TL;DR: head over to http://taghistory.raifer.tech/ for usage graphs of arbitrary OSM tags over time (by number of OSM objects).

In OpenStreetMap, tags define what an object is. Whether it is a mountain, a river, a house, or a postbox: Every map feature has it’s own tag (or set of tags).

OSM doesn’t have a fixed set of object categories. Over time, a more and more faceted and diverse set of features got mapped in OSM, thus the amount of different tags grew. At the same time, sometimes, tagging of a specific thing changes: Features that used to be mapped with one tag, get newer, better and more refined tags. That’s OpenStreetMap evolving.

Of course, OpenStreetMap is also still growing, but not all the tags are getting more widely used at the same pace: For example, while it’s quite possible that most of the world’s railway stations are already mapped in OSM, there are still many juicy pastures left to be mapped out there.

… See full entry

Philly Needs some Work

Let it be known…

…that about two weeks ago I decided to undertake an epic journey to more fully map my city of Philadelphia. I am starting by randomly mapping around South Philly. So far I’ve partially completed East Passyunk to Washington and parts moving into Point Breeze. I know this will probably take a year(s). I will eventually be reporting on my progress on my blog.

I’m leaving this diary entry here as a placeholder. I should have done it when I started, but we’ll just guess that I started on… August 17th, 2016? Sure, let’s go with that.

Wish me luck.

Check out this thing which I just got working again:

>>> Long Names of OpenStreetMap <<<

So that’s elements with a name tag, where the name seems to be very long. It’s a full list of the longest names in the planet (>150 chars)

I just found this old code and dusted it off. I made it originally back in May 2010 when Richard Weait ran a “Project of the week” looking at long names. I called it “namecheck” at the time, but I’m renaming it “longnames”.

A crazy long name is probably a data bug to be fixed. It certainly looks like a bug when we try to render it.

But… well taking that example. Here we have a few university buildings, each with a name, which list several departments. Can we class this as wrong? I think so, yes, but I’ll have to make a hand-wavy non-scientific judgement: I’d say it ceases to be a name of the building and becomes more of a “description” when it gets that long…. in this case. And maybe that’s a problem for a lot of them.

… See full entry

Found myself at the Royal Observatory this morning (on the map), and discovered a bit of trivia since I expected to be located at longitude: 0°0 as my geography class would have made me believe. Well, its not:

Prime meridian at Greenwich. CC-by-sa ChrisO

The prime meridian established at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in 1851 is actually at 0°0′5.3″W, thats 102m west of the the 0°0 prime meridian used in the WGS 84 coordinate system. Why? Because the modern coordinate system was corrected to have its origin at the Earth’s centre of mass.

Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_meridian#International_prime_meridian

… See full entry

In the past few weeks, I have been busy with Iran Import Project. After an unsuccessful upload attempt on August 22, 2016, which I tried to upload the level 4 and 6 administrative boundaries of Iran, unfortunately, the JOSM crashed and around 136000 untagged nodes were added to the OSM, I decided to change my approach and follow the OSM import guideline.

After preparing the data in OSM and running validation tools in JOSM, they data finally was ready to be uploaded to the server. There was some missing Persian character in some of the name tags; hence, they were replaced by the correct character.

Before uploading the data, all the previous level 6 boundaries were deleted and level 4 boundaries were kept intact. The upload was executed on September 04, 2016 using JOSM upload by chuck function. After the initial upload, the outer border of our OSM file was deleted and the current level 2 boundaries of Iran were kept.

Currently, we are fixing the relations that share a member from level 2 boundary of Iran.

Cheers.

My very first Diary entry concerned paranoia within the English Middle-Class, and a July entry documented a slow pursuit by such a guy up a steep hill. There have been many others, always a pain but undocumented, and the “Middle-Class ‘Paranoid Guy’” (MPG) has therefore become a stock item for me. However, I’ve now discovered how to teach others to discover his lair (read on)…

Yesterday’s (Monday, 29 August 2016) MPG was dislodged from his lair in a bungalow in The Mount, a Neighbourhood Watch area near the top of Marshall Hill. Now, the opening sentence of this paragraph has actually just given you some important clues; one or more of the following will make it likely that a MPG is around:—

1. A street with a pretentious name
2. A detached/semi-detached house or (best of all) a bungalow
   (these men—they are almost always men—are normally retired) (like me)
3. Their street has a Neighbourhood Watch and they are active within it

… See full entry

Hello dear OSM community.

