Hi, I have several questions as a new user of OSM.
What I’m trying to achieve:
I am trying to produce detailed representations of street-trees (ie, trees on the public street, as distinct from nearby trees on private land). We have a group locally that wants to encourage interest and understanding about street-trees. We are trying to persuade the local city council to alter their management plan for street-trees. It appears to be too happy to remove mature trees before the end of their safe life. There is plenty of discussion about the plan. But information about the actual trees over the whole area is not so good.
What I’ve done so far:
I don’t have a GPS, but I have a bicycle, which is pretty good for making ‘traces’ along a known way. I count the pedal turns and record the tree details using a voice recorder on my mobile phone. At home, I have transcribed the recording in a spreadsheet. I have then converted the ‘pedal-count-units’ into decimal fractions of the street length. Using the known lat and lon values for the nodes at the ends of the street, I have been able to calculate the position of each tree along the street. I’ve recorded details for several streets but have only made up OSM layers for one street. I have been able to put the result up on a web page. The hosting space has been loaned to me by a local residents’ group, here.
http://www.woodlawnflats.co.uk/maps/WRT_Carlton_layers.html
What I would like help with:
First - can I overcome the problem of having the tree markers ‘move’ when I zoom to a new level? The map I made (link above) is set at zoom 17. If I zoom in, the trees appear to shift. Is that just because of my lat lon values needing more accuracy? It seems unlikely. There is a related problem identified here http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=84134#p84134 but I’m struggling with finding a full discussion of this that I can understand.
Second - can I overcome the first problem by removing the icons at a particular zoom level? I’d like to remove them when someone zooms out anyway. Perhaps I can make them only visible at the level where they work ok.
Third - if I overcome the first problem, can I make the icons change size according to the zoom level?
Fourth - I have included a ‘mouseposition’ line in the code for the page, but it produces figures that are not lat lon values. What am I doing wrong? And how can I put it right?
Fifth - I’d be very happy to place the tree locations as nodes on the OSM server. But I don’t want to do that if it is not good for the project as a whole. There are issues with the level of detail I want to make available, and how often it will change over the 20 years of the council’s felling and re-planting plan. Can anyone suggest my best course of action on this?
Other points:
I’ve really enjoyed trying to get to grips with OSM and the JOSM and OpenLayers. I’m very new to it. But there’s very little help that can be easily found to address the problem I found in the fifth point above. For someone who doesn’t want to commercially exploit the OSM data, but isn’t sure about adding their features of interest to the server, there isn’t a clear point of information about how to create your own page and credit OSM. If I’ve missed the place, I apologise. I have been looking in a lot of places. Of course, if I feel I’m in a position to write such a page, I’ll happily add it to the wiki. But I’m far from confident enough at present.
Oh, and one last point. When I saw the Bamberg (Bavaria) street trees, I tried to find out who might have edited them. I downloaded a bbox to JOSM and found the node id for a tree. Back on the OSM page, I looked at the history and searched the id numbers. But I eventually became convinced that the id numbers on the history page are edit id numbers and that’s completely different from a node/feature id on the map. Is there any way to check out the history of a feature using its id…?
Thanks for reading all of that, and happy holidays if you’re reading it in the next few days.
GC