Linear High Street Maps

This is an experimental tool that is designed to produce linear maps depicting the shops and businesses along the length a single street. There are two key purposes:

• To provide a printable output that can be taken into the field to help with re-surveying the street.
• To provide an interface that exposes current address data and other attribute tags, and flags up missing and incorrect data.

Streets currently in the tool are linked below. At the moment, new localities and streets have to be added manually by me. Please get in touch if you would like to help test the tool on a street near you. Printing using Firefox does not seem to handle the vertical positioning correctly. I would suggest using Chrome instead. Printing from Chrome, with two pages per A4 page at about 130% scaling seems to work well for me.

Inclusion Criteria

OSM objects are included as POIs in the linear map if (and only if) they meet all the following criteria:

• They lie within a buffer distance (default 50m) of the street centre-line defined in the tool.
• They have at least one of tag keys the from the following list, or a disused:* version of one of them: tourism, amenity, leisure, shop, healthcare, craft, office. However, an amenity=* or leisure=* tag only counts if its value lies on a whitelist of types, a tourism=* tags only counts if its value does not lie on a blacklist, and a tourism=information tag only counts if there is also an information=* value on a whitelist.
• There is either no addr:street tag, or the addr:street value matches the name of the street in question.

These criteria are designed to include only businesses that lie on the street in question.

Also included are any other OSM objects within the buffer distance that have a matching addr:street tag, and at least one of addr:housename or addr:housenumber, and don't match an address already present on a POI. This is designed to capture private houses between businesses on the street. Such objects are indicated by a "⌂" symbol.

Checks Carried Out / Map Key

Address Tags

• The value of addr:housenumber is shown if present, and a "𝒩" is shown instead if addr:housenumber is absent but addr:housename is present. Hover over the 𝒩 to see the value of the name.
• The last two letters of a correctly formatted addr:postcode are shown in a coloured circle. The most frequent six values are shown in different colours. Clicking on the circle takes you to a tool with more information about the postcode.
• If addr:street is missing, or any of the settlement tags addr:village, addr:suburb, addr:town, addr:city do no match the defined values for the locality, then a grey box is shown under the housenumber space. Hover the mouse for details.

Name, Business Type

• The value of the name tag is show, linked to the OSM object. A long dash is shown if there is no name tag.
• The value of the first of any counting tourism, amenity, leisure, shop, healthcare, craft, office tag is shown in brackets, or a disused:* version of the above if none present.
• For disused:* objects, the name and type are shown in grey.

Brand, Website, FHRS ID

• If an fhrs:id=* tag is present, an F in a square box is shown. If the value is not found in the FHRS database then the box is coloured red. If there is no tag for an OSM object where one might be expected, the box is coloured orange. The box is a link, either to the FSA rating page or the FHODOT tool.
• If a brand:wikidata=* tag is present, a B in a square box is shown, linked to the Wikidata page. The box is a link to the Wikidta page.
• If a website=* tag is present, a W in a square box is shown. If no website tag is present, then a grey dotted box is shown, linked to a web search for the object name and locality. For objects with a brand tag, the website value is compared to a template (regex) in my database. Expected but missing values are indicated by an orange box, present but mis-matched values are indicated by a red box. The box is usually a link, either to the tagged website or to a web search to help you find one to add. (The contact:website=* tag is not supported this tool. It has much lower use than website=*, to record the same information. It is not helpful to data users to support duplicate keys like this.)

These flags are hidden on the print view to keep things simple and uncluttered.

Fixme and note tags

• If the object has a fixme=* tag, then an italic F is shown at the end of the line. Hover the mouse to see the tag value.
• If the object has a note=* tag, then an italic N is shown at the end of the line. Hover the mouse to see the tag value.

These flags are hidden on the print view to keep things simple and uncluttered.