Different points or roads

Taking private notes on a survey with OsmAnd and processing them with JOSM is a breeze. Here’s how.

With this workflow you’re able to enter geo-referenced text while surveying and copy-paste it in JOSM. I do this to i.a. enter opening hours on the go.

tl;dr: Create quick actions in OsmAnd to create notes. Don’t upload, but export the notes as GPX. Open in JOSM, convert to data layer. Remove a note node when it’s done. Remove all notes in OsmAnd.

Personal notes?

If you don’t choose to upload your notes, they stay private.

Setting up OsmAnd

1. Enable the OSM editing plugin. (main menu → Plugins → tap the icon for OSM editing, it turns orange)
2. Enable quick actions. (main menu → Configure screen → switch Quick action to on)
3. Add a quick action for “add note”. (quick action → Add action → Add OSM note → switch Show interim dialog to on, leave message empty)

To save typing on things you add a lot, also add one-click quick actions for them. (Create a quick action like before, but switch interim dialog to off, and fill in a message.) I have those set up for bicycle parkings with the standard capacities that can be found all around Ghent: 5, 10 and 15. For non-standard parkings I can still create a manual note.

After surveying

On the device with OsmAnd

1. Export your notes as GPX. (main menu → My places → OSM edits → share icon → All data → GPX file)

2. A “share” menu will pop up to send the result somewhere. Get the file to your computer somehow. Some suggestions:

   • KDE Connect.
   • The Nextcloud app if you have a Nextcloud server.

On your computer

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I’m starting to get my head around using the brand tag where available, and find the iD pre-suggestions helpful, but I’m not quite sure about suggesting brands that are currently missing from the list.

I’ve found the details for the brand “Buzz Bingo”, and applied it to one branch within Plymouth (osm.org/way/725888265), but naturally having this as a pre-selection would be helpful, as they seem to have quite a few branches scattered around the UK.

I think the suggestion data would look something like this:

“amenity/casino|Buzz Bingo”: { “countryCodes”: [“gb”], “tags”: { “brand”: “Buzz Bingo”, “brand:wikidata”: “Q60746117”, “brand:wikipedia”: “en:Buzz Bingo”, “name”: “Buzz Bingo”, “amenity”: “casino” } }

… and would go within the “casino.json” file, but I’m not sure about adding this to the github dataset, as I don’t want to fluff anything up. I’m also not entirely sure if “casino” is the correct way to tag a bingo hall?

Is there any more brand experienced mappers who can either guide me in the right direction to learn more, or who could add the above to the correct location?

Based on a suggestion from the OSM community I added a special symbol for campsites which will need work.

All sites without a name tag or only a name tag are now marked with a ! symbol.

https://opencampingmap.org/

I not a very skilled designer, so feel free to make better Icons which I can merge.

Happy mapping.

Sven

Introduction

DEARPAUL24 has committed to revising any bus routes per recent changeset 79005275 whereas the private message has helped me to get off to the current comfort zone (which is Washington Place). Therefore, effective 2020, the new format for the PT routing syntax will be as follows:

Company/Cooperative Brand P2P/Filcab/jeep/UVEXP: Origin -> Destination E.g. MPTSC Filcab: Alpha -> Bravo

Updates on Infrastructure

E2/Alabang Viaduct got into breathing space since the first lane from the median on the northbound lane is hereby reserved for RFID users to take the elevated portion; meanwhile, CALAEx (Santa Rosa - Mamplasan) is opened 24/7. Daang Hari Extension (Open Canal) will likewise be improved for the next year as CALAEx (Cavite) is likely to complete by 2022.

Credits

Special thanks to @TagaSanPedroAko for the query

I went to Taichung for COSCUP Taigi Conference last Saturday. But I didn’t response some question very well, so I type for a better answers for the question attendee asked.

For the question regard of how many place hasn’t tag with name:nan which stand for Taiwanese, the number is 15,000. The name:hak which stand for Hakka language is much more, but the magnitude is quite the same level, around 15,000 place name that has no name:hak tag.

Some one ask about the API, one of the API OverPass API is quite useful for small amount data, and can use OverPass API with certain query script, finding out which place still lack Taiwanese name tag name:nan. Using the same query script, just replace name:nan with name:hak, and you can find out the place which lack Hakka language name for a place.

Link for the query：OverPass Turbo

Someone says Department of Geography of NTNU had already publish a place name dictionary 《台灣地名辭典》, which has local language name like Taiwanese and Hakka place name. It will be a good reference book for researching place name.

Currently OpenStreetMap place name is based on GNS database from the US military, and plus some place from 台灣堡圖. I feel good to know that some years ago there is a book publish by Department of Geography, NTNU, but due to copyright issue, we just can’t import all the name from the book to OpenStreetMap.

I have made several edits around the world related to the OSM coastline. My goal is to enable small-scale derivation of land and ocean polygons without resorting to global preprocessed continent geometries assembled from programs like OSMCoastline.

