War Memorials: revisiting an OpenStreetMap Project of the Week

Great Gable, a mountain in the English Lake District.
The summit and around 1200 ha of the surrounding area are dedicated as a war memorial.

Four years ago I proposed mapping war memorials as the OpenStreetMap Project of the Week. It ran in early November 2010 to coincide with the anniversary of Armistice Day, when several countries honour their war dead. At the time I was intrigued at how this particular topic resonated with mappers.

I was gratified that both Peter Reed and Chris Hill felt engaged by the idea. Richard Weait, co-ordinator of Project of the Week, wrote a very interesting post about the poem "In Flanders Field" which was written by a Canadian.

Strava & OpenStreetMap GPS traces: a quick comparison

Strava introduced their heatmaps and their Strava Slide tool at the Washington DC conference of the OSM US community SotM-US in the spring. I had a quick look at the time and it seemed interesting, but there was little data in areas which I map.

A question came up recently regarding how accurate the Strava heatmaps are for mapping routes on OpenStreetMap, particularly in wooded areas. This prompted me to have another look at the data.

It happens that I have made a lot of traces across two paths on an open playing field (an area sufficiently unobstructed that it is used periodically for calibrating and testing professional grade GPS equipment). A short distance from these two paths is NCN 6, a heavily used national cycle route. It was therefore very easy to grab some screen grabs of Strava and OSM data:

Strava Cycling Heat Map
(NCN 6 on left, university cycle paths centre & right)

The same area showing traces which have been uploaded to OpenStreetMap
(probably mainly by me)