Diary Entries in English

Recent diary entries

It seems difficult to locate boules courts in Kuala Lumpur, using various sources such as pictures (and shadows), sat images, maps … For example, I contacted Petanque Uputra, to map their courts, but they seems resilient to release geographic information… This feels useless, because satellite data will eventually reveal their location… I finally nailed it.

While trying to locate Petanque KL (I think I found it), I discovered the difficulty of working with outdated sat data. THis is the location I thin I found : osm.org/?mlat=3.12394&mlon=101.73567#map=18/3.12394/101.73567 The sat image providers in OSM show this area as covered in woods, while Google Maps shows the most recent data…

This quest started when a petanque contact Bayarsaikhan (MN) drew my attention to the 2019-09-13/17 Asian Oceania Bocce Junior championships in Putrajaya.

It seems that many schools in Malaysia have petanque facilities.

Location: Pudu Ulu, Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, 51500, Malaysia
Posted by juminet on 8 September 2019 in English. Last updated on 8 December 2019.

In this page, a collection of infos about how useful is OSM for tourist operators. Mainly fed by weeklyOSM news.

Posted by SimonPoole on 7 September 2019 in English.

While keeping a quarterly minor or major release schedule is a bit of an uphill battle, I believe the work on the next major version of Vespucci has progressed far enough that the first beta will be made available later this month (snapshot development builds are available now).

The fall releases always tend to suffer from porting to the next mandatory Android API/SDK version and this one is not different. I assume that this typically consumes a man-month of development work, this time around it doesn’t seem to be quite so bad however there are still a few issues I haven’t resolved that need to be fixed before release.

The bad news is that this will be the last release that will support an Android 2.3-3.0 compatible build. The reason is that to be able to continue to follow googles minimum target API/SDK rules we will have to switch to a new packaging of the Android libraries that provide backward support for older versions of Android (this implies that the estimated one man month for following google changes for next year is very optimistic). As all the package names have changed it is simply not feasible to use an old support library as we have done up to now for the legacy build with minimal addition version specific code. Undoubtedly it is a side effect of the packaging change that google is quite happy with.

My intent is to revive the legacy build for 4.0-4.3 devices when google drops support for them, which is likely not far away.

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Posted by kamicut on 5 September 2019 in English.

Today Development Seed is excited to launch mapping.team. At the core of this platform is the new OSM Teams API, a platform-agnostic tool for mappers, organizations and developers to coordinate mapping and build communities. Visit dev.mapping.team to start creating teams of OSM users, or use the OSM Teams API to integrate the service into your own app.

Why Teams?

OpenStreetMap has over 1 million users who have contributed at least one changeset. Among those 1 million users, the motivations to map vary drastically. For some it’s a hobby, others voluntarily map to help people in need, and others are part of organizations who pay them to map, or students in classrooms exploring the globe. Regardless of the motivation, OSM has brought people together to collaborate and create the largest map database of the world.

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Posted by FinB2000 on 4 September 2019 in English.

Hello mappers,

I’m currently adding buildings around Ringland to the map, and I need your help.

I’ve also noticed that most buildings and houses haven’t been mapped in Newport, so it would be great if you could add them.

“The more we map together, the sooner we’ll finish.”

Happy mapping, FinB2000

Location: Ringland, Llanwern, Newport, Wales, United Kingdom
Posted by Polyglot on 2 September 2019 in English. Last updated on 8 September 2019.

(Work in progress)

During the summer of 2019 Ashish Singh worked on further improvements to PT_Assistant. He improved the data model, which led to a better functioning of sorting stops in public transport routes. It could also lead to nicer visualisations of the routes, but that has not been implemented yet.

In this diary entry I want to highlight some of the new features and explain others that existed before.

Public transport

Validator

In the validator everything related to public transport is prepended with PT:

  • It can detect that routes can be fixed by simply resorting the ways

  • Or that stops aren’t served.

  • It also reports when the highway is not suitable for the mode of transport

  • Or that the vehicle goes against oneway traffic, or takes a turn where there is a turn restriction

Visualisation

The route that is currently selected or for which the relation editor has focus (it’s on top) is highlighted in purple with the stops in yellow. The stops have the ref of the route, followed by a sequence number.

Relation Editor

Routing Helper

  • The routing helper was added last year and is now better on (wrongly) split roundabouts

  • There is also a new option, which makes it possible to split the way that is painted in white. The way that was added last in most cases. If a user does this by selection option 8, they get the possibility to make a turn before the white way’s end node is reached. The user selects option 1, 2 or 3. Often there is only 1, or goes further back by using option 8. Once a turn is selected, it is the white way that is split and the side road becomes the new white way.

Demo

Stops sorter

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Posted by tchaddad on 2 September 2019 in English.

Summer has come to an end, and so this post is to wrap up the progress made over the course of the “Add Wikidata to Nominatim” project. Overall, the main contributions are documented in the 4 preceding diary posts, and in:

  • updated steps for extracting Wikipedia data and calculating importance scores
  • a new script for extracting Wikidata items and place types

These new processes have made big improvements in several OSM-to-Wikipedia comparison metrics as compared to equivalent numbers from 2013 (when the previous Wikipedia snapshot was taken).

Improved Numbers

For context, the number of Wikipedia articles in the top 40 languages in 2013 was 80,007,141, and the number of Wikipedia articles for the same 40 languages in 2019 was 142,620,084 - an increase of ~78%.

Within these article records, in 2013 it was possible under the old processing steps to attach latitude and longitude numbers to 692,541 articles, while in 2019 it was possible to enrich 7,755,392 records with location information - an increase of ~1,020%. This particular statistic largely reflects an improvement in the source Wikipedia / Wikidata projects.

More exciting, with the old method of linking Wikipedia articles to osm_ids, it was possible to link 313,606 Wikipedia article importance scores to osm_ids, but with the new method that uses both Wikidata item ids, and Wikipedia pages together, the number of Wikipedia article importance scores that can be linked has risen to 4,730,972 - an increase of ~1,409%. This increase is due to both the large number of Wikipedia and WIkidata tags added by OSM contributors since 2013, as well as the inclusion of Wikidata item ids in the linking process for the first time via this project.

Future Work

Although the project technically concludes today, there are obviously always areas of future work where more gains can be made. These include:

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