It was been a while since i posted in the diary.

I had made a new script that i had put in the OSM postGIS scripts repo https://github.com/baditaflorin/osm-postgis-scripts

You can find it in the statistics folder, under the name highway_length_per_type_different_attr.sql

How can you do the same for your country or region ?

First, download and run the scope.sh (linux) or the scope.bat (win) utility that you will use to load the file into postGIS.

After you load the file in postGIS, you just have to connect to the database either in PgAdmin or via Qgis Dbmanager and copy and paste the code.

It took 20 seconds to generate this result for the map of Romania (~150 MB pbf file)

Please help me with ideas of what other scripts would there be interesting for you. Thanks and see you at SOTM in 3 weeks

I am doing mapping in osm science 2015 and I started doing mapping of my [village and surrounding areas] (osm.org/#map=16/22.1680/87.9135). It is a great experience to see my village on map. Here we can see the [temporal changes] (http://osm-analytics.org/#/compare/polygon:kffwOcrcfCesOnrAscA%7DuMlwOs%7C%40/2015…now/buildings) from 2015 to present for buildings and roads.

I do not know quite how I managed not to see these the last time I passed the tennis courts close to Huckerbys Field, but I didn’t:—

It was 27 July 2016 and I made a Diary Entry. My walk was along the identical path, just in the opposite direction. Well, whatever; they will be up on the map shortly.

My favorite part of OSM is fixing the TIGER data, as I previously mentioned. I am getting much more efficient, and I am even exploring areas further away from my home location. Unfortunately, the one part of my process that has let me down is my smartphone device. I am surprised by this, but I think it shows focus has moved away from TIGER review, in this time of the ubiquitous smartphone.

When I am on the ground checking road names and intersections, it is hugely helpful to check my screen for OSM data. It has replaced all the pen and paper requirements. But the one thing that I cannot see is whether the tiger_reviewed=no tag is present. The lack of this information has had me checking streets where I had already checked previously.

There is a nice web service run by the folks at ITO World, which shows the TIGER review status of all the roads, but this information is not updated often. It is also not available offline. In saying this, it occurs to me that I can take a screenshot of the ITO World website map, save it to my smartphone, then reference it in the field.

cafe

Need to tidy up some post boxes (ref, type, operator): Tag:amenity=post_box. Must make a note to check the wiki earlier!

This is a small meditation upon the fragility & fleeting nature of life and an encouragement, from one who is becoming old, to fix your gaze upon what you can be & never to stop.

I found a couple of houses on my last survey that appeared to be abandoned. The one above was particularly poignant because of it’s 2nd floor portico; I could imagine the owners and their guests in days past, standing with cool drinks on hot, balmy summer evenings, gazing across the vista of the fields of Marshall Hill as it fell away below them (Marshall Hill is one of the taller hills in Nottingham, and the houses that now cloak the hill are worth many millions of £ GBP). Today, the house is unloved & ill-kept, hedges, bushes and trees growing to the skies and hiding the house from view most of the time.

… See full entry

So, Motihang area in Thimphu is quite warm during day and there are lots of dogs ( both stray and pet) due to lots of building and suburbs. So my tracks started from the Motithang School.

Let’s celebrate the eccentricity that lies at the heart of the English character.

This is the Flowerpot Man on the roof that I spoke of in my earlier Diary entry. I was worried about rain then, but it was spotting all day today (and raining hard by tea-time) so why worry today? However, it turned out that the householder valued his privacy, had a lock on the gate & no bell. I needed to get higher to get a good photo & could not (or at least, not without breaking in). My cheap smartphone has a decent camera but only a digital zoom (which I did not use), so the man is very small.

The next picture has another of my favourites, which is Gargoyles, in Marshall Hill Drive.

… See full entry

(copy of post to talk-us)

Breaking news - pardon the pun -

The lift bridge on US 1 Bypass between Portsmouth NH & Kittery ME is stuck in the up position. Permanently.

