Thursday 24 March 2011

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.

1 comment:

Tom Chance said...

I'm glad you warn against doing gardens, I'm taking long enough to get the basic building outlines in for the whole of Southwark (London) and addressing my local area:

http://osm.org/go/euuvChs0

I'm also not sure of the point of entering such close detail imprecisely as though we might hope to compete with OS MasterMap, although I'm not one to knock extra detail if someone is interested.