Patterns in address data
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
Prompted by recent discussions about house numbers becoming illuminated features in order to aid delivery of fast food by Deliveroo riders after dark I used an idle lockdown moment to peruse the incidence of house numbers in the UK by using taginfo.  We have a sample size of 2 293 590 house numbers with 29 881 values. Initially I thought I had stumbled upon a curious feature as the frequency of house numbers follows a sequential pattern i.e. 1 is the most frequent house number followed by 2 and so on.  I was about to muse on why this should be and concoct all kinds of theories about ..read more
Visit website
OSMUK first quarterly project 2020: Parks
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
Last week saw me surveying Ward End Park in Birmingham. This park had had no attention from OSM mappers since it was first surveyed in 2009 and so looked a good candidate for the quarterly project. Aerial Imagery also showed significant detail to be missing (mostly footpaths). The park is an innner city park close to some economically-stressed neighbourhoods, but shows none of the vandalism you might have expected. It is also unexpectedly litter-free: this either shows it’s a well-respected local amenity or low useage in February means no litter. It is largely just open parkland and grass with ..read more
Visit website
A unique OpenStreetMap project
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
  Every Quarter (3 months) the OpenStreetMap UK embarks on a community project to improve the map and,  whilst working together, to build our community. The final quarter of 2019 saw us trying to fix some of the FIXME and  fixme tags in our data. Pretty obvious  OK?  Something needs fixing so let’s go fix it. For the first time in the history of our Quarterly Projects on first sight it looked like we actually managed to make the map worse. The number of fixmes after 3 months of effort was higher. So what went on? First the data: FIXME is an older tag generally no longe ..read more
Visit website
Junction improvements: more than meets the eye
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
It’s been fascinating mapping the changes during 2019 for the major junction improvements under way at the Iron Lane junction in East Birmingham; long tolerated by users of the  A4040 Outer Ring Road for generating long waits especially for users of the adjacent Stechford Retail Park and long-suffering passengers on the 11A/11C outer circle bus route. “Pinchpoint” is the official nomenclature for such junctions. The junction moves from being a signalised gyratory to a junction with two new roundabouts and improvements to north-south flow with a dualled section (involving a new bridge over ..read more
Visit website
Drone Imagery from the Seventeenth Century
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
If ever you are visiting the city of Lille in northern France take some time out to visit the basement of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, home to fourteen relief maps of  fortified French cities. These intricately detailed maps (really they are scale models and almost works of art in their own right) are a regional collection that was donated to the city of Lille in the 1980s from a larger collection housed in the Hôtel des Invalides military museum in Paris. Think of them as the seventeenth century equivalent of aerial imagery collected by drones. The collection was originally commissioned by ..read more
Visit website
Mapping a New Town being developed on a vanished national landmark
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
It’s not often you get the opportunity to map a completely new town from the ground up, so mappa-mercia volunteers (all four of us)  descended on Houlton, next door to Rugby Warwickshire to do just that on a wet Saturday 1st December. Houlton is the name for a new town of 6,200  homes that is growing on the site of the decommissioned Rugby Radio Station, whose large antenna masts were long a major landmark on the journey north and south along the M1 motorway. Houlton had been marked as a construction site for some time in OpenStreetMap, but a trawl of local news sites suggested it wa ..read more
Visit website
UK Defibrillator Map
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
Over the last few days there has been significant national press attention to a project to create a map of the locations  of public defibrillators. The project is a collaboration between the British Heart Foundation , Microsoft and the NHS.  One of the pilot areas will be the West Midlands Ambulance Service. OpenStreetMap already has a large database of the locations of these devices, and in fact devoted one of our UK Quarterly Projects to the theme. Of course there is a map to visualise the data. There is also a useful set of tools and information to help mappers Taginfo returns a t ..read more
Visit website
Joy Diversion: Mapping in Manchester
Mappa Mercia
by RobJN
3y ago
Saturday 19th May saw the UK OpenStreetMap community and Open Data Manchester join forces for an afternoon of exploring central Manchester. Several mappers from the Midlands made the trip and boy, did we have fun! Our hosts had prepared some great “Explorer Backpacks” and we soon broke off in to teams for our expeditions into the unknown. From the waterways to historic relics, the missions were wide ranging – we even had a Geiger counter on hand to find the spot with the highest background radiation! After soaking up the sun we headed back to Federation House to share our findings before head ..read more
Visit website
Conflation & Validation: OSM Conflator
Mappa Mercia
by RobJN
3y ago
When Ilya approached the UK OpenStreetMap community about incorporating third party data (Shell petrol stations) into OSM he had already ran the data through his “OSM Conflator” tool. As part of the project he also created a “Community Validation” tool. I decided to take a look at both of these using Asda petrol station data as a test case. In a series of posts I will share my experience with conflation and validation. This first post covers just OSM Conflator, with a follow on posts in the coming days covering the Community Validation tool and some reflections on the process. Intro to OSM Con ..read more
Visit website
The streets they are changing
Mappa Mercia
by Brian Prangle
3y ago
The streets they are a changing   The view along our streets is about to change thanks to the mobile phone and OSM mappers are presented with a vast new challenge. BT are scrapping half of the 40,000 phoneboxes on our streets over the next five years, citing  a drastic drop in useage.  One third of phoneboxes never have anyone make a call from them, and BT measure call volume from all kiosks at a mere 33,000 a day. Phonebox numbers reached their peak in 1992, when there were 92,000 of them. Reducing the estate  will save BT £6m a year in maintenance, mostly repairing vandal ..read more
Visit website

Follow Mappa Mercia on FeedSpot

Continue with Google
Continue with Apple
OR