A random discussion on the OSM World Discord server yesterday led me to do two things I don’t do often:

1. Edit the OSM Wiki
2. Map outside my area

The question was posed, how to tag a coal heap, the kind used for storage, typically next to a coal-fired plant of some kind? There were several ideas, and you can find examples of them out in OSM.

• landuse=landfill + resource=*

This, to me, feels like tagging for the renderer, but I can understand it. A lot of these heaps have a similar form to open-air landfills: bulldozers pushing and piling mounds of incoming material. But the function is quite different, and the landfill page is clear in that it stores waste.

In the case of coal heaps (and, as I thought about it, sand, salt, and gravel, too), there’s more or less a permanent “heap” site that grows and shrinks as the resource is used and replenished. Not all are permanent enough to warrant mapping, but the heaps near coal-fired power plants have their own infrastructure, so it feels mappable.

Interestingly, there are some examples in France of former coal mines that were filled in, and in those cases, the combination of those tags makes total sense. Otherwise, no.

• landuse=landfill + material=*

Seems to have more use, existing usage appears to be coal heaps and similar. Again, landuse is not the right tag for what these are. And while the use of the material key isn’t quite as wrong, I think it could use some refining. If it’s like a coal heap, i.e., something being stored for later use, that feels like a resource, and for true landfills, there’s already landfill:waste.

• man_made=spoil_heap + resource=*

To be clear, I didn’t actually see any uses of this that were the kinds of storage heaps I’m interested in. Most were legitimate former mines, the resource key referring to what the former mine was extracting, as opposed to the contents of the pile left over.

Spoil heaps seem well-used and well-defined enough that I don’t want to touch them, though the line between a spoil heap and a landfill seems to blur a bit to me, especially when the heap gets covered over and turned into a park. Personally, I think these work as landfill:waste=mining_waste, but re-tagging established features with a lesser-used value isn’t what this is about.

The point of it all is that there didn’t seem like a good tag to put on the storage heaps, so I thought I’d embrace the scarcely-used man_made=heap and elaborate on it, then start tagging. Most of the features I’m applying this to are newly mapped, and mostly coal piles (easy to find coal plants in OSM), so this isn’t a re-tagging campaign, just me trying to fill a perceived gap.

Here’s the heap wiki page.

See, this is why OSM and similar communities are amazing. I’m still pretty new around here, and even though I’ve gotten pretty deep into some of the wiki pages and JOSM functions, there are whole aspects of OpenStreetMap that I’m just not aware of.

But when a user like myself starts stumbling into these other aspects, experienced community members are there to help. Thanks once again to Leif Rasmussen’s input, it’s clear that my #DigitizeRacine efforts still needed a bit of refinement (typecase issues), and were also likely to be considered an Import.

For now, I think it’s best if I hold off on uploading additional changesets to #DigitizeRacine and get my import planned out in more detail. And fix those ALL CAPS items!

Thanks to some excellent feedback from the community, the #DigitizeRacine project is moving forward with great efficiency.

Microsoft’s building footprints seem to be fairly accurate for Racine County, and often only need minor corrections, or a garage or two added.

In refining my landuse areas, I came across a few areas with no sidewalk. I went looking for a parcel map to reference, and came across the WI State Cartographer’s V4 Parcel dataset. Not only does this give me the parcel boundaries I wanted, but it includes address information, and is freely available for public use.

So, after a bit of pre-processing, I’ve joined the parcel address information to Microsoft’s building footprints, then split the resulting layer into a few thousand manageable chunks. I’ve always liked the task management method that HOTOSM uses. I grab a section or two, work on those to completion, cross them off the list.

At this point, I think the focus will shift towards the building footprints, as those are currently not in the OSM dataset. Whatever my opinions on landuse areas, those are already present, and refining existing data can wait. Adding buildings with accurate address tags is now the primary task; landuse will be the next phase. The state parcel layer also includes some zoning tags, which may be helpful in determining landuse areas.

A lot of the counties around here provide publicly available building footprints. Mine doesn’t. Inspired by some of the more rigorous OSM efforts that exist in the broader community, I am committing myself to my home community of Racine.

Beginning with the City around me and broadening out, I’m going to work on getting all our buildings added to OSM, and fix some of the validation errors lurking in the data. Seems our local editors like to combine landuse ways with highways, but the common convention is that this is incorrect. Lots of ungluing to do. Other things, too.

An effort like this needs its own hashtag, I think. So: #DigitizeRacine

We’ll start with rough building footprints, just to get everything on the map. Later, house numbers, porches, more specific tags, all that. But for now, I’m just going to churn out some rectangles.

Edit: also seems that the landuse areas will, at their corners, follow the curb. But why follow one curb and say “landuse doesn’t include the street”, and then completely cover whole swathes of other streets? I’m going to break them up into block-sized areas. I’m of the opinion that this is more information, too, as it gives the actual curb locations.