Another trip into the wolds

The lovely weather tempted us out into the Wolds again. This time around Millington and Huggate. Last time we were in the area a few days ago we got talking to a guy with an expensive HD camera trying to film Red Kites. Today we saw him again. Last time we had rather too long a conversation which seemed mainly to convey just how money he has and actually convinced me that he has more money than sense. So this time we stopped somewhere else to have a drink and were pleased to see and hear a willow warbler.

The roads in the Wolds have very few name boards, even in the small villages. We found a few new, small residential roads that we had either missed before or were new. One thing I did see, which is worth following up on another visit, is the newly signed National Cycle Network trails. I understand that some of the existing NCN trails are having some sections renumbered where there are optional or alternative routes. This however is a newly designated route which I have yet to follow properly.

One of the roads that show up on the OS Locator tiles was Cobdale Lane. Like most of the roads is the area I wasn't expecting to find an hint of the road name, but I was wrong. The name started at a bend in the road and a pleasant cottage was set on the dip and turn in the road. The name of the cottage was Cobdale Cottage. A few hundred metres futher down the road there was Cobdale Farm too. Maybe the road name is Cobdale Lane as suggested. 

Lovely day in the wolds

The rolling hills of the Yorkshire Wolds is close to home and is a constant draw when I want to fill my lungs with fresh air. We went out today for a simple ride out, but I couldn't resist checking a few things for OSM. There's a roundabout near Pocklington that is being built - the road now used the roundabout in part at least. There was a small road that has altered in Shiptonthorpe. The main event today though was the scenery bathed in sunshine. It was about 21°C which is certainly warm for mid April.

We looked out for birds at the spot pictured as we enjoyed some tea. We saw distant red kites and buzzards. I heard a green woodpecker a few times, but it remained stubbornly hidden. I think I'll be back, if only to catch a glimpse of that woodpecker.

More villages and lint chasing

A couple of years ago we added what we thought was the last road to OSM within the boundary of Hull. That turned out to be a bit optimistic, but fairly close to the truth. We have taken much longer to move towards completion of the East Riding of Yorkshire. There is a still a long way to go, with towns like Bridlington and Hornsea still requiring a bit of work and a few largish villages still needing attention. The countryside is pleasant and now the spring is arriving with blackthorn hedges bursting into better shows of flower than I remember for many years.

Recently we have surveyed Beeford and Brandsburton. Both were easy to do, but the difference in the ambiance in each village was marked. Beeford was pleasant, Brandsburton was distinctly odd. The list of villages needing their roads and basic facilities mapping in East Yorkshire is now probably about 40, and some are tiny needing only a brief, passing visit. There are still surprises though. We found a secondary road heading out of Beeford which was not mapped. I need to check if there are any more that need adding in the county.

The process of checking roads has been assisted by the release of Ordnance Survey's Locator data. This defines a bounding rectangle and centroid for every named road in the UK. This has proved particularly useful in settlements since it shows up roads that are newly added in an area since it was surveyed. To get this I use the highly useful transparent tiles that ITO World produce. I added them to my own overlay, which now also includes postcodes at high enough zoom levels. The OS Locator data is also available in OS Locator Musical Chairs.

Like all lint tools there are some drawbacks, the main one being that people are tempted to just use the name from the OS Locator dataset rather than going out to check what is really there. On many country roads there are no name boards and OS Locator is usually right, but even so I prefer to go and look before using the OS name. At this time of year the ride out is always worth it.

Lint tool providers have a duty, in my mind, to be as impartial as possible. They can wield quite a lot of power in the way they chose to flag up errors. Many people quickly adopt the scheme as the standard way to tag and there is a flurry of activity to reduce the 'errors' for their area.  Recently there has been some discussion about the way national speed limits are tagged. I strongly believe that tagging schemes should be designed to assist the surveyors and mappers, but some seem to think that the consumers of data should be treated preferentially over mappers. Here's why I don't agree:

• There are never enough mappers in an area. Attracting them and keeping them is hard. An overly complex tagging scheme means they will quickly get fed up. "All that just to add a speed limit? No thanks."
• Complex schemes mean mappers make mistakes. These are then likely to be 'fixed' by some bot or mass edit. These are not done by mappers who have visited so surveyed data can be lost or changed.
• Mappers must use a tag over and over again, each time they encounter the thing that needs tagging. Complex schemes means adding many tags for one object every time you see it which increases the mapper's workload.
• Programmers write code to recognise and use a tagging scheme once. The map or analysis or whatever that they produce can then be run over and over again with little or no effort, consuming the tags that mappers took hours to add.
• Retrospectively increasing the complexity of tagging for a commonly encountered object, like a speed limit, means you are asking people to resurvey huge lengths of road. If you don't need a resurvey then the increased complexity is not needed as it can be inferred some other way in a program.

