The last post explained some of the background on the use of Wikipedia page links and other information in Nominatim. This post covers looking into Wikidata as another source of information that may be of use. Wikidata is the knowledgebase of the Wikimedia foundation. It was founded in 2012 with the goal of collecting factual data used in Wikipedia across all languages. The project is maintained by over 20,000 active community contributors.

The Wikidata repository consists mainly of items, each one having a label, a description, and any number of aliases. Items are uniquely identified by a Q followed by a number, such as:

• Q936 → OpenStreetMap

Statements describe detailed characteristics of an Item and consist of a property and a value. Properties in Wikidata have a P followed by a number, such as:

• P112 → founded by
• P275 → license

Properties can point to values, such as:

• P2124 → member count

Or properties can point to values that represent other concepts, such as:

… See full entry

Please use this space to contribute feedback on the proposed path tagging schema.

If buildings are to be placed on a smaller scale maps, they must be prepared: simplified, then typified and finally aggregated/amalgamated.

Building simplification is not the same as line/polygon simplification (done with DP or VW algorithms). When simplifying building, you want characteristic details to remain: for example most buildings have square shapes, that must remain in simplified version.

Example of building simplification:

Here dashed polygon - original building, yellow one - simplified to specified amount.

As you can see square angles have been preserved as well as larger details while smaller details have been removed.

… See full entry

Thank God am now a member of unique mappers

I’ve been very stupid lol sorry for the mistakes I was just testing

Wijzigingenset: 72604895 #hotosm-project-5652, #TanzaniaDevelopmentTrust Same District missing buildings 4 days ago geleden gesloten door Alessandro Steinhart| Message send. Follow medio august 2019

New proposal for categorising paths: osm.wiki/Proposed_features/path_defined_by

I previously wrote about the challenges of categorising paths - and created a (failed) proposal for a tagging scheme.

As is the way with Openstreetmap the proposal I wrote then failed to catch anyone’s excitement/interest. But the mapping of paths continues to pose real issues. So I recently wrote another proposal - this time to try to define paths according to how they have arisen - whether they are constructed or simply worn lines on the ground, and whether they are defined by markers or arise perhaps from wear by animals (but are also used by people).

As I’ve said in the proposal: >”Paths vary hugely in character - but current mapping struggles to capture the differences. There have been various attempts to agree a simple method to categorise or rank paths and path status. … What people call a ‘path’ varies hugely. In theory it might be best to record path attributes and to categorise paths according to this data, but in practice this is entirely unrealisitic (at least in the short term). To classify a path adequately it is necessary to take into account at least path width, incline, tilt, variation in tilt/incline, degree of camber, edge quality and character, surface material, surface material grade, surface compactness, surface slipperyness, smoothness, and visibility. Partly issues also arise because paths are used by people with such different needs - whether for example on foot, in small motorised vehicles, on one of many very different bicycle designs, in one of many wheelchair designs, or pushing many different forms of wheeled equipment. This means that it becomes almost impossible to agree on simple definitions of some important characteristics (such as ‘smoothness’).”

I’d welcome comments - the proposal is here osm.wiki/Proposed_features/path_defined_by

tl;dr the release notes 📗

The latest version of MapRoulette, 3.3.3, was released today on maproulette.org. There have been a few notable new features and updates since I last wrote about MapRoulette in the 3.3 release post, so here’s a new diary entry to talk about what has happened since in MapRoulette land!

Virtual Projects

Challenges are organized in Projects. A Project lets you, or your organization, organize Challenges that belong together. You can create as many projects as you like, and move Challenges between them if you want. Each Project’s page lets you review progress metrics and comments for all challenges in a project, combined. This is pretty handy, but also a bit limited. That’s why we added Virtual Projects. Virtual Projects are different in a few ways:

• You can add any Challenge to a Virtual Project, not just your own.
• Challenges can belong to more than one Virtual Project.

Just like regular Project pages, your Virtual Project’s page has progress metrics and comments related to all challenges that are currently in your Virtual Project. You create a Virtual Project just like you would a regular Project.

Improved Mapillary integration

We introduced a Mapillary overlay in version 3.1.1, but it was not so great to use yet. We have improved it a lot, it now shows Mapillary image locations that are more relevant to the task location, and we use the native Mapillary viewer widgets, so you can zoom in and easily skip to the next or previous images in a Mapillary sequence.

… See full entry

I shot and added as an experiment the aerial sphere 360 panorama to the OpenStreetMap for the lake Lac de Tseuzier: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1642268

The sphere panorama itself is located on the DJI’s website: https://www.skypixel.com/photo360s/spark-78d50747-504a-4a84-90c9-6a02357eb70e .

Here is the link to the same panorama on Google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/GZjbKr1J7hy3WgYU7 , and in the Street-View mode it is shown on the map as a small blue circle.

The area of this lake is about one square kilometer. The size of the panorama file is 1.8 MB. It is created with the Spark quad-copter, which weighs less that 500 grams. Spark creates and publishes the aerial sphere 360 panoramas to the Skypixel website automatically from the DJI Go 4 app.

I added it with the “image” tag. In my opinion, it is time to introduce a new OSM tag for the aerial sphere panoramas.

This is my first pin to easily locate my research area in Pune.

Dear OSM Community,

At Amazon we are coming across a situation where unmaintained track roads have no access tags. We would like to know your suggestions/feedback on how to tag these roads.

Track Roads:

By definition track roads implies traversal of motor vehicles and are mostly used for agricultural use. We have private GPS traces showing where delivery vehicles go, and when we match them against OSM data, we see they’re going along highway=track ways. We want to add appropriate access tags so that routers can route correctly along the data in the future.

