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After some hassle with JOSM and generic understandings I have now started to work on it.

Yesterday, I noticed a new sign on what I knew as Carseview Drive. It proclaimed the road was "Carse View Drive". I thought I may as well change it to the new name, but perhaps this wasn't such a good idea.

The new sign was placed high on a pole, you can guess why.

I have ridden around and uploaded street names for Aranda, Ferntree Hill and Kaleen in northern Canberra. Does anyone know how to indicate a missing street sign? If I leave the name blank then there is no indication why it was missed. Any ideas?

Captured another bit of the N71 road in Ireland !

Now have Cork-Bandon-Clonakilty-Skibbereen-Bantry. And a return route
to Cork from Bantry via Gougane-Barra and Macroom....

Highway 30-330 interchange. Potlatch not loading streets at zoom 14. Will look again on another day.

Added top layer of parking in Galeria Dominikańska. Looks ugly?

The United Nations has a working group that addresses how to romanize place names written in another character system. This might be of interest for those adding to openstreetmap in a non-roman character system.

http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/

Just got back from Japan, and have been doing some mapping on the Tokyo area, as well as some railway lines further afield, including Kakunodate, Matsumoto, Nagano and Mito. (the joys of tourist rail passes!)

I think Tokyo is going to be extremely difficult to map without better aerial photos - my GPS was not a happy bunny with all those tall buildings around.

The other thing is that with so many multi-layered roads, it's really difficult to see how a 2D map is going to present enough information about what's going on! Perhaps we need some partial transparency rendering hint tags?!

Those Japanese characters are hard work too! I have a massive stash of photos of signs that I need to go through, filling out the tags with kanji and hiragana, at the moment many are just English! :(

I've started mapping the center of Bordeaux with potlach. It is quite a long work as streets have recently changed du to the tram work.

I don't know why my changes haven't been replicated on mapnik but just on osmarenderer.

Couple of Potlatch issues have cropped up at the same time (different issues, same cause but I won't bore you with the details) which you may encounter. Should be fixed this evening, apologies for the hassle.

Following a discussion with jburgess and artem on IRC, I started fixing up Leipzig's trams where a single way has two railway and highway tags (instead of two ways reusing the same nodes). Apart from maintaing these ways (i.e., does a maxspeed tag also apply to the tram? Probably not!), it was also causing rendering issues in Mapnik (see https://trac.mapnik.org/ticket/66).

I started with all the secondary roads, and it seems to have worked well (I kept an original OSM file of the area just in case). The ways with highway=secondary retain all the other tags which might be on there, while the ways with the railway=tram tag have just this and possibly a bridge tag.

The procedure was taking the OSM file and treat it with some Emacs keyboard macros and search and replace etc. (to assign negative ids to the new ways), and with JOSMs search feature.

If the renderers are happy, I will repeat the process with the other highway types in the next few days.

Comments welcome.

The traces taken around Mullumbimby, and down through Rosebank, Goonengerry, Binna Burra, Federal and Eltham have been mapped. Some of the traces around Eureka and Federal were taken with my Edge 301 on the cycle trip north, and so are not as accurate as the rest. The roads really should be driven over again.

Most of the roads have only been driven one way, and only once, so more traces would be useful. That won't happen (by me) until next Christmas, but maybe Rosscoe can oblige :)

Finishing some tracked but yet unmaped roads. One nice part here.

Uploaded, 2008 England Peak district - test run of GlobalSat DG100.

Car has a hardwired (powered from the car stereo 12V - so it comes on when the car is running) GPS data logger based on the DGPS-XM4 Model GPS DataLogger ( http://homepages.tig.com.au/~robk/ ) fed from a Garmin Serial WAAS mouse embedded under the plastic trim of the dash, out of sight.

Another DGPS-XM4 attached to a handheld garmin marine GPS again with WAAS for walking, however enabling serial NMEA output cuts down the GPS battery life to 8 hours (not good for long walks or camping).

Answer, replace the DGPS-XM4 and serial cable with something smaller, lighter with its own batteries. So a test of the GlobalSat DG100. First results look good!

This week, I've embarked on a project in conjunction with OSM user PeterIto, in mapping the Longendale Valley.

I've started with the largest town in the area - Royston Vasey. Well, the real name is, of course, Hadfield, but the Derbyshire town's claim to fame was that it was the set for the BBC comedy series, the "League of Gentlemen".

It's mostly done after a couple of days mapping, apart from a bit in the North and East, and a couple of other bits to fill in here and there.

On my way back from getting some lunch today I tried out my new iPod Touch as a tool for quickly taking notes of roads that I passed (all of which had already been skeleton-mapped using the Yahoo imagery). The handy little Notes application allowed me to tap out the street names as I passed them so I could enter them onto the map when I got back home.

Benefits:
- Small and very portable
- Nice on-screen touch keyboard for taking quick notes

Constraints:
- Spell checker corrects things automatically, which doesn't work well for street names and abbreviations
- No direct access to OpenStreetMap for immediate editing
- Easy to walk into lamp posts or trip over broken paving stones
- Prime target for thieves

I think I'll stick to the traditional pen and paper for now, at least then I can draw little sketches to aid my memory as well as just taking notes of street names.

Added a lot of small streets in Old Town.
Added three parts of City Moat.

I'm working on a more basic version of this for OSM (first time I've ever done anything AJAXy - lawks). Am probably going to need some help from a hardcore OpenLayers junkie though...