in your map window you can scroll through that
window to the left those selections you can open some of those selections and pull them open
and if you find something that you like there like say a hospital you can drag that hospital label
onto the map and place it over hospital you can do that with anything if you want to add something
that isn't on there there are different categories go ahead and draw the thing you want to add or
select the thing that's there with a label that you want to add and down the bottom left hand corner
of that control panel you'll see simple as grayed out because that's the mode you're in and you'll
see advanced is an option click on advanced and which you'll see is all kinds of tags there's a
key in a value for each tag and you can add as many tags as you need to to describe the thing that
you've drawn or that has been drawn if one of those is incorrect go ahead and click the X to
delete it if there's something missing click the add button that's kind of down towards the bottom
of that pain and it's on the right hand side and add a key and then add a value now the keys
are what the thing is so if it's a road the key is highway and then for the type of highway the value
would you know might be residential or it might be motorway or it could be service road could be
any number of things you can make up values if you want to you can use values that already exist
and they'll auto complete if you start typing them or you can add things that don't exist if there's
not something in the list already the complete list can be found on the open street map wiki
and there's a link to it right on the page that you're on if you look over to the far left there's
a bunch of links go ahead and middle click on documentation so that opens in a new tab or if you
don't have a middle mouse button left click and select open a new tab or if you're using internet
explorer and don't have tabs go ahead and upgrade your operating system and start this
particular episode over again so that you're caught up once you open the open street map wiki tab
down down towards well I can depends when we're out on the page there's a link to map features
go ahead to that page this is going to show you all of the predefined tags that the open street map
community has agreed upon most of everything that you're going to run into is already there if you
run into a feature that isn't there feel free to submit it they would love it if you submitted a new
feature something that they didn't think of it's that's actually pretty exciting I'd be I'd
be pretty happy to know if you found something that was not a feature on the map and submitted it
and they accepted it that would be pretty awesome so you know feel free to do that go ahead and
continue to add bridges and add one way streets wherever they are proper wherever they belong in
that map because that's going to help that's going to help everybody if you want to get into some more
some more original mapping you want to add features that don't exist already tracing houses tracing
buildings parking lots they're parking ways drive-throughs I think for me one of the important
ones that you can do is to find the hospitals and draw the hospitals in draw in like the main
entrances what I usually do is just draw the hospital and add it as a building and you can label it
as a hospital but when I draw it I won't include the awning that's over the main entrance or the
emergency entrance and I'll trace those separately and you can label those as a building and then as
the type of building you can do just a roof which kind of indicates that it's an awning and then I'll
label it you can give it a name and I'll name that emergency entrance or main entrance or visitor
entrance or deliveries all of those things I think are very helpful to people pharmacies the same
thing I'll draw the pharmacy and label it with the name of the pharmacy is and then I will draw
you know separately which you can attach them they'll kind of attach but they're separate buildings
but I'll attach the awning over the drive-through lanes and I will name that you know the pharmacies
drive-through and while I may or may not have I won't swear that I've done that you said
since you know where my town is and can look at it you might you might see that I haven't done that
at the the wall greens or whatever I don't I don't remember if I have or haven't but you can add
the drive-through lanes and you can label them as one way so people know how to get into the drive-through
lane at your local pharmacy all these things I think are are pretty important to help people
get around another thing that I find tremendously fun to do is to use the satellite imagery data
and draw in roads that don't exist especially if they're private roads that you're not allowed
to drive down and these uh snotty A holes with their nose in the air that don't want you on their
property you can go ahead and map their road and they'll wonder how did someone get there they must
have trespassed but you didn't it's satellite imagery it's open to everybody and uh to help with
them for not wanting you to know where their road goes I think that's a lot of fun I have a lot of
fun doing that maybe maybe I'm a bad person for that but I really take a lot of pleasure in adding
their roads and their houses and their swimming pools to the map and letting everybody know where those
are because they don't I don't know maybe they like it maybe they don't I don't know but I have fun
something else that I do I have an application on my phone called osm tracker
capital O capital S capital M capital T and no spaces and I believe in the android market at least
there's two applications called osm tracker and one of them is garbage it's not what it appears
to be it looks like like a broken attempt at I don't know what it was but it didn't work but there
is one that is correct and that works and that is right it's in the eftroid market there's only the
one and it is the right one in the regular android play market there's where I found the two I
believe the application also exists in the iOS market I think I remember checking that on a
co-workers phone and it did work but you can use the osm tracker application to record
your current location and if you move around it will record a trace of where you have been so
I'll use that if I'm mapping out things that don't appear in the satellite imagery like trails
through the woods you can't always see a trail because there's you know foliage there's leaf
cover you can't always see like a property corner marker uh those aren't going to show because they're
small but I might mark that on my my trace because you can mark specific little things you can take
notes along the way and it will add a point to the map to your trace and it will give a little name
to that note uh things like that I do all the time um and if you if you looked at my town and
some of the surrounding towns specifically to the north uh if you followed root 16 you'd see a big
spot where I trace a lot of trails and I mark a lot of things out in the woods or all label
local businesses that I frequent or that I'm fond of or that I think might be important to people
there's a bike shop in my town and I really like the dude who runs that bike shop he's a lair as he
cracks me up and he runs a good business and I like him so his business is on my map it's on your map
it's on the open street map project uh it exists there might be another bike bike shop in town uh
I think there is but I didn't have as much fun when I went to that guy's shop so I haven't bothered
putting him on the map yet I'll get around to it when I get around to it but you know being that
I'm the editor of the map for my area that's my prerogative and you have that same right to do that
put the things on that you think are important you know we the people of earth who use open street
map trust you to make those decisions and we're not gonna second guess you and uh you know that's
that so do what you can to help the map use the map and I hope it's helpful for you but thanks for
listening to this episode thanks for sticking it through all the way for for trying to do something
that by all rights should have been in a um in a video podcast and uh for for sticking with me
and when you're done contributing to the open street map project please remember to contribute
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