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Guys, Newbie here..

Loaded up my tracks from laos.. All good. Go to Potlatch and load the specific track up, which show light blue.. No other tracks as this is very mote loas.. The village now shows.. but the war theatre name LIMA 36 doesn't.

I am a bit lost next.. What and how do I make the track acceptable to be uploaded in OSM.. I click and there is an option to add road etc.. which I select dirt..

Do I really have to trace the entire GPS track surely there is an easier way to say follow the blue overlay either to the end of part way through.. In this case the road is the same all the way through the mountains to LIMA 36.

Thanks in advance for any help.

asked 20 May '12, 07:38

brian_bkk's gravatar image

brian_bkk
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converted to question 20 May '12, 12:06

SomeoneElse's gravatar image

SomeoneElse ♦
36.9k71370866

Thanks for all the detailed answers. I usually clean up my GPX files before hand, so should be good to upload.

The LIMA 36 site at the end of the track is quite important as this is the only reason why people would go there.. It is an old Air America landing strip 1,000 metres above sea level.

When I zoom in.. I see the village name that I added before the site.. but just the end of the trail, no reference to LIMA 36.. May be I am missing something in what you said.. sorry about that.. having a learning curve this week with editing GPS files and posting to OSM.

When I view / edit my traces LIMA 36 shows, but does not show on the standard OSM map.. I selected the icon and dragged it to where the landing strip is.

Cheers Brian

(20 May '12, 15:44) brian_bkk
1

Some of the U.S. battlegrounds that do get rendered include an additional tag: tourism=attraction. I don't know if that's appropriate here (or anywhere, for that matter), but I tried it on your node and it now shows--albeit with no special icon indicating that the site is indeed a battlefield. This is experimental, so please edit as you see fit. Also: Unless the track is literally named "Dirt Road", you shouldn't name it that. If the track has no name, no "name=*" tag is needed.

(20 May '12, 20:15) barte

Thank you.. I can now see LIMA 36 :-)

The step above about vector file loading is a god send.. Nice and easy to delete the data where there is already a track and then get the new path in place.. doesn't take much time at all.. Thank you.

Sorry to ask so many questions.. I have now completed a major road all the way to the Vietnam border. I followed the same road type etc up to where the road ended and my addtion started.

What is strange is.. When I go to OSM and look. I can see the original road clearly.. but to view the new complete road I added I have to zoom right in..

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=14.651&lon=107.313&zoom=11&layers=M

Thank you for your help.. Once I get past all these questions I have a lot of roads / trails and tracks for Laos to upload..

Cheers Brian

(21 May '12, 11:22) brian_bkk
1

Yes - that's normal. Not everything is rendered on the map immediately. If you right-click on a tile and add "/status" to the URL you can see when it was last re-rendered. One near you is:

http://a.tile.openstreetmap.org/12/3267/1878.png/status

and says: Tile is clean. Last rendered at Tue May 08 12:32:47 2012

You can request a re-render by adding "/dirty" to the URL:

a.tile.openstreetmap.org/12/3267/1878.png/dirty Tile submitted for rendering

I've just done this, and status for that tile now says:

Tile is clean. Last rendered at Mon May 21 11:41:35 2012

(21 May '12, 11:43) SomeoneElse ♦

The reason why you'd normally "trace the entire GPS track" is so that where there's more than one GPS track (each of which contains some inaccuracy) you can average them and draw a track down the middle (and if there's background imagery available, take that into account too).

None of this applies in your case, so you'll just want to convert the track to a way, as follows:

  • Edit the GPS track as you normally would.
  • Wait for your blue trace to appear
  • alt-click on your GPS track to convert it to a way
  • You'll probably also want to press "y" to simplify the resulting way to use fewer nodes
  • add whatever highway tags are appropriate

You'll still need to check the results manually - any "rat's nests" in the track that occurred when you stopped will need to be removed, and you'll need to ensure that your new way doesn't duplicate any other way for any part of its length (which would happen if you went down the same route twice). Also, the level of simplification that "y" performs is controlled by a slider in the "options" dialog (the button at the top right).

(edited following note from Richard)

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answered 20 May '12, 12:28

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SomeoneElse ♦
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accept rate: 16%

edited 21 May '12, 14:45

For what it's worth, you don't need to make it "selectable" - alt-click will do fine on its own. The only reason to make a layer selectable is if you want to select items without pulling them through.

It's also worthwhile pressing the 'Y' key to simplify the way after you've alt-clicked it. You can adjust the degree of simplification in the Options dialogue.

(21 May '12, 14:22) Richard ♦

The other part of your question "why doesn't LIMA 36 show up" is that not everything is or can be shown on the "standard" mapnik map. Here, for example, is the site of the battle of Towton - the adjacent field named "bloody meadow" is shown, but not the battlefield name.

However, just because it doesn't show up on the standard map doesn't mean that no-one will see it. There are many examples of people using OSM data to highlight a certain kind of feature on a customised map - there may already be one for historic battlefields.

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answered 20 May '12, 12:42

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SomeoneElse ♦
36.9k71370866
accept rate: 16%

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question asked: 20 May '12, 07:38

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last updated: 21 May '12, 20:03

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