As a primer, the coastline should be mapped as ways with natural=coastline, with land on the left side and ocean on the right side. This is specified on the OSM wiki: Tag:natural=coastline. “Land” in this instance is defined as the non-ocean parts of the world, not solid ground in general; for example, the Great Lakes are represented not by coastlines but as water body features inside “land”.

There are a few implications to this design:

The ocean should be one polygon in the OGC Simple Features sense: it has one outer ring in the clockwise (CW) direction, and a counter-clockwise (CCW) inner ring for every continent and island. The Caspian Sea is the one exception to this single polygon as stated on the Wiki.

The complement of the global ocean polygon is thousands of land polygons representing continents and islands. Each polygon has a single CCW outer ring and zero inner rings. Again, the one exception is that the Eurasian continent polygon has a CW inner ring representing the Caspian Sea.

In theory, this specification should be enough to infer land and ocean polygons from orientation even within a small geographic extract. I discovered and corrected several dozen places where a violation of this specification arises. The image below is an example of data that needs to be corrected:

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Recently I’ve spent time improving detail in the Pierce Park neighborhood of Boise. This area has seen development over the last 10 years and OSM hadn’t quite caught up. Recently neighborhood discussions have been about private/public parks (that were not actually on the map, or weren’t quite bounded correctly), walking/bike routes (commonly used paths were not shown on the map) and canals (even major canals were missing.) I was able to get a majority of that cleaned up where it intersects Pierce Park Ln, as well as fix some issues with bus routes and parks to the west/southwest.

Although my duty is here (I live in this area) I’ll also try to cover the State St. corridor a bit better, as well as insure all NW Boise canals and feeders in the area are mapped, since there are a surprising number of them and they may become pathways in the future.

I haven’t been to Changchun Movie Theater around for a long time. Near Yitong Street, just back of the Changchun Movie Theater, there is a new residential site called Gentry Mansion (昇陽十里華), developing for urban renewal due to disaster prevention.

There are several restaurant in that site, I am curious about what store will open in the first floor. I already write down the address information for the store. Let’s wait and see what will open in the site.

Open Culture Foundation (OCF) had move away from Bade Road Section 1, around Guanghua Market. But the map website had not update the venue. Despite OpenStreetMap, even Google Maps does not update the venue.

I edit OpenStreetMap today, fixing OCF address on OpenStreetMap, adding the new office of OCF on Bade Road Section 4. I also summit a edit suggestion on Google Maps, hoping Google will accept my change as soon as possible.

It is quite strange for me that Facebook fanpage for OCF address is already update, on the street of Bade Road Section 4.

Taiwan Provincial Highway 12 in Taichung, is the famous Taiwan Boulevard, which linked Taichung City Downtown and Taichung Harbour. I edit and creat Provincial Highway 12 relation today. And I hope I can create route relation for each Provincial Highway route that doesn’t exist on OpenStreetMap in the future.

There are Provincial Highway 6, Provincial Highway 13, Provincial Highway 13A, Provincial Highway 61B, Provincial Highway 63, Provincial Highway 31, Provincial Highway 37, still don’t have route relation for each highway route. When I finish all Provincial Highway routes, I hope I can start working on City/County Highway and Country/District Highway.

It seems that even through villages of Orchiad Island’s name field was filled with both traditional Chinese and Tao language side by side, but the corresponend name field for the Tao language name:tao was not filled. So I rush to edit and fill the empty name:tao field. I also create the two road relations of Taitong County road system on the island.

I’ve made a little blog post about issues rendering names on a map that might be of interest.

On 29th November, GlobalLogic organized a mapping party with Swecha Hyderabad (NGO). The primary objective of this mapping party is to bring mapping awareness within the local community and create valuable data for the flood-affected region in India (Darbhanga, Bihar). About 18 local mappers joined the event and discussed about maps, open source tools and contributed roads in flood affected areas, the session ended with a Pizza and Cake. We are looking forward to conducting more such events in 2020 for spreading awareness of community mapping.

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In April of 2019 I became the transit planner for Sangamon Mass Transit District in Springfield, Illinois. This was a natural transition for me because I’d already been there for over a decade in an IT capacity and had intimate knowledge of how our schedules were run and, more importantly, how they needed to be represented digitally for public consumption.

About 4 years prior to this I managed to cobble together our first GTFS export that allowed passengers to navigate the system using Google Maps, Bing Maps, Here Maps, Moovit, and any other application that used GTFS information. Even though we weren’t broadcasting live data, the ability to retrieve static schedules via any serviceable smartphone made a huge impact and dramatically cut down on phone calls to our dispatchers - who now, ironically, almost exclusively reference the data as presented in Google Maps to give customers information anyway.

When I constructed our GTFS feed I searched far and wide for any and all applications or services that allowed me to submit it to them, and I vigorously tested each of them against each other to make sure our data wasn’t being misinterpreted or misrepresented. More often than not, any errors I found were the result of ambiguous data in the GTFS itself and not a failing on the part of the interpreter. So I refined and restructured and recalculated to remove any and all ambiguity, and I continue to do so every time I update it, even if it’s just a matter of moving the coordinates for a bus stop a few feet and recalculating the stop distances of multiple routes. I’m the authority on the information and I want it to be the best it can possibly be.