The driver trace is on-the-ground evidence that the road can be used by motor vehicles for deliveries, but we have no evidence either way that the road can be used for general traffic.

There are four different ways we’ve come up to tag this information:

1. motor_vehicle = yes

… See full entry

Date: 22/07/2019

Today I mapped a village near the town of T’boli in Indonesia. I have made 63 changes in total. This includes adding a tributary and a confluence to the Allah river. I also mapped out several building and a few residential roads too.

We discussed and planned for the forthcoming mapathon challenge and the training for local youth mappers #ABSUMappersTeam #OSMNigeria

Had the first Validation training on the use of JOSM to validate edits. Emphasis was on the need to maintain standard, ensure accuracy and meet the need of the user. Timeliness of validators inputs was reemphasized and the need to encourage local mappers while correcting and advising them on the best mapping practice

So, I’ve not really gotten into Open Street Maps, but figured that I might delve into it a bit, as I’m not liking Google as much these days. - I use an Android phone, so any hints or tips would be welcomed. - I can be found on Mastodon as @randynose@fosstodon.org or on Twitter (not checked as often) as @RandyNose.

Randy 07-21-19

As I was working on improving the visualization of route relations I had to improve the data part of the public transport. now one can get the nearest way to a bus stop and all stops a way is serving. stop can be identified as left or right side according to the direction of the way it is serving. these features of the data will help in making the edges in route relation which will be my next task. By using these it has also improved the sorting of pt_route members including the stop which was not working properly before(was creating the duplication of stops when it was passing through a two-way road).

Tonight I made the worst mistake I’ve ever done on OSM - straightening everything.

By “everything”, i mean everything on the edit windows,

and then uploaded it.

I have spent two hours and a half mapping the City of Lai Châu in northwestern Vietnam. It was founded in 2008 after the establishment of Lai Chau province.

The city is amazing thanks to its good planning, with wide boulevards and large and beautiful squares and parks.

I’ve drawn a lot of facilities in the past 3 days. And tonight I drew some more, such as square, parks, and schools and buildings.

Then, I mistakingly hit Ctrl-A, which selects Evverything on the map. Not realising the mistake, I then pressed “L”, which straightened those selected.

At this time, the app froze for 20 seconds, which made me think, perhaps it’s too heavy and it’s time to Upload.

I did it - uploaded it.

Now I’ve running Revert to roll back the damages I made.

My hard work is gone!!!!

Don’t be like me.

The map tiles on the default OSM homepage display the international borders of India as per the defacto ground situation (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:India_disputed_areas_map.svg#Notes). To comply with Indian law, please use one of the OSM India tileservers or setup your own instance with the boundaries of J&K and Arunachal Pradesh as per the Survey of India (http://www.surveyofindia.gov.in/pages/display/190-public-awareness).

The link below describes the details process of :

https://github.com/azaadshatru/OSM

1. Building your own OSM Tile Server on Ubuntu.
2. Using OSMBright Stylesheets.
3. Loading India specific data to tile server.
4. Correcting Map of India.
5. Sample configuration files.

OpenClipArt Twitter Statement

6:53 am - 3 May 2019 — UPDATE: Our plan is to get the site back online early next week. Under DDOS attack from some unknown forces, the simplest thing to protect our beloved Openclipart is to keep offline at present. Your CLIPART is SAFE.

I was trying to obtain an EPS pair of scissors this evening using File | Import Clip Art… under Inkscape (which is setup to use openclipart.org by default) but got zero result, not even an error message. The OCA index page showed a most peculiar message (“Openclipart is PROTECTED.”) which did not help someone in my position that was unaware of the cause. Then finally DuckDuckGo got me there to twitter.

You will see that these OSM Diaries also suffered constant bot attack starting late April which caused the site admin to take them offline from Search-Engines on 24 May (and again on 23 Jun) as to stop the attacks. It surely cannot be a coincidence that two non-commercial sites run by volunteers both suffered DDOS attacks within a few days of each other, causing both admin to hide their sites from public view as to mitigate the attacks. Of course, the reason for those attacks is still currently unknown.

The nature of these DDOS attacks is also uncertain. OSM used the site-wide robots.txt (see also diary/390115) to stop the bot-flood (OCA does not appear to have a robots.txt). That was physically enacted by two ‘Disallow’ lines in the text-file:

Disallow: /user/*/diary
Disallow: /diary

If you understand that the Robots exclusion standard is advisory, a little bit of thought will make it obvious that the fact that the bots stopped when the above was placed into robots.txt means that they were spam-bots. However, there were zero links or spam within (most of) their posts. Further, DDOS actions are almost always as to extract large amounts of money from the victims (it is effectively a technological mugging). What is the point in mugging non-commercial sites?

At OSM Utah, we hold an OSM mapping night every month. If you are in the Salt Lake City area, you should stop by. The details are on our Meetup group.

This month we will do a photo mapping night. Photo mapping is a great way to collect information to map later. Every smart-phone has a built in GPS these days, and let you attach location data to any photo you take. JOSM lets you open photo image files, or even an entire directory with ‘geotagged’ images, and will display them as markers on the map.

It works like this. As you walk around, you just take photos of things you think may not be on OSM yet and you want to map later. That could be anything from a general photo of a building (to map things like roof type, levels), a sign with opening hours of a business, a fire hydrant, a hiking trail (to map width, surface type). Anything that you wouldn’t be able to map from aerial imagery, either because it’s too small, likely obstructed by tree cover, or it can only be observed at street level.

Here’s a few photos I took recently

… See full entry