Change of Road Name - URGENT PLEASE

Hi folks

I live in Portstewart N Ireland where my address is Agherton Drive. I have noticed in recent times it has been changed in OSM.
The Drive is off the A2 Coleraine Road via Fairfield Road and then second right into Agherton Drive. Presently the name given to
it is way off the mark because someone has named it Cappagh Grove. This is most misleading for those using OSM mapping.
The problem is that I can’t figure out how to basically change the name of Cappagh Grove to Agherton Drive. I’m wondering if
some kind soul would be happy to make the change for me. I would be eternally grateful. Thanks so much.

Gerald

Hi Gerald,

I can change the name for you.

Following your directions (second right off of Fairfield Road) I see the following in OSM:

It looks like the first part (from Fairfield Road to Cappagh Road) is actually unnamed in OSM at the moment. The other, longer part (from Cappagh Road to Agherton Road) is indeed in OSM as Cappagh Grove.

How much of this road is Agherton Drive?

There is a cul-de-sac off of “Cappagh Grove” actually called Cappagh Grove (near the Agherton Road end). Is that named correctly?

Best regards,
Colin

Hi Colin

Thanks for a quick reply. Appreciate your help very much indeed. Agherton Drive runs the whole way from
Fairfield Road to the sharp RH corner where Cappagh Grove begins. The corner is just past the road on the left
called Cappagh Park. Also one or two other matters. Coming down Agherton Drive from Fairfield Road the
first road on the Right is called Cappagh Road which runs to Woodvale Road. The road to the left between the
two roads is called Flowerfield Road. Coming on down Agherton Drive the next road to the right is Agherton
Park which is marked twice on the OSM. The rest of the roads on the Right and Left along Cappagh Grove are
all part of Cappagh Grove and are called as such. Hope this helps to sorts things out with the OSM map.
Thanks again for your help.

Kind regards
Gerald

Hi Gerald, would you take a look now and check it’s OK? You may have to refresh the page in your browser a couple of times to see the results.

Colin

Hi Colin

Thanks so much. The area now looks as it should do. I hope no one
changes it again as I think that must have happened for some reason.
I checked the road etc and everything looks fine. Much appreciated.

Kind regards
Gerald

Hi Colin

Forgot to ask if there is a decent user’s guide or manual for OSM that you may know of.
Would like to delve a little deeper into things but it seems to be almost overwhelming!!
Thanks again.

Kind regards
Gerald

Hi Gerald

Take a look at the Beginner’s Guide on the wiki. You can find it from the “Help” menu item on the main osm.org web page, but here’s the link anyway:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide

The UK users tend to communicate more via a mailing list instead of this forum by the way - probably for historical reasons. You might find it useful to join a list or two, and ask your beginners questions there. Everybody is quite used to that and in general they are (generally) very helpful and tolerant. You can always subscribe to a list and lurk in the shadows for a bit to get a feeling for things…

UK-specific stuff is discussed on “talk-gb”, worldwide stuff on “talk” and “tagging”. There is also a “talk-ie” list for Irish subjects which you may find useful (in particular the legal issues around open data, access to OSNI/OSi stuff, administrative structures etc in NI sometimes have more in common with the Republic than with the situation in the rest of the UK). You can find all the mailing lists through this page:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mailing_lists

Regards,
Colin

Hi Gerald,

You are the second person in a week to describe OSM as “overwhelming”. It looks as if we really need to do something about it.

As Colin says the talk-gb mailing list is more active than the forum (although I fully appreciate why a forum might be preferred). In addition, the Irish OSM community covers the whole island of Ireland and provides a number of resources on their website: http://www.openstreetmap.ie/. They also tend to use a mailing list talk-ie.

Having recently been in your neck of the woods, I’m aware that quite a lot of detail is missing in Northern Ireland. An example is street and road names which are frequently missing, for instance all the side streets off Lissadell Road are missing names (as is almost all of Portrush, see http://qa.poole.ch/?zoom=13&lat=55.1865&lon=-6.67026&layers=TFFFB0)). I also had to add an amenity=restaurant tag to the Cromore Halt, and have just added the Magherabuoy Hotel outside Portrush, places where I ate whilst staying at the University of Ulster. Many shops, bars, restaurants, banks, pharmacies are also missing in the Coleraine, Portstewart and Portrush areas. This suggests that what detail that has been added has come from visitors, such as myself, with roads and other features having been added from aerial imagery.

This gives the appearance of accuracy, but sometimes this is spurious. Nothing beats on the ground local expertise, as you have shown.

Probably the guide designed to help the beginner which is most useful is the Learn OSM site (http://learnosm.org/en/). This is geared up for people participating in Humanitarian Mapping tasks (such as the recent Nepal earthquake). From other recent discussions I think the hard thing is knowing where one might start. Many of us started when the local area was incomplete and adding a few roads (or a whole estate) which then appeared on the map was very satisfying. Now its harder to get the same instant gratification. These days I tend to do shops: its easy to wander up and down a high street taking photos of the shops. I then add the shops when I get home. I find this good because I can do something useful quite quickly.

Hope these comments are of some use,

Jerry
SK53

Hi Jerry

Thanks for a very full, unexpected reply which is very much appreciated.
At least the description of OSM as being “overwhelming” got a response!
Really I was looking something like a user guide in PDF that I could print
off and use as I try to come to terms with OSM which I think is a really
good idea and folks should be made aware of the benefits of it.
My interest arose as a result of connections with a local Ramblers Club that
uses many maps as we travel far and near in N.Ireland and Donegall. A
number of members use a Garmin handset with maps but the problem is
these maps cost an awful lot of money and are not updated very often. So
we have been looking in the direction of OSM where the one downside seems
to be the difficulty in getting a good manual/user guide to help newbies like
myself. I will follow up on some of your suggestions and hope that the
powers that be in OSM might look again at newcomers who look for an easy
way to learn the program. Hope this help.s

Kind regards
Gerald

If you want to get maps based on OpenStreetMap data on a Garmin handheld, you might find this page useful:

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2013/05/download-garmin-705800810.html

Also some of the answers at the help site:

https://help.openstreetmap.org/

point at introductory material and might be useful.