What makes houses and streets belong to towns in Finland?

// It’s just missing data and missing mappers.
Collect house numbers is very hard work. :slight_smile:

Well, another question, not related directly to postal addresses. How should I assign speedlimit for roads in Finland?

In Russia we distinguish between streets (inside cities/villages) and roads (outside cities/villages), from the point of view of the traffic regulation.

For the streets speed limit is 60 kmph, and for roads speed limit is 90 kmph. For conversion purposes, I check if a highway is inside place polygon.

In some cases an address might carry an “extra” letter, such as Mannerheimintie 4a B 10 vs .Mannerheimintie 4b B 10. The house number 4a resp. 4b distinguishes two separate neighbouring houses.

Sometimes, when a house of flats does have just one entrance, the adress might look like Mannerheimintie 5 as. 10. In this case as. is short for asunto (flat) and means house number 5, flat 10.

The addresses of terraced houses or dual family houses might look like Mannerheimintie 6A, Mannerheimintie 6B, Mannerheimintie 6C - where A, B resp. C stands for an appartment entrance.

In Finland the concerning limits are usually 50 km/h resp. 80 km/h. Trunk/primary and sometimes even secondary roads 100 km/h and motorways 120 km/h. But in populated areas the speed limit might drop down to 30 or 40 km/h (on residential streets). And roads with an 80-limit might in wintertime get a speed limit of 70 km/h, as well as motorways down from 120 to 100 km/h.

How should I define which areas are populated from osm data? :slight_smile:

You can hope that all the buildings from the national mapping agency data get imported, and then you calculate buffer zones for every building, and turn those into suitable polygons where the buffers overlap enough :slight_smile: I don’t remember the exact distances for that. That’s the only definitive way I’ve read, on how to define them not-from-street-signs. Even that would give holes, which are not “outside” in reality. Other than that, it’s hard to get it right.

Only recently there has been some coordinated effort to collect these highway=city_limit signs. The only other way to be sure is maxspeed=50 + source:maxspeed=FI:urban, if somebody has bothered to tag it. Maxspeed=50 without the condition “inside populated place” is very rare on major highways. Small rural roads (tertiary and below) can have a 50 limit because of the curves and such, even outside populated places. I’d hope that most, if not all, primary highways have the lower speed limit sections tagged appropriately by now.

It would be hard to draw the populated areas as separate polygons, mostly because often the major highways penetrate deep into the populated area, but are not “inside populated area” themselves.

Other than that, you might get a good guess from “a place=city/town node is near and road is secondary or lower”. My wild guess is that most place=village 's are not “inside a populated area” with regards to the traffic rules - but at least some are (for example “Veikkola”). In the first sentence, “near” being roughly a radius of 2 km.

Let us know if you have a nice overlay with your guesses :slight_smile:

The speed limits are in Finland defined with “maxspeed” ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:maxspeed). The special thing in Finland is that we have different speed limit in summer (~from April to October) and winter. Those are usually defined with “maxspeed:seasonal:summer” and “maxspeed:seasonal:winter” tags. Sample: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/61840557/history. There is also few with maxspeed:summer / maxspeed:winter.

I did spend some time and create (bad) map about speed limits in Finland (situation 11.07.2012 / will not update): http://www.latukartta.fi/maxspeed/highway.html. The actual motivation was to make visual speed limits in my area - it’s easier to update stuff when you know what has being done. There is
for : maxspeed=120 define line-color : blue
elsefor : maxspeed=100 define line-color : red
elsefor : maxspeed=80 define line-color : yellow
elsefor : maxspeed=70 define line-color : black
elsefor : maxspeed=60 define line-color : green
elsefor : maxspeed=50 define line-color : purple
elsefor : maxspeed=40 define line-color : black
elsefor : maxspeed=30 define line-color : brown

Please also note that buildings can have multiple addresses in Finland (one for each adjacent street). These are mapped as nodes within building outline, each having one address.

Entrances (A, B, C, …) should be slowly removed from addr:housenumber and replaced with ref+entrance=staircase / entrance=home / entrance=x node that indicates the actual door position but whether that’s easy / possible to do with a reasonable accuracy on a particular area depends on quality of imagery. Sadly, in some recently built houses also entrances have started to use small letter for entrances in Helsinki (I think this is against some guidelines tough which tell you how they should be marked).


i.

Hi There!
I read this topic carefully, but still has question. Does the new municipalities (admin_level=8) means the city? I was last week in Kouvola and found that it covers a very large area (http://www.visitkouvola.fi/en/index/kouvolatanaan.html), and everything inside this area is in “City of Kouvola”, even the National Park Repovesi (40 km from the centre of Kouvola).

Could you please inform me, is the licence is cleared already or not yet?
If it is cleared - where can i get it?
Thank you in advance.

Officially, there are no cities in Finland, only municipalities. Cities were often founded by the crown and later, when Finland got independent, the state now and then granted the status of being a city. In 1995 cities were “abolished”. After that a municipality could declare itself a city, so nowadays one third of all municipalites are cities.

