Contributing Advent 2: Opal Mews
Although OpenStreetMap in the United Kingdom, and specially in London, has come along very far, it is going to be nearly impossible to keep things up-to-date. We use a few external datasets to compare against to check for completion, and one of those is OS Locator. The fine folk at ITO World have created a comparison algorithm between OpenStreetMap and OS Locator, which they expose through a summary per area and a tile-layer as a visual aid.
I usually have to travel quite a bit from home to actually see a discrepancy, but since the update to the latest data set I actually found one very close to home: Opal Mews. On the site the discrepancy looked like:
In this case, the tag is simply missing on the way. However instead of adding the data directly from OS Locator, a survey is required. In some cases, the data in OS Locator is actually wrong, even though it's supposed to be an official source. So I went past the road, checked whether the name "Opal Mews" was visible, and added the name to OpenStreetMap: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/19136631
Now ITO World's OSM analysis does not have it listed as an inconsistency anymore:
One down, 18 thousand to go!
Comments
Great post! Just spotted one near my house will check it out tonight.
I think your changeset link is wrong. You added the street name in Changeset #19136631, not in #19099382.
@Edward: Thanks! I've fixed it.
Yes, it's very useful. I remember surveying one area of London because the OS Locator highlighted lots of discrepancies. It turned out that OS was wrong about most of them!
It was an area with a completely unpredictable pattern of apostrophes: "St Theobalds" vs "St Theobald's" etc. Sometimes the ground survey found an apostrophe where OS had none; sometimes the reverse. In those cases, I think you can also use the "not:name" tag to indicate that it definitely isn't what OS might think...
Life Line
Updated 3 restaurants
I walked 3.1km in 29m25s
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I walked 5.4km in 55m28s
Updated a restaurant; Confirmed a hotel
I walked 6.3km in 1h12m59s
Paraphrasing opening keynote speaker at ConFoo: "Should we go back to the waterfall method of writing massive specs upfront to feed to AI coding agents?"
I walked 1.6km in 17m29s
I walked 2.1km in 17m44s
Updated a pub
I walked 2.6km in 26m41s
Merged pull request #1065
Comparison whether class is userland or internal used the wrong macro
PHP 8.6: zend_enum.h now mixes code with declarations
PHP 8.6: Argument names are now stored as zend_strings
Updated a bench and a waste_basket
I walked 8.3km in 1h25m37s
Created a recycling
I walked 10.5km in 1h46m57s
An interesting journey in story form, showing how English changed over time.
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
A much better writer than I is summing up perfectly why I have such disdain for Generative AI/LLMs.
https://jonn.substack.com/p/so-why-do-i-feel-so-angry-about-this
Created a waste_basket; Updated a waste_basket; Deleted a bench
Created a bench; Updated 7 benches and a gate; Deleted 2 benches and a gate
Created 10 benches and 2 waste_baskets; Updated an information


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