Looking back to 2019,I have the following bits of contributions and moments for my diary record in favour of OpenStreetMap Community and sustainability.

1 . Initiated and hosted series of planing meetings to activate community participation ,growth and expansion of OpenStreetMap Community in Nigeria ,especially,in January 2019.

2 . Contributed and also advocated for HOT Microgrant 2019 donations

3 . Applied for HOT Microgrant 2019 to drive Local community projects in Nigeria but luck was not on our side

4 . Participated in Regional Meetings for OSM Africa Coordination ,especially,when,time permits

5 . In April ,I made sure my local community hosted International Women Day (IWD)2019 to drive gender equality in mapping community and geospatial women empowerment.This also was used to campaign for LetGirlsMap program. For me ,this event has come to stay after succesully hosting it same period in 2018. For 2019 IWD ,the event was tagged :Geospatial Technology the Solution for Women Transformation:Balance for better.

6 . From July to August ,facilitated Mapathon training for Local UniqueMappers Communities at Abia State,Imo State ,Enugu State and Anambra State respectively in Nigeria

7 . Started up UniqueMappers Awka at Nmandi Azikiwe University Awka with the help of Prof.Ifeanyi Enete who mobilzed compus community members comprising of students and staff

8 . Started up UniqueMappers Yola credits to Nnadozie Onyeukwu (State Coordinator) and Saliha who worked very hard to kick-start activities for this local team of UniqueMappers without me travelling to Adamawa state to coordinate.And todate their whatsaap group is quite lively and with active osmites.

9 . Finally succeeded in getting UniqueMappers registered with the Federal Government of Nigeria as the NGO for OpenStreetMap Nigeria Community.This would help to re-position our OSM community efforts for effective project and stake-holders driven community engagement

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What?

There is a place to be mapped. The area is usually too large for one guy. Involving a team of mappers is, therefore, evident. And there is an excellent approach to solving big problems called divide and conquer. Therefore Divide and map. Now. – the damn project.

The goal is to split a large area to squares a human can map. Then, lock a square, work on it, and mark ready for review. Lock again, review the square, and mark as done. The project is here to avoid overwriting work between mappers.

If this sounds familiar, you probably know the HOT’s Tasking Manager. (HOT stands for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.)

Why?

There are issues with the HOT Tasking Manager. Mainly performance issues. Then, slowly forgetting about essential functionality. Unwanted updates as the necessity of email address (I really hate this!). And only one repository for the whole project.

These are technical issues, however. What about community issues? Why Google disk when there is OpenStreetMap wiki? Why Slack where you must be invited and logged to (just!) see the history? Why all these sign-up Google forms to contribute? I will try to guess an answer – because HOT is a company (even non-profit) and does not know how to be an open community.

Before you ask “If you are so smart, why you do not contribute to Tasking Manager?”, I tried 1, 2, 3, 4. However, there is no real discussion about the future of the Tasking Manager. The future is already decided; openness means that you can see the source code and fix bugs. Nothing more.

Who?

Let’s talk about the potential damn community. It starts with mappers. I will split mappers to novices, experts, reviewers (or validators), and mentors. Mappers are the most critical and the largest group, so the tool they use should be efficient, stable, and comfortable.

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On the night of October 23, 2019, just close to 10 pm when I was about to go to bed, I received an email notification so I opened it and it read:

Congratulations!

Thank you for submitting your application for the State of the Map Africa2019 in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast. It is our pleasure to inform you that based on the results of the reviews by our scholarship committee team, you have been selected to receive a full scholarship that will…..

I was beaming while I read the mail, I was so happy. I wonder how I managed to sleep that night. It was going to be the first time I left Ghana in so many years, to a place I had fond memories of as a kid and a chance to meet people who share the same interest and are passionate about what they do. You could not blame me for being that happy, could you?

A few days to the conference I booked a bus ticket ahead of my travel from Intercity STC Coaches. Yup! I travelled by road from Accra to Grand Bassam. I was joined by Victor Ezwugu who was coming from Nigeria and we both travelled from Accra to Grand Bassam. I enjoy long journeys but this one got tiring and long for me, maybe I just couldn’t wait to arrive. After about 10 hours we arrived at VITIB (venue for the conference).

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Hello All and Happy New Year,

I’d like to present my latest pet project: #NorthernBeachesSolar

Inspired by an UK based project I wanted to do something similar in front of my doorstep.

The wiki page gives some details about tags I’m using as well as three changesets that are part of this project.

I wanted to share this and collect some feedback or comments.

Cheers, Seb

I’ve been scanning Soviet military maps for information relevant to the OSM map of Turkmenistan, coupled with data collected between 2015 and 2019, and among other things have identified yet another numbered highway, the P-28. It connects the A-388 highway south of Yoloten to Tagtabazar and a few villages to the east and southeast, all the way to the Afghanistan border. Bit by bit, the OSM map of Turkmenistan is becoming ever richer.

At some point I intend to do a fulsome correction of Turkmenistan’s borders. The existing ones were largely drawn from CIA maps to get something in place but are not as accurate as the lines on the Soviet military maps. Bear with me, this will be a time-consuming project! But as winter sets in, when it is cold outside and the rain is coming down, doing this will be more attractive than chopping firewood or pruning dead limbs, and I will get to it.

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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