Our family has a cottage on McKenzie Lake in Ontario, just outside Algonquin Park. I’m trying to fix up the area, but if I see what I think I’m seeing, this may not be easy…
First of all, when I click it drops a point. Is there any way to turn this off? It’s very annoying to try to select something, miss, and then have to undo.
So I’m looking at McKenzie Lake and nearby Lake St. Peter. I noticed that the top half of St. Peter has a different color than the bottom half. I suspected this has something to do with the settings of the outline?
But when I clicked on the top half to fix it, it selected most of the lakes in the entire grid square. But the parts of the same lakes in other squares were not selected.
So, first off, how do I edit this? Clicking on one selects a bunch. Is that expected?
Secondly, is it bad that these outlines are split up like this? Lakes, roads, everything seems to have the same sort of problem.
what you’re seeing is the result of a big import from NRCan-CanVec… they divided the area into tiles and imported the tiles separately, which is why everything is split up.
at the moment McKenzie lake is divided into 3 parts, all of them “simple” ways, whereas Lake St. Peter has a multi polygon as the top half (because of the small island) and a normal way in the south. what you selected was probably the multi-polygon of the woods around it and not the actual lake
If you use an editor like JOSM or Merkaartor, you can filter out things like woods if you don’t want to work with them now. You can also see bing images (unfortunately in a not so good resolution) as background in these programs and have different tools to modify and add nodes.
if you want to do bigger edits i’d suggest using one of these programs instead of Potlatch (which i think you’re refering to now).
Ok this is basically what I thought happened. But since this happens to every feature that crosses a grid, the scope of this problem is ENORMOUS. Is this something we should be looking at for some sort of automation?
As to joining things back together… how? I see the same problem at random locations on all of the roads - they’re going along and then there’s an “intersection” for no reason. I’d like to link these back together, but I can’t figure out how to do it.
You mentioned something about street numbers… are those the annoying vectors beside the roads? They are very annoying because the make it difficult to select the road itself. But there are numbers on the roads… should I leave them? Or is there a better way to do this?
yes, the street numbers are the annoying lines everywhere
near lake st. peter they at least have some numbers, eventhough i doubt the interpolation would be of any use, but since you know the region you should be a better judge on that.
if you want to model single buildings you can just put the number as an attribute to the way which is your building. otherwise you can make a single node with the number (e.g. if they are unevenly spread apart) or you can use interpolation, like in the import.
for combining the lake parts: you have to split the ways at the border of the “grid”, combine the split ways from north+south and delete the ways along the grid-border.
in JOSM that would be: ctrl+click the way and the 2 border nodes to select everything, hit “p” (or click tools->split way), do the same for the other part, delete the 2 unneccessary short ways across the lake, select both lake parts and hit “c” (tools->combine ways).
in case of lake st. peter there will be a dialog popping up asking you what to do with the multi polygon. since we don’t want to change that, you should put in “outer” as role, like before, and change nothing else.
This seems impossible. Scrolling around the area I find that this “problem” effects practically every landform.
This needs to be fixed in an automated fashion. How does one “go up the hierarchy” in the OSM world to discuss this with someone who maintains the importers?
the import was done in feb 2011 by bdustan (http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bdustan). you can try to contact him with questions why he did it the way he did. or you can search the mailing list archives.
otherwise, if you want to automatically update things, you don’t necessarily have to “go up the ladder”, just follow http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits.
i’d recommend opening a topic about that, gather ideas what fix could be done and how to automate it. after everything is discussed, you can then just do the changes. (following the guidelines above)