It initially stuck “down”, but they managed to get it up one last time for a ship that wanted to exit port, by some expedient, but that killed it. It was scheduled to close permanently, to be scrapped, in just 10 weeks (November, at end of tourist season), with the under-construction parallel replacement-span to bear the same name due to open Spring 2017.

NHDOT & MeDOT considered fixing it one last time but after checking if the jam, a problem they’re rather too familiar with, was a hard or easy jam, the cost for the short remaining life was deemed excessive.

Reference MDOT SML

After waiting a day for a local to do so (after official declaration that permanent closure was effective immediately), I have applied change-set 41726297 to mark the bridge’s 3 ways -

• access=no foot=official bicycle=no
• note=CLOSED - mid section of bridge is a lifted roadway stuck in up position 2016-08-22. Permanently closed 10 weeks early, will not reopen. new bridge due to open spring 2017.
• (except: foot=no, level=4 on center span stuck in UP position; if you’re official enough to get up there, you don’t need OSM to find it! )

For the under-deck​ rail-crossing Way 150771571, v11 I only gave it the same ‘note’ above, it didn’t have access= routing tags, it’s rail (and for special federal trains only these days i hear).

I have also added map notes, one closed, referencing the above change-set on existing center span, and one open, at approximate offset of the new span, referencing the MDOT project page as a TBD next spring.

I’m open to constructive criticism on better tagging … or fix it and share why ; e.g.,

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I feel like this myself at times…

This was the greeting that met you on coming through the side-entrance at a bungalow on Hallam Road but was not the best I saw yesterday (Thursday afternoon, 25 August). That was a Flowerpot man on top of a house roof in Pilkington Road (no, really). However, I was worried about the delay that obtaining agreement to photograph it might take. It had been pouring down with rain earlier on & I was worried about further rain soon (it never happened). I’m going back to the house another day, so maybe will be able to feature it soonish.

Oak Circle at Quail Hill Drive. Oak Circle is very short, not even 1/10 mile long. You show it going all the way back to a friends house on his privet property.

Following were some of our observations on the edits made on OSM for this week. The associated changesets have also been mentioned for your kind reference.

• Camp sites that were’int present was being added in this changeset as opposed to what was seen on the satellite imagery. Also, this changeset neither had a comment nor the source of information.

• Coastline of an island was deleted; Changeset link

• ATMs, artwork and campsites were being added all over the map; Changeset link 1,2,3.

• Amenities such as town halls, supermarkets and unclassified, secondary roads were being deleted ; Changeset link 1,2,3

• In yet another case, the user was found adding tourist spots with improper and arbitrary names; Changeset link

• Here, the user was found deleting a lot of trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary roads and amenities. In some of his other changesets he was found tampering with the disputed border between India and China; Changeset link.This user was subsequently blocked by the DWG and all the changesets were reverted.

An attempt to address these issues have been made both, by the community and us by leavings comments in the respective changesets.

The previous week’s review can be found HERE

Happy mapping. Let’s all make OSM the best map ever.

Thank you all so much!

OpenStreetMap(OSM) is the greatest invention of modern mapping system in this digitalized world. It is a great source of open data. It is more helpful and informative from any other online Map. In this MAP we get specific data. It is very helpful for peoples. By this map anyone can get information about his queries. Anyone can upload data and also can use data in their necessity. It is also helpful for the organizations that help vulnerable peoples. In this map we get the information about vulnerable area, way of passing, important point, water point etc. that is necessary for any kind of search and rescue operation in disaster. In this map data is free, so it is granted by everyone. It is easy to upload information in this map so anyone can contribute with the information from anywhere, anytime. OSM data is helpful for Vulnerable Capacity Assessment (VCA). By using this data different NGO, Government and International organizations can continue their relief operation. It is also helpful for research work. After all we can say, OSM data is very helpful for people for society as well as country. OSM data is very helpful for disaster risk management. In this map we get the data about identification of vulnerable places, way of passing, important key indicator as building condition, material, and structure by research this information govt. or relevant authority will identify the vulnerable places and take necessary steps to reduce the vulnerability, to reduce the damage of any kind of disaster. By using this data Bangladesh Red Crescent Society or this type of voluntary organization or Government organization like fire service, civil defense can plan their search & rescue operation.

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