Mapping BT cabinets ?

A few months ago, as part of my general grumble about being on the only
one of the 4 BT exchanges which serve my general area which doesn't
currently offer FTTC, I decided to find and map the local BT PCP cabinets.
This just served to rub my nose in it further, as I'm not fed from the
geographically closest cabinets (they're on 2 of the other exchanges).

Anyway, like Topsy the mapping has just grown over the months, and a
couple of friends in the slightly wider area have contributed some more
cabinet locations - and thus grown the area where we have mapped all of
the cabinets.

But I'm now wondering whether to stop widening the mapped area more and
more, or whether to turn this into a proper crowdsourced type project ?

I don't have any smart ideas on how to go forward - at the moment I
just have an overlay on Google Maps (and I don't think this would scale
well to the whole country). To avoid publishing a crazy URL, what I've
mapped at the moment is linked from
http://www.adsb.co.uk/blog/bt_cabinets.html

And would the wrath of BT come down upon us for publishing their cabinet
locations ?

Ideas welcome.

--
Andrew

Andrew Benham <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> But I'm now wondering whether to stop widening the mapped area more and
> more, or whether to turn this into a proper crowdsourced type project ?

You could possibly merge the data into OpenStreetMap:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
You'd just need to create some tags for the cabinets, perhaps similar to:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Keyower

In fact, in GB it appears there's 72 cabinet=pstn, 56 cabinet=cable_tv,
13 cabinet=fttc, 148 utility=cabinet already mapped.

> And would the wrath of BT come down upon us for publishing their cabinet
> locations ?

Copyright: no, you did the research yourself
Terrorism: perhaps, but cross that bridge if you ever come to it

Theo

On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:51:29 +0100, Theo Markettos wrote:

> Andrew Benham <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> But I'm now wondering whether to stop widening the mapped area more and
>> more, or whether to turn this into a proper crowdsourced type project ?
>
> You could possibly merge the data into OpenStreetMap:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/
> You'd just need to create some tags for the cabinets, perhaps similar
> to: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Keyower
>
> In fact, in GB it appears there's 72 cabinet=pstn, 56 cabinet=cable_tv,
> 13 cabinet=fttc, 148 utility=cabinet already mapped.

OK, thanks for the info. I've tried adding a node for a PCP cabinet, but
discovered I don't know how to make use of the above info. I've tried
adding a key of 'cabinet' and a value of '72', but it didn't care for
that.
Nor have a managed to search for these nodes which anyone else has added.
I'm a bit of an Openstreetmap newbie...

Andrew Benham <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:51:29 +0100, Theo Markettos wrote:
> > You could possibly merge the data into OpenStreetMap:
> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/
> > You'd just need to create some tags for the cabinets, perhaps similar
> > to: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Keyower
> >
> > In fact, in GB it appears there's 72 cabinet=pstn, 56 cabinet=cable_tv,
> > 13 cabinet=fttc, 148 utility=cabinet already mapped.
>
> OK, thanks for the info. I've tried adding a node for a PCP cabinet, but
> discovered I don't know how to make use of the above info. I've tried
> adding a key of 'cabinet' and a value of '72', but it didn't care for
> that.
> Nor have a managed to search for these nodes which anyone else has added.
> I'm a bit of an Openstreetmap newbie...

OSM nodes can have arbitrary key=value tags. The above numbers are the
counts of the nodes on the GB map... so if you have a PSTN cabinet you'd add
cabinet=pstn to the map info for that node. The exact method of doing this
will depend on whatever editor you're using (can't run any at the moment to
check what the GUI does, but pick any node in an editor and you'll see its
existing tags)

Tagwatch gives me the above counts:
http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Great_britain/En/tags.html
In theory clicking on one of the tag links will more information on that tag
(perhaps where nodes with it can be found), but the server is very
overloaded at the moment:
http://xapi.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/*%5bcabinet=*%5d

I suppose you could download the whole dataset for the GB and search it?

Theo

On Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:14:59 +0000, Theo Markettos wrote:

> Andrew Benham <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:51:29 +0100, Theo Markettos wrote:
>> > You could possibly merge the data into OpenStreetMap:
>> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/
>> > You'd just need to create some tags for the cabinets, perhaps similar
>> > to: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Keyower
>> >
>> > In fact, in GB it appears there's 72 cabinet=pstn, 56
>> > cabinet=cable_tv, 13 cabinet=fttc, 148 utility=cabinet already
>> > mapped.
>>
>> OK, thanks for the info. I've tried adding a node for a PCP cabinet,
>> but discovered I don't know how to make use of the above info. I've
>> tried adding a key of 'cabinet' and a value of '72', but it didn't care
>> for that.
>> Nor have a managed to search for these nodes which anyone else has
>> added. I'm a bit of an Openstreetmap newbie...
>
> OSM nodes can have arbitrary key=value tags. The above numbers are the
> counts of the nodes on the GB map... so if you have a PSTN cabinet you'd
> add cabinet=pstn to the map info for that node. The exact method of
> doing this will depend on whatever editor you're using (can't run any at
> the moment to check what the GUI does, but pick any node in an editor
> and you'll see its existing tags)
>
> Tagwatch gives me the above counts:
> http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Great_britain/En/tags.html In theory
> clicking on one of the tag links will more information on that tag
> (perhaps where nodes with it can be found), but the server is very
> overloaded at the moment:
> http://xapi.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/*%5bcabinet=*%5d
>
> I suppose you could download the whole dataset for the GB and search it?

I suppose I could :-) I think I'll see if the server is ever quiet
enough for that xapi query to succeed.
Thanks for your help.

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--
RohiskReics