The higher zoom levels of the electrification layer on openrailwaymap don't
get updated since lets say some months.
for example:
Wesel-Bocholt remains unaltered "under construction"
Herzogenrath changes aren't rendered
As I don't know how to get the actual zoom level I cannot cite his number.
Topic 1:
I had seen some interesting behavior where the name of an abandoned
line was rendered even though it was not tagged in the way but was
tagged in a relation. I also saw cases where a street was rendered
with an abandoned line even though it wasn't tagged on the way but was
included in the relation. I've also seen instances in the
electrification layer where there's a double render: both the
electrification color and a gray line appeared in the same location
conflicting. Thirdly I've seen instances where the way and the
relation were tagged 'abandoned' and the line showed up as solid
rather than dashed.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on since I had seen
ORM documentation that says we do not render relations. It turns out
that the OSM backend turns relations into ways, assigning them a
negative osm_id. ORM then renders these ways.
Basically, if a relation is tagged
railway=construction/abandoned/razed/disused/rail/light_rail/tram/subway,
it will render in ORM. There are guidelines that say don't use
railway=rail on a relation
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:route%3Drailway). Perhaps
they should be expanded. Maybe even a validation rule should be added
to the editors.
So the question I have is what's the best way to deal with these
relations? For some the easiest thing to do is remove the railway tag
from the relation. For others, the relation is so large (I saw one
last night that was 500+ ways), and not every way is individually
tagged that map accuracy would be decreased if the railway tag was
removed from the relation. For those cases, it seems easier to de-tag
a few ways and let the relation take over. But then if the way ends
up being blank, I feel guilty and I then rely on others to not delete
it and realize it's part of a relation. I also feel like I'm
violating the rule of not tagging just for the sake of the renderer.
Thoughts? Are there any guidelines?
Topic 2:
The ORM renderer will shade in turntables and traversers if and only
if they are polygons. Took me a while to figure out why some were
rendering (like
https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=40.87473288924837&lon=-73....)
and others weren't. It seems that a "closed way" (group of nodes
joined by a line where the starting node is the ending node) isn't
automatically a polygon unless certain tags are present. I'm thinking
in the above case the tourism=attraction tag may have tripped the
above case into a polygon. An area=yes tag will always force the
database to create a polygon.
So the question is what do we do with all these turntables and
traversers that are closed ways and not polygons?
-retag with area=yes to force the renderer? I've done this for
several but I'm not sure it's the right thing to do
-request the OSM Project make a change so that a closed way tagged
'railway'='turntable' is treated as an area when uploaded. Not sure if
this is a backend or editor issue. Is this even a backend thing or is
it a local database thing?
-have ORM render closed ways and areas/polygons. Not sure that's even
possible with the rendered.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
I just started doing some ORM development and I'm using kosmtik. While I
like it, it's sometimes hard to figure out where you are or more
appropriately, where you are trying to go.
Some areas I can recognize by geography: single lines on peninsulas, major
rail hubs like Chicago or Kansas City, by shape/lines once you know the
area, etc. I can also get a permalink from ORM and put the coordinates
into the url for kosmtik.
However, I was wondering if there was a way to get the ORM background
(Mapnik Grayscale) or similar to display behind the renderings from the MML
file. There seems to be quite a few additional plugins for kosmtik but
it's a bit confusing as to what they do or how they work. I've seen ones
that will render side by side or over but not under. Not sure if I'd fully
need to render the "world" or if the grayscale tiles could be pulled in
from an existing tileserver.
Also, did anyone have any luck working with two sessions of kosmtik? I can
run a second .mml and specify a different port number, but sometimes, the
browser, seeing the same url (despite differing port numbers), caches the
tiles and requires a hard refresh to get the correct view. I could
probably play around with running the mml files out of a different folder
or symlinking them.
Thanks,
Jonathan
What's up with the website? Most page requests go to the Blog.
Sometimes I can get an old permalink to work.
I know rendering seemed a bit slow lately. Most changes historically
propagated in three days but they seem to have been taking longer.
Electrification was at least a week out of date. Maybe it was updated
less frequently because of the beta test.