One thing I have noticed and has been commented upon elsewhere is that many of the people suggesting that data consumers need this tag or that tag to make sense of the data have never actually tried to used the data in a program. They have no idea what is really involved and what techniques can be applied to get around any problem.

Fairy land

Another string of pronouncements have been made on the Talk mailing list by the ODbL deniers about why OSM should not accept the new licence and contributor terms. Grant despairingly wonders why they should come to these conclusions.

People come to these conclusions because it suits their agenda, not because of the facts. Why let a carefully written licence and all of the discussions that have gone before get in the way of a good conspiracy theory? The world is full of conspiracy theorists and FUD mongers; the fact that OSM attracts them simply shows the project is big enough to attract the cranks as well as the serious.

Some people will always glaze over when confronted with a big blob of words, whether that's a licence agreement or something more important like an explanation of how dangerous radiation is. They then seem to go off into fairy land, inventing fearful scenarios and outcomes that are wrong.  Doing thought-experiments is a great way to test the limits of a licence, but you have to keep checking that you have not exceeded the bounds defined by the licence otherwise you end up in fairy land.

I fully and wholly respect anyone who has an objection to the licence change and who wants to use the CC-BY-SA licence as it is, I just haven't been convinced by their arguments. What I don't respect is the underhand way some people undermine the licence change process by spreading FUD and untruths about what it means and the way the project will work when the change is complete.I support the change to ODbL. I believe it will benefit OSM, but even ODbL is not powerful enough to drag everyone out of fairy land.

HU14

We've been working on addressing close to home. Bing aerial imagery came along and I realised that although Bing is not as good here as elsewhere, it is just about good enough to trace buildings. I traced a few buildings and then took the existing addressing and applied it to buildings. It was much better, so we gathered the remaining addresses for Swanland. I then tried to gather all the addresses for nearby Melton in a day (and didn't quite manage it). Then Blackadder announced he had completed a whole postcode, and I realised that I was more than halfway through HU14, so I just had to polish off North Ferriby. Just! What was I thinking about.

I decided to try Blackadder's scheme of drawing the gardens too. That means working out where the boundaries of private gardens are. This is harder to work out than it may seem. Some are masked by trees, some of the photography is a bit blurry and so on. Then there's the age of the photography - about ten years old. A lot has changed in ten years. I have had to use OS StreetView for a few areas where new housing has been built since the Bing photos were taken. I have tried to represent the differences between hedges, fences and walls as best as I could. I tried to take note of hedges or fences as we wandered around gathering the addresses.  My verdict on drawing gardens: DON'T. It is a pain and makes the difficult job a lot harder.

Gathering the addresses seems a bit easier, it's probably just that we can do it on auto-pilot. I draw the buildings as blanks before we gather the addresses, we can then write on the real addresses as we go round and sketch in any additions. It is still a lot of work. You can see more here.

I'm not doing any more addressing for a while, but I think I will do some more again. The prospect of gathering the addressing for the whole of Hull is overwhelming and would take years.

Naming country roads

A lovely day tempted us out, first to do some jobs on the allotment, then trying to resolve a few names on the country roads. We found a couple of small residential roads missed on the first pass. We found two war memorials, a small church, some allotments and a village hall previously missed too.

Before we went out I spotted something we've seen before, or so I thought. There looked like a road name on OS locator that looked like it was really the name of a farm. There is a road called Highgate heading west out of Cherry Burton, which is well signed. OS Locator shows a small section of road called "Dunken Hill Highgate". I expected to find a farm called Dunken Hill and that the same mistake as we have seen before, that is an address has somehow become treated as a road name.

We found the farm called Dunken Hill, exactly as expected, but when I got home I looked at OS StreetView. It shows the road name as Dunken Hill (without the Highgate bit). It shows the farm name as Dunkenhill Farm. There is also a nearby area also labelled as Dunken Hill and the road crosses part of the edge of it. There were no signs, but I decided to accept the OS StreetView name. The OS Locator still seemed muddled and being different from OS StreetView is something that happens. If anyone knows better I will accept their wisdom or knowledge.

I'm not actually too bothered about some of these country road names, the roads are there, there are no houses or businesses on many of them except farms and they have names of their own. Many country roads have no name boards, so using the name to navigate isn't actually possible on the ground. Making sure the missing roads are added is much, much more useful, but hunting down road names can be an excuse for a pleasant ride out.

Shared building, two streets

I have been gathering addresses and other detailed information for the villages that make up the postcode area HU14 - more of that soon. One thing I noticed in a few places is where a building that makes up a semi-detached house is on the corner of two streets and each house is on a different street. Having thought about it there is no real reason why both houses in a semi-detached should be on the same street, I just expected that they would be.

The highlighted houses in the picture are especially confusing because their numbers are so close, but one is on Riverview Avenue and the other on Southfield Drive.