Talk:Getting Involved
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Department of Transportation database
The US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration appears to have databases of highways and other geographic data in computer-readable form for the United States and Mexico:
Would it be a good idea to try to import this information? --68.49.21.68
Standards and Conventions
I'd like to document some useful guidance about standards and conventions. Maybe this is premature, but for newbies (like myself) its difficult to know whether my contributions are worthwhile if I don't have something to measure then against. 80n 12:17, 2 Dec 2005 (GMT)
- I've now moved all this to the embryonic documentation page. 80n 17:08, 3 Dec 2005 (GMT)
Naming Conventions
- Street names: Which is preferred? Church Street or Church street or Church st.
This is probably the fully correct name, "Church Street", as displayed on street name signs. It can then be left down to client software to abbreviate according to a standard set of abbreviations should it be required to fit the name into a smaller space than the full name can fit. Likewise, when street names are entered in an abbreviated form, I suggest that the name gets expanded if it's unambigous to the full name.
- Abbreviations. Should there be a standard list of abbreviations? St=Street or Saint?
Yes, probably, but each abbreviation needs to define if it's valid at the beginning, middle, or end of a name. We would also need to cater for non-English abbreviations In Regexp terms,
- \sSt$ Street
- \sRd$ Road
- \sStr$ Straße
- ^St\s Saint
- ^Lwr\s Lower
- ^Upr\s Upper
- ^Hl\s Heol
Drawing Guidelines
- Should dual-carriageways always be drawn as two paths?
- If the dual carriageway is such that at any junction the separation is such that it prevents any possible turning, it needs to be two paths.
- How do you draw a roundabout? Four points, eight points?
- Intersections and interchanges - how much detail
- Accuracy. How do you judge and or indicate the accuracy? How accurate is good enough? Is a rough approximation better than nothing (ie inaccurate roads get refined the way wikipedia articles do).
- Is it constructive/helpful to mark a road that you know is roughly in the right place but dont have any supporting GPS data?
- Landmarks, footpaths, etc?
- How do you indicate that one road passes over or under another?
- If a road is made up of several/many segments, how often should it be labelled with its name? eg M25 - once between each junction? Once on each carriageway (M25 Clockwise, M25 Anti-clockwise)?
- once we've got the "street is composed of many line segments", this doesn't matter that much, as you'd label the street, not the segments. Until that time, we should attempt to label each end of the street where it meets a junction. Where a road changes name without a junction, label both sides of the change.
Topology
- Is correct topology more or less important than accurate location?
- If a road is a dual carriageway it should be show as two lines
- If a road has a small traffic island (eg at the approach to a large roundabout) should this be represented as a triangle or not? How big should it be before it should be drawn?
- Should mini-roundabouts (comprising of just white paint on the road) be drawn as a roundabout?
- Once the applet and WMS server can label and render individual nodes with a "roundabout" tag, it can just be an appropriately labelled node. There should be no need to draw a complicated structure where none exists in reality.
- Where a side road connects to a main road should there be a node with three lines connected to it or should the main road be a continuous unbroken line and the side road just ending at but not connected to a node that is part of the main road?
- If a road is can be clearly made out from the aerial photo, but there are also a few GPS tracks, which should be considered to be the more accurate?
- Should roads be drawn based solely on the aerial photo if there are no GPS track points?
- If you have permission to freely derive work from the aerial photo, and if the photo is up-to-date, that should be fine. Landsat is not really sufficient accuracy for this in towns.
Etiquette
- I see some yellow dots - I know the area - should I connect them up?
- Yes. Quite a few track logs are from people who don't actively edit the maps. If you detect someone else editing in the vicinity at that time, probably best leave it to them.
- Should every road be given a name?
- Not unless there is no real-world consensus of a name. You can't just call a street "Bob Street" if no street signs say as such, and if none of the locals know of it as "Bob Street", Lists of street names are usually available from the local authority. If it's not there, and you have never personally been there and seen a street sign, or have multiple other confirmed sources, best leave them blank.
- Actually, what I meant was, if you mark up a road on the map, should you try to label it with a name or is it OK to leave it out and let someone else enter the name later. There are a lot of roads marked in central London that don't have any names attached. Its going to be a tedious and painstaking task to go through them all. But on the other hand is there any point in adding names until the key/value system and the route system are in place? 80n 20:07, 3 Dec 2005 (GMT)
- Not unless there is no real-world consensus of a name. You can't just call a street "Bob Street" if no street signs say as such, and if none of the locals know of it as "Bob Street", Lists of street names are usually available from the local authority. If it's not there, and you have never personally been there and seen a street sign, or have multiple other confirmed sources, best leave them blank.
Play Area
There should be a designated play area where new users can play and practice their drawing skills before getting to work on real parts of the world.
- Where? Antarctica? The Moon? A separate database?
- It would need to be cleared down/reset on a regular basis
- It should contain some GPS tracks that users can play join the dots with
Examples
It would be nice to have an area where standard examples can be created and displayed. I'd like to be able to see what a well drawn roundabout, motorway intersection, etc look like.
- It's probably possible to combine this with Play Area above, perhaps taking some decent data from a well mapped area, reviewing it for "good practice" etc then dumping it in the middle of the atlantic or similar.
Newby needs help
Hello. I've just learned about this site from Wikipedia, and I really appreciate the idea of free maps. I would like to help. I've got Mio PDA with tomtom software, but (here comes VERY stupied question), I really can not find out how can I turn the tracklog mode on! (no RTFM please, it doesn't help). In godsname, how can I turn this ting on? Excuse me for stupied question in the wrong place. Vitalyzator 19:22, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- Its very possible that the TomTom software will not allow you to create a tracklog. If it does it is also likley to "snap" to the nearest street in the navigation software so dont use that anyway. All is not lost though. Most PDA's will let you run other software as well as the navigation software. To do this you need a serial port splitter (software) to enable two bits of software to use the port the GPS receiver connects to. I use GPS Gate to do this. GPS Gate also contains logging software, or you can obtain another piece of software to do the job seperately. Check my page for some more hints on using a PDA, also Clive has some on his page related to using a TomTom. Blackadder 21:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC).
- Thanks for advice. I've already dgot some explanation from Cimm here (in Dutch), but you explanation is quite usefull, too. I will try to fix software problems in the week-end, when I'll have more time. Hope I'll be able to participare OM acively soon. Vitalyzator 23:33, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Data points.
How far apart should the data points be? 1 meter? 10 meters?
If you have a hundred people give you points that are accurate to 10 meters and one person that can give you data that is accurate to a few centimeters how do you know which data is which?
Am I wasting my money buying a high sensitivity receiver? --Korea 07:13, 20 June 2007 (BST)
'Down Your Way' section
The 'Down Your Way' section which was added at the top of this page... It's rather err... "fun" -- Harry Wood 17:14, 26 October 2007 (BST)
