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Hello,

I am a newbie and trying to teach some students to map a neighborhood. WE have been using JOSM today to practice mapping some buildings - doing simple outlines and then naming them using presets and giving them attributes.

WE noticed that a lot of times the building name does not show up OR the building outline does not show up. Sometimes they both show up and sometimes they do not.

I also noticed that different information is visible whether we are looking at the OSM site OR in Potlatch. For example I looked at some of the edits we uploaded from JOSM, saw them there, then opened it in Potlatch 2 and they were not there.

Are we doing something wrong that all these different versions of the maps have different information?? Please advise, it is frustrating since we are not sure what is going up or not.

Thanks!!

Olivia

asked 21 Nov '11, 16:27

ODSplanning's gravatar image

ODSplanning
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accept rate: 0%

Thanks all.

Please see below map of Petionville, Haiti.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=18.516231&lon=-72.290027&zoom=18&layers=M

I have asked the students to add a number of little icons and places as practice, which we will delete. Please look at the block square in the middle of the page and you will see Boite de la Musique. Efie's Shop and a few other icons on that block. Many of those icons have building outlines under them - but we can't see them until we use all data.

We are going to be going out into the field and need to use this program, so we want to make sure what we make can be viewed all the time on OSM. I noticed other parts of Port au Prince are much more densely mapped and you can see everything.

How come icons show up. but no building ourlines, or just names and no outlines?

Thanks!!

Olivia

(21 Nov '11, 18:05) ODSplanning

For some of those (for example, Laundry Salon), there is a way in the shape of a building, but the way is not tagged building=yes, so it will not display like a building. There are specific rules by tag for how and if nodes/ways and their labels will display at each zoom level for the osm.org slippy map, as Richard said.

(22 Nov '11, 14:36) neuhausr

There is only one database - the main one on the OpenStreetMap website. What is most important is that this database has your edits in. When you save from Potlatch or JOSM (or whatever), assuming nothing catastrophic happens, the edits will be saved into this one database.

The fact you're not seeing them show up has two possible explanations.

Firstly, the browsable ("slippy") map on the OpenStreetMap website is made from this database in a constantly updating process. This takes the data you've uploaded into the database, and makes it into pretty-looking map images (.png files, just like any other image you see on the Internet). This is very fast, but it's not immediate; it will usually take a couple of minutes, sometimes longer. The different zoom levels are "rendered" at different times, so it's possible that you might find it shows up at one scale before another.

Have a little patience, and don't be afraid to press 'Refresh' on your browser to check that you're seeing the latest version - browsers can "cache" old versions to reduce loading time. (There are a few little tricks you can do to make sure the images render on demand, but generally you don't need to think about this; the OSM server will sort it all out for you.)

Secondly, different maps will choose to show different information from the database. So, for example, the map you see on the OSM website shows pubs fairly prominently; other maps might choose not to. After all, if every map showed everything in the database, they'd look incredibly cluttered and be difficult to read.

The JOSM map view, the Potlatch map view, and the main site "slippy" map all have slightly different rules for how to render the map. In general both Potlatch and JOSM will show you everything, but they might, for example, not draw a building name on the map if they don't think there's room. The slippy map is much more selective about what it shows.

Have a play around with the "+" icon at the right of the map screen to see different styles of map. You'll see there's even a little "Data" checkbox here that will show you absolutely everything.

If you still think something's not showing up right, post the link here to the area you've been working on, and tell us what you expect to see, and we can help some more.

permanent link

answered 21 Nov '11, 16:39

Richard's gravatar image

Richard ♦
30.9k44279412
accept rate: 18%

To show building outline AND function icon (eg: bank note for a bank, tshirt for clothes shop) you need to add the building=yes, shop=shoptype and name=shopname. If you forget the building=yes only the icon will show, if you forget the shop=shoptype only the building outline will show.

Richard is correct, depending on which type of map you choose, not all the information will show, Mapnik will show shop type icon and building outline, OSMarenderer will overlap all the shop names if shops are close to each other.

permanent link

answered 27 Nov '11, 15:46

Meersbrook's gravatar image

Meersbrook
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accept rate: 0%

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question asked: 21 Nov '11, 16:27

question was seen: 9,032 times

last updated: 27 Nov '11, 18:23

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