1.12.2009 | Frederik Ramm
European OSM power users are already well aware of the various error checking and data analysis tools we have bundled into our OSM Inspector web application – among others, a geometry view that shows self-intersecting ways, very long ways, or very long distances between nodes in a way, and a tagging view that highlights all sorts of strange, or potentially misspelled, tags as well as anything tagged FIXME.
There’s now an additional places view showing a hierarchy of settlements and their population values.
We have been very busy improving our OSM data processing capabilities, and implementing an architecture that provides us with nightly builds of all sorts of full-planet OSM derivates. Consequently, as of today, the views mentioned above are available world-wide, and updated daily. (The remaining Europe-only layers will also be expanded to cover the whole planet – time permitting –, plus we’re working on a super cool additional multipolygon debug view to be launched RSN.)
All OSM Inspector layers have true vector data (for example, if there is a problem on a way, they will draw the whole way and pinpoint the problem). They can generate lists in addition to the map display. Direct links to JOSM and Potlatch are provided, and anyone can extract data from the WMS or WFS service to display or process in their own applications.
We have also improved the speed and usability of some of the layers, provided enhanced documentation on the OSM Inspector wiki page, (including sections detailing how you can use the OSMI layers to fix problems), and fixed some bugs.
On request of the Netherlands community, we have added a special layer for the Netherlands only that shows where work has been done since the AND import, and where things have not been touched since then.
Try it out, and tell us what you think! (Oh, and do fix some OSM bugs along the way!)
