Dealing with OS Locator road name data: special cases

posted in: Uncategorized | 2

This is a mini-tutorial presented as part of the UK Quarterly Project to fix road names.

There are occasions when along a long stretch of road the name changes several times. In the absence of a survey confirming that the local authority precisely defines where the name changes by placing road name signs adjacent to each other, you need some method of determining where the name changes. If you don’t have a helpful placement of road signs then a change in the house numbers is a good indication.

However, armchair mapping  can make use of the OS Locator data layer whilst editing. In the example shown, there is a stretch of road with 3 names. The geometry of the OS Locator blocks is a good indication of where the road name changes.

Long Roads in OS Locator

East Side (at the foot of the image above) shouldn’t be added because it’s already named something else in OSM and needs a ground survey, but it’s likely East Side is correct , given the nearby roads running from it, named South Side and North Side.

Hutton Bank and Rudby Bank can be named as OSM has no name for them. There’s a slight added complication that the road name seems to change in the middle of a bridge. So we can split the bridge and add the names up to where the OS Locator boxes indicate, not forgetting to add the tag source:name= OS_OpenData_Locator.

Result: one small improvement to OSM road name data.

There are occasions when the OS Locator data just throws up something that is unresolvable! Is this OS adding a sense of humour to its data? Were the staff just bored? Or is there really a road with no name called No Name Road? This has to be the special case of all special cases!

No name road

OpenCage Data Open Geo Interview

posted in: Participate | 0

OpenCage  Data have featured us in their long-running Open Geo interview series. You can read the interview here.

OpenCage Data is a division of Lokku. Founded in 2006 and based in London, Lokku are long time supporters of OSM – they’ve sponsored numerous State of the Map conferences, mapping parties, and made major donations to HOT-OSM and OSMF’s server drives. They also run #geomob, a meetup of London location based service devs. Opencage are best known for Nestoria, a  property search engine.