Big, ugly, green blob in the middle of Pennsylvania

W3BC · 2019-10-03T11:13:07.000Z

I’m curious about the meaningless green rectangular area in central Pennsylvania. It’s unsightly, annoying, unidentifiable and unnecessary. I wish it could be turned off which would make OSM far more usable for my purposes.

Any ideas?

BCNorwich · 2019-10-03T14:10:19.000Z

It’s a huge multipolygon of a woods area that was started years ago and never completed. It looks like the green should eventually cover a much larger area. Please don’t cut them down. When the woods are all gone we’ll all be in a sorry state. The only thing you can do is render your own map without the woods.

SomeoneElse · 2019-10-03T14:35:47.000Z

Would any of the other maps on openstreetmap.org (such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/40.364/-79.107&layers=T ) work for your purposes? Or any map on ay other site?

bradrh · 2019-11-04T18:22:24.000Z

The wooded areas, at least in the US, are ambiguous and poorly mapped. I don’t think they should be rendered.

SomeoneElse · 2019-11-04T18:31:51.000Z

bradrh:

The wooded areas, at least in the US, are ambiguous and poorly mapped. I don’t think they should be rendered.

The map styles that you see on openstreetmap.org are international - they render the same things everywhere. If a map style there were to not show woodland because it is poorly mapped in one place it would punish users in other areas who have mapped things properly.

W3BC · 2019-11-06T15:01:05.000Z

BCNorwich:

… When the woods are all gone we’ll all be in a sorry state. The only thing you can do is render your own map without the woods.

Pennsylvania already is a “sorry state!”

I certainly would like to render my own maps without the green monster, but I can’t figure out how to do that. The Transport base layer is OK… until zoom level 9, when it’s “Hello again Mr. Green.”

Is there a commercial mapping solution I can buy?

SomeoneElse · 2019-11-06T15:56:52.000Z

W3BC:

Is there a commercial mapping solution I can buy?

Off the shelf, it may be that one of the usual suspects (see e.g. https://switch2osm.org/providers/ and the equivalent list in the wiki) has something already, since it’s likely something that they’ll have had to do to deal with US imported data for other customers. I’m not saying that only the US has a problem with half-arsed imports, but it’s certainly more of a problem there than (say) Germany, the UK or Ireland. It’s somewhat understandable given what the size and nature of the mapping community was in the US 10 or so years ago.

W3BC:

I certainly would like to render my own maps without the green monster, but I can’t figure out how to do that.

It shouldn’t be that difficult to exclude it. https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-18-04-lts/ is designed to be fairly easy to follow. There are no undocumented steps, but it does assume that you have an Ubuntu server or virtual machine that you have control over.

What you’d need to do in addition to that is change the “openstreetmap-carto.lua” file (you can see the original at
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/openstreetmap-carto.lua ) so that it doesn’t delete the “source” key, but that it does delete the “natural=wood” tag from data that has the tag “source=PA Ortho”.

Pennsylvania is slightly larger than Scotland and significantly smaller than England in OSM terms and so should fit fairly nicely into a virtual machine on an existing PC, if you don’t have a suitable server already.

benjamin-demarteau · 2020-01-20T15:39:09.000Z

SomeoneElse:

It shouldn’t be that difficult to exclude it. https://switch2osm.org/manually-buildin … 18-04-lts/ is designed to be fairly easy to follow. There are no undocumented steps, but it does assume that you have an Ubuntu server or virtual machine that you have control over.

That link is dead, I found https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/, but there is really no documentation at all apart from “we use X and Y and it does the thing”.

SomeoneElse · 2020-01-20T16:20:27.000Z

benjamin-demarteau:

That link is dead, I found https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/, but there is really no documentation at all apart from “we use X and Y and it does the thing”.

On that page there’s a link down the RHS to “Manually building a tile server (18.04 LTS)” that points at https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-18-04-lts/.

I guess that the deep link changes when it moved from Wordpress to github?

Since I wrote the reply above https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/using-a-docker-container/ has been written which might be easier still.