OpenStreetMap gets new, easier to use in-browser editor | Hacker News Reader

OpenStreetMap gets new, easier to use in-browser editor

blog.openstreetmap.org

209 pointsjboynyc33 comments

iD developer here. I did a series of posts on the architecture of iD that folks here might find interesting:

http://www.mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/02/26/id-architecture-part... http://www.mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/02/27/id-architecture-part... http://www.mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/02/28/id-architecture-part...

I've been following iD development on github (https://github.com/systemed/iD/) since last year, and I honestly think that reading through its source is the single best case study I've come across for application development with D3. It's pretty phenomenal. Perhaps I'm a bit biased since I work on map stuff as well, but I think pretty much anyone thinking about using D3 to build anything larger than one-off visualizations would do well to see how it's put to use in iD.

Hats off to you guys, great work!

Just added my first changes through iD, I didn't expect something so simple, functional and ergonomic. Little details like contextual ~pie-menus, geometric operation suggestion for instance segment midpoint as a trigger for insertion, very pretty. Did you work on modeling tools prior to that ?

Thank you for your great work. You just gave me a new hobby!

The iD editor is really slick. Glad to see this is becoming the default editor on openstreetmap.org. It deserves it.

For the impatient, here is what it looks like: http://blog.openstreetmap.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/id_...

Unrelated .... but did you create that animated gif on a mac? Which tool did you use?

I think that's the PR gif that the OSM blog posted a while ago when first announcing iD.

@dbaupp is correct, I didn't make the gif. If I had to guess though I would say that photoshop can probably convert video files to gifs. Not sure.

FWIW...

    $ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 30 -f image2 frame-%5d.jpg
    $ gm convert -delay 20 -loop 0 frame-*.jpg output.gif

Ffmpeg is probably able to convert a video directly into gif, but I couldn't get it to work from a single Google search.

Since I obviously have some OSM developers in the room, can somebody point me to the right place to query against OSM mapping data? That is, if I want to get all one-way streets and stop-lights within my area, how do I do that? I've tried the various tools that send you a subset of the map (they don't seem to work) and the "download the whole OSM map and play with the XML" seems like a good way to choke on the data... Anybody got pointers?

A query like "one-way streets and stop-lights within my area" is perfect for the Overpass API: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API

The best UI for Overpass is http://overpass-turbo.eu/

Overpass is great: All hospitals in Western Cape of South Africa: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/on

Else there are more manageable regional extracts of OpenStreetMap XML: http://download.geofabrik.de/

If you're wanting to query the data importing into PostGIS is a fairly straightforward way to do it. And you don't have to download the whole planet in one go.

+1 to this. Metro Extracts: http://metro.teczno.com/ along with osm2pgsql: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql is the way to go.

Be aware that those extracts are squares around the cities - they're not exact city border outlines. This means that you can't just use the data without concern for whether the things you're gathering are actually within the city or not.

I haven't found a very simple way to get everything within exact city borders, yet. This is the process I've been going with so far: https://github.com/JamesChevalier/cities#cities

That is a very useful resource; thank you.

Some cities make shapefiles available for urban growth boundaries and city limits. It's worth enquiring. But be aware that some cities city limits are not simple polygons; depending on local ordinances you can see islands, internal voids and peninsulas attached with zero width stems.

True! Like Houston, TX ... which looks a little like the flying spaghetti monster ... http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=3675...

The poly files that you get from the process outlined in the readme file will include islands/voids. It's pretty cool.

Well remember OSM is an international project, so trying to find one definition of "city" and "border of a city" is hard. Some places (like USA) seem to use "city" as a hard solid thing, other places (eg UK / ireland) don't.

Yeah - OSM goes a long way in categorizing different levels of "area in which people live" based on population density. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place

Except that the place tag isn't always based on population size. In some places, (e.g. UK), a common cultural definition of a "city" is archaic, and depends if the place has a Cathedral and/or charter from the monarch.

I give you the "city" of St. David's: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/3216768 It's in Wales, UK, and is tagged as "place=city". It's a small town of ~2,000 people. It has a charter from the monarch, and a cathedral. The "note" tag in OSM says: "the "city" is on paper, what's on the ground is a small town".

Humanity is complicated. :)

heh, true!

I've been playing with place names & http://overpass-turbo.eu/ ... I seem to be getting the best results with "city|hamlet|metropolis|town|village", although some states like Alaska & Hawaii still don't return much with this scope.

In Alaska, a lot of places are labeled as County. In Hawaii, a lot of places are labeled as Other.

UK isn't the only place with weird "cities".

Greenhorn, Oregon is designated as a city but has a 2010 census population of zero. Though now unicorporated, Tenny, Minnesota, was a city and had a peak population of 180 people in 1910 but now is down to 5 (2010 census).

A friend of mine has recently started a service for providing processed OSM data based on user's requirements for a small fee. Check it out - http://opencagedata.com/

I've been speaking to them a bit about city-specific data, and they've been incredibly helpful & knowledgable.

Why am I not surprised that you're interested in seeing data on one-way streets in your area? :)

I've been meaning to dig more deeply into OSM for a while now, and this may be the kick I need to do it.

Note that this is partially a result of the Knight Foundation grant to Development Seed that was reported a couple of years ago. http://www.mapbox.com/blog/knight-invests-openstreetmap/

Nice work!

Nice. In the older editors, I always had trouble figuring out how to categorize points of interest. For example making a node a restaurant/bank/etc was always a hit or miss operation. Most of them wouldn't stick, if they even had one that made sense. I hope that's been fixed.

Sure has.

iD has large number of built in presets and also transparently queries http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/ for the more eccentric stuff.

BTW if anyone is looking for an area to dive in, please feel free to help me map Andhra Pradesh http://freyfogle.tumblr.com/post/57007174879/mapping-andhra-...

Is it easy to add a roundabout yet? I've wanted to make a whole bunch of improvements to OSM and keep getting stuck when trying to turn an intersection into a roundabout.

You need to draw a circle and mark it one way, and tag it junction=roundabout

You don't need to mark it oneway: that's implicit in the junction=roundabout tag.

And then do I have to bisect the existing roads and rejoin them to the circle somehow?

Why can't I just change an intersection into a roundabout, perhaps with a slider to select the diameter?

Surely from a metadata point of view it makes more sense to store the describable facts rather than a bunch of road segments that emulate a circle.

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