Today, I went on a car trip in an area where I knew that some roads needed surveying. But how could I find them easily in the real world?

I already use Navit for navigation, so I looked into what could be done with that. Quite a lot, it turned out.

In the following, all command examples are for the Linux commandline. Macs should have the same commands available. On windows, try running them in a Cygwin shell. For all three, you may have to install the commands “xsltproc” and “wget” from the relevant package repositores.

Creating Data

First of all, we need to get a list of all the places we want to survey.

That can be done using the XAPI.

Getting Relevant Data

In Denmark, we have imported all addresses from the official register. And we have tools to find addresses which do not have roads with the same name nearby. When we discover a row of adresses, and nothing is on the aerial photos (most of them are from 2005), we sometimes simply draw a way along the address nodes and tag it as highway=proposed, source=fantasy.

So let’s look for ways with tag source=fantasy:

wget -O fantasy.osm 'http://www.overpass-api.de/api/xapi?way[source=fantasy][bbox=11.56,54.86,12.57,55.32]'

This will find all ways with the source=fantasy in the southern Sjælland in Denmark and save them to the file “fantasy.osm”. You would want to change the coordinates to those for the area you is interested in. The sequence is left, bottom, right, top boundaries.

Similarly, this will find all ways that have a “fixme” tag at all:

wget -O fixme.osm 'http://www.overpass-api.de/api/xapi?way[fixme=*][bbox=11.56,54.86,12.57,55.32]'

Unfortunately, we do not have a tag that specificly says that someone needs to survey on site - yet. I think I will suggest fixme:survey for this.

Converting to POIs

… See full entry