Kouvola was until 2008 a small city. In 2009 it ceased to exist together with five other cities/municipalities (Anjalankoski, Elimäki, Jaala, Kuusankoski & Valkeala) and these merged into the new city (municipality) of Kouvola. The area of “new” Kouvola is now 64 times larger than the area of the old one. The boundary of “new” Kouvola should be tagged with admin_level=8 and the boundaries of those former municipalites with admin_level=9. Borders of villages/suburbs within a municipality are tagged with admin_level=10. Admin_level=9 or 10 borders are hard to get, since they are not shown on the map of National Land Survey of Finland.

Thank you for quick reply.
Can I add place=town to the relation of “new” Kuovola to fix the problem with address search in our navigation software?
The problem is described in first message.
Now everything is clear, thanks.

There is also lots of other merging recently and in the future too, so expect “cities” to enlarge in Finland (on national politics level current rulers would want to significantly reduce the number of municipalities while municipality level politics tend to mostly oppose such plans so it’s hard to tell how things end up and on what schedule).


i.

Do this list is updated automatically or you update it manually? from time to time?

Another question:
Here http://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/aineistot-palvelut/rajapintapalvelut/rasteriaineistojen-palvelurajapinta-wms I found some data with municipalities borders.
Can smbd help me with translation (google translater couldn’t :slight_smile: ) - is this data is free? Can I use it in OSM? How can I connect this WMS in JOSM?

Thanks in advance

Updated mostly by me, since the OSM wikipages aren’t automatically updating themselves.

Yesterday I noticed that Potlach 1 is no longer in use. I used it to search for a specific relation (using a relevant name), since the search function (of relations) in Potlach 2 is still hardly usable. In P2 you have to know the correct id of a relation. Using google search “name + site:openstreetmap.org” isn’t that a handy replacement for the searching function of P1. Maybe there’s a better relation searching tool that I have missed?

Edit: Yesterday I also noticed that a couple of users have entered the border of the former municipality of Anjalankoski. They didn’t use a relation, but only ways to mark this level 9 border. I think the southern and eastern sections of that border are not correct.

I am not sure if it is better, but it could be more flexible. Download finland.osm.pbf from http://download.geofabrik.de/openstreetmap/europe/ and use Osmosis or some other tool to extract what you need, and then load the result into JOSM and use its search. I would try something like this:

osmosis --rb finland.osm.pbf --tf accept-relations boundary=administrative --used-way --used-node --wx finland-boundary-relations.osm
osmosis --rb finland.osm.pbf --tf reject-relations --tf accept-ways boundary=administrative --used-node --wx finland-boundary-ways.osm
josm finland-boundary-relations.osm finland-boundary-ways.osm

This should be shown in the above file finland-boundary-ways.osm.

I can still access Potlatch 1 by clicking “Edit”. I have set it as default editor in my preferences, but I’m not sure if this trick works for a long time, though.

I believe NLS themselves should do the translation:
http://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/en/opendata
http://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/en/NLS_open_data_licence_version1_20120501

It is “open” but there are some restrictions in 2.2

  • mention the name of the Licensor, the name of the dataset(s) and the time when the National Land Survey has delivered the dataset(s)
    and
  • require third parties to provide the same information when granting rights to copies of dataset(s) or products and services containing such data

These two are restricting the use of data in OSM unless some actions are agreed with NLS and also committed. There has been some discussion about how to tackle these two, though.

.

HACY
Thanks. I am not so good in official english, so I asked for reading in original (finnish) for more clear understanding.
Hence, adding tag source=NLS is not sufficient? It’s a pity…

Pikari
What is the source=MML 2012? Where I can get it for drawing municipalities borders?

I changed the default into P1 with no result. There’s no option for P1 in the edit menu. (Yes, I tried - even after closing and restarting my browser).

Edit: Ah, now it seems to work. I just chose edit and the P1 started “itself”.

Maanmittauslaitos = National Land Survey of Finland. Somehow not up-to-date background map images are here http://tiles.kartat.kapsi.fi/peruskartta/$z/$x/$y.jpg. By somehow I mean that the mapsite of MML (Kansalaisen karttapaikka) is a bit more up-to-date than the maptiles that are hosted in kapsi.fi (I’ve seen updates in karttapaikka that are not shown on the kapsi maptiles).

How can I use it?
In browser I’ve got

An error occurred: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '$z'
  File "/tilerender/mml/render/env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/TileCache-2.11-py2.6.egg/TileCache/Service.py", line 303, in wsgiHandler
    format, image = service.dispatchRequest( fields, path_info, req_method, host )
  File "/tilerender/mml/render/env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/TileCache-2.11-py2.6.egg/TileCache/Service.py", line 201, in dispatchRequest
    tile = TMS(self).parse(params, path_info, host)
  File "/tilerender/mml/render/env/lib/python2.6/site-packages/TileCache-2.11-py2.6.egg/TileCache/Services/TMS.py", line 23, in parse
    res = layer.resolutions[int(parts[2])]

or this is for JOSM?

This file should contain all the municipality borders in OSM format.
http://latuviitta.org/documents/kunnat.osm

Wonderful!!!
And may be last question - why you do not import it to OSM?