Status update, November 2020

I'm finding it takes an unexpected level of effort to write these updates. It's just something I'm not that interested in, anyway, I'm going to keep trying.

I've added a bunch more UPRNs and USRNs, I feel like I'm now pretty good at deanonymising them, although I can't do it in dense areas. Working with OS Open Linked Identifiers helps a lot, I can start with a USRN, match it to a road in OSM, look up all the UPRNs connected to it, usually there is just one at one end of the road. That's the street record. In more spread out areas there is usually just one above each building. It can identify semi detached buildings, and even apartments. I've not looked at the OS Open Roads dataset yet, but I imagine that could help.

I have been wondering how much of a dataset you could get just by merging OS Open Data back together. It's clear by OS Open Zoomstack that they are not afraid of OSM's data, but it's ease of use and developer recognition. They believe they have the superior data, which they currently do, but we have the mind share and attention of a lot of powerful companies. OSM is never going to to take legal lability so there are markets OSM simply wont compete, but I still don't understand why OS is fighting. Either release all of OS as Open Data and make OSM in GB pointless. Or join us.

I collected a lot of addresses in a near by village, Godshill. I prepped better this time so the survey was really quick. Just walking around with StreetComplete entering numbers. It has a regression that made entering house names more difficult than it should have been but I still managed. In future I'm going to prep like I did here, it takes some of the joy out of StreetComplete, but you do get better data quicker.

I added a bunch of defibs in Guernsey. I don't actually know if Guernsey is covered by OSM UK, it's not covered in the stats. However the OSMUK QP is defibs, so I reached out to submarine and asked them if I could use there dataset. They agreed and now OSM has more coverage and Guernsey residents have a digital map of there nearest defibs in there pocket. I'd like to do more work like that.

Cj Malone on