DfT Cycling Data 2011
The project is being coordinated by CycleStreets and Gravitystorm.
We're live! Head on over to the application at http://gravitystorm.dev.openstreetmap.org/cnxc-app/ and get started - for real! You can also see the progress of each area on the Snapshot server.
Contents |
Background
The DfT commissioned survey work in various cities around the UK for their online journey planner. In 2011 they released the results of the surveys as Open Data, in a format based on Ordnance Survey ITN data - unsuitable for use with OSM. However, in addition, they have funded work to convert the survey data to be based on OSM geometries suitable for incorporation.
The kinds of things surveyed include cycle routes, cycle parking, cycle lanes and their widths, surfaces widths and lighting conditions of cycleable paths, and so on.
In the UK wide areas of the cycling infrastructure have been mapped, often more recently than the data from the DfT. Also, with the development of Vector Background layers in Potlatch 2, there was an opportunity to create an improved process for dealing with external datasets.
Further background information is available in blogs and on the mailing lists.
- Initial announcement of the project
- Update on the progress of the tool
- Talk-gb thread on the project
The Data
As of March 2012, approximately 1/3 of the areas covered by the data have been processed. You can see which areas are available, and how much progress has been made with dealing with them, on the server. We're waiting on the rest of the data arriving, and we'll upload each as soon as they arrive.
Merging into OpenStreetMap
When it comes to editing, we've set up a copy of potlatch2 with all the layers preloaded - so no configuration required. You can use this at http://gravitystorm.dev.openstreetmap.org/cnxc-app/
The merging process works as follows:
- Click 'Map style' > 'Wireframe' to make things much easier to work with.
- The background data is highlighted either orange (needs attention) or blue (already processed).
- Click a background feature to select it.
- Ctrl+click (or cmd+click on a Mac keyboard) the relevant OSM feature to see a side-by-side comparison of the tags.
You can now review the tags, copy whichever ones are relevant, and mark the background features as complete if there's no more information to reconcile.
Feedback on the data
We would really welcome feedback as to any errors you spot in the data conversion. The aim is that the data is pre-processed and snapped to the OSM geometry as effectively as possible, so that merging is merely a case of manual confirmation of each attribute according to your local knowledge.
The Software
A number of software components are used to make all this work
- Potlatch 2 is used as the editor, and can load data from both OSM and the DfT data. Merging is done with new merging panels. The splash pages, vector configuration file and other resources are available on github
- Snapshot Server is used to serve the DfT data for each user, saving them from having to load the whole country at a time
- Some scripts are used for loading data in and out of the server. These use Osmosis to read/write between XML and Postgres.
License
The (original, unprocessed) data is released under the Open Government License: Official letter from the DfT
The data on the snapshot server has had additional transformations for the purposes of merging into OSM, namely being snapped against OpenStreetMap geometry and the Bing imagery for additional alignment.
Feedback
Feel free to contact Gravitystorm with any feedback you have. Did you figure out how to use the tool? Did you manage to merge some data? What doesn't work? How could the tool be improved?
If you have local knowledge of the areas in question, it would be great to hear back from you on the datasets themselves - do they match reality? Are the tags appropriate?