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Yesterday was the first meeting of the new OSMF board and i thought i’d write down some comments on it since it was noticeably different from previous meetings. With three of the previous board members having left, two of them having been on the board for a long time and one having been the chairperson for a long time it was obvious there were going to be changes and i want to share a few impressions of this from an outside perspective.

What has not changed is that many of the board members seemed remarkably unprepared. This is not necessarily a big deal, board members are volunteers and you cannot necessarily expect everyone to sit down for a few hours before the meeting preparing themselves for all subjects that might be discussed. But i as someone who just listens in and does zero preparation for that other than looking at the agenda five minutes before the start often find myself wondering when a matter comes up why no one is ready to discuss it. This especially applies to this first meeting after the election when the election of treasurer, secretary and chairperson are obviously on the agenda so you would assume that those who consider one of these positions to have made up their mind if they want it or not. Don’t get me wrong - i am generally a huge fan of just winging it - but you have to be able to do that if you want to.

The meeting started with everyone being unsure about who would chair the meeting since neither the former chairperson nor the former secretary were on the board any more. Ultimately Paul assumed the position of temporary chair since he had formerly been secretary. But it might be a good idea to make a note of the problem and add a rule for that to the board rules of order in the future.

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The following is copied from the Indiana University website:

“The bulk of Indiana University’s Russian Military Topographic Map Collection is made up of the Soviet Red Army topographic maps, which were produced for defense and economic planning. This collection came to Indiana University from the duplicate map room of the Library of Congress Map Collection in the early 1990s. These maps cover not only parts of Russia and Eastern Europe, but extend as far north as Scandinavia, as far west as Germany and the Netherlands, and as far south as Iran.

“An interactive index map of the collection is located here: https://iu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=098c42997ca441029b69f0597ff92ea6

“For more information, visit the Cyrillic Maps Collection.”

There are very few maps of Central Asia, but coverage of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, and eastern Germany is pretty good. The maps of former Soviet states are uncopyrighted, but odds are good that coverage outside the USSR was taken in violation of local copyrights and so may not be used in OSM.

As you may be aware, the “switch2osm” site recently moved from Wordpress to Github. This means that it’s easy to request changes to the site over at the github repository. Any changes made there will automatically go live on the main site after a minute or so.

“Requesting changes” might mean commenting on existing issues or creating new ones (which will need someone else to make the code or text changes you’ve requested), or it might mean suggesting the changes yourself via a “pull request” - a list of specific changes you’d like to see made. Here is an example of a pull request - you can see what it’s a change from and to, and on this page you can see any comments and when it was merged in and by whom.

Obviously, if people can contribute via pull requests rather than just creating issues it’s better for everyone - it means that you’re not relying on someone else reinterpreting the changes that you’d like making, and it’s quicker for the maintainers too.

Normally if you wanted to make a major change to something on this site you’d “fork” a copy of the repository into your own github area, create a “branch” from that that relates to the change that you’d like to make, “clone” that locally into an environment on a local machine that allows you to test the site locally, make your changes, test your changes in a local web browser, submit your changes back to your copy of the site, and then create a pull request explaining the change you’d like to make.

What you may not know is that for simple textual changes you can actually do the whole process online. That’s not appropriate for anything that might break links, but for simple text changes (like the example above) it’ll work just fine, and this is what the rest of the diary entry describes.

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Started recording GPX traces with OSMTracker then Garmin Venture HC before moving full time to OSMAnd.

I gave tracking with Vespucci recently a shot it was smooth than I thought, from Abidjan to Accra here.

Try it too! Cheers!

My Promised Targets

Last year I set down my mapping new years’ resolutions well before January. So wouldn’t it be fun, and also embarressing :) to review these and see if I had the year I hoped to have. My diary entry a year ago is here. Set out the various targets.

My Hot-Spot

I wanted my heat map to shift to Ireland. While it is true that I developed a number of heatmap centres in Ireland, I achieved these by following the dispersed regional community initiatives (remote tasks and face to face meetups) set by #osmIRL. This meant that I didn’t have a particular area into which the aggregate effect of highly intense mapping could be channeled. So my big heatmap remains in Lesotho, and because it built up over 4 years it may stay that way for a while. However, considering I wouldn’t have made my largest hot-spot shift anyway, I regard the case of measles I have caused on the linked map to be a success.

My Ireland Rank

Next, I want to maintain a top 10 place in the Ireland 2 monthly contributor list. I was able to do this exept for twice, as in June I fell to 20th and in August I was 25th. This was caused by a lovely summer where I went outdoors a bit more plus my old trusty laptop had some issues and I couldn’t afford to replace it immediately. I have learned that to stay on top (top10) in Ireland one can have 2 week breaks, but no longer. In 2020 I will not have breaks longer than 2 weeks.

Map on the move

I wanted to hit the Mapillary millionare status by the end of January, and then I wanted my total in Ireland to hit 1 million by the end of June. I comfortably made it with both these, and my Mapillary is now 1,292,702, and I don’t want to set more targets here, except to capture images where osmIRL needs them most of all.

Mapping Gaps

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