An upload has just been made by myself for Marwood Road, Carlton NG4, UK and it has four houses in a row (2 sets of semi-detached) that are each numbered ‘1’ (and two next-door to them that are each numbered ‘375’), and yet they are all correctly numbered. What is going on?

Now yes, I’m being a little bit naughty in my description, because two of those houses are numbered ‘1a’ and ‘1b’, but the other two are each “1 Marwood” and are part of the same semi-detached house. In fact, whilst surveying it was worse, because whilst these four houses are obviously near the beginning of the street there were two houses before them, one of which was positioned on Cavendish Road, but the bungalow was clearly positioned on Marwood Road. That bungalow was residential & occupied (though the owners were out) and no-one else on the street knew what it’s number was - and neither did it display one. Truly, this was a street designed to give taxi-drivers a nervous breakdown.

This is the street: Marwood Road, Carlton NG4; the houses concerned are at the eastern end, on the south-side of the street. ‘1a’ and ‘1b’ are part of a semi-detached house that is too new (as is the bungalow) to be shown on the current Google satellite view, although Bing does show them (it is normally the other way around) (Bing metadata capture date of “10/1/2011-3/26/2012”). West of [‘1a’, ‘1b’] is [1, 1]. The first house is 1 Marwood Road, and the second is 1 Marwood Crescent. Gaah!

I decided that to answer the mystery of the bungalow was going to require some hard snooping; there must be a number somewhere. And there was (carefully hidden in plain sight, next to the door, but much too small to read from the street):

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It has been three days we returned from Thimphu, Bhutan and I have already started missing the country and the people there. People are very helpful, friendly and motivated. We were invited by Thimphu Thromde through Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team from a project funded by World Bank. Our main aim in Thimphu was to establish a foundation for OpenStreetMap community in Bhutan. We trained people from various background, government officers, non government officers and also students. We saw almost 81 enthusiastic citizens of Bhutan emerged in the world of OpenStreetMap. They were sensitized, trained and became mappers during our 3 weeks of stay in Thimphu. We had 4 days long training from 9 to 5 in the evening and they stayed there motivated and excited to gain the ability of map and show the identity of their local place. We also trained the participants some basic vector analysis and map creation methodology in QGIS (an open source GIS tool). This helped in better understanding for them about the whole GIS system (data creation to data analysis and output). You can see their activities OSM Bhutan facebook group : https://www.facebook.com/groups/osmbhutan/ I hope that they continue to map and foster this OpenStreetMap community to whole of Bhutan.

Dear all,

Today, v2.43.0 of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on openstreetmap.org) has been released. It has not yet been rolled out to the openstreetmap.org servers.

Changes include

• Adjust alotments pattern
• Whitespace cleanups of code
• Adjust colours of dog parks and construction sites
• Increase font size of addresses
• Fix combination of long names and oneway arrows

Thanks to all the contributors for this release, including Ircama and measad, both new contributors.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v2.42.0…v2.43.0

As always, we welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues.

English Eccentricity #1

Seen today whilst mapping in Carlton NG4:

Look, the guy wants a xmassy-sorta fibre-glass polar-bear on the bay-window of his house, and if he does want a sorta-xmassy fibre-glass polar-bear on the bay-window of his house, I say “why not?” (though it could do with a wash).

OpenStreetMap’s standard map layer is used by many people each day. OSM even provides a dump to the access logs from which one can see which parts of the world is viewed how many times for each day. Inspired by Lukas Martinelli’s work on Parsing and Visualizing OSM Access Logs, I’ve worked on a web app to visualize OSM’s tile access logs. Contrary on Lukas’ approach, I wanted to focus on an accurate representation of the data and wanted to make something works for the whole (Mercator-projected) world.

I’ve ended up with a viewer that takes an (uncompressed) log file from planet.osm.org and produces a two-dimensional histogram for each zoom level: For example, at zoom level 6 in the viewer each pixel on the viewer represents the number of accesses of the corresponding https://www.openstreetmap.org-tile at zoom level 14. That’s 8 zoom levels further in – or, put another way, each 256x256px² https://www.openstreetmap.org-tile is represented by a single pixel in the visualization.

The number of accesses of each tile is represented by a logarithmic color palette:

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Today’s Weather Alert from weather.com said: “CHANCE OF RAIN: 100%” (they weren’t kidding). In typical macho style I put on my rain-proof jacket & went out mapping anyway. I stayed out too long.

Surprisingly, the rain doesn’t penetrate the smartphone — a credit to the design — but it does interfere with the capacitance on the glass surface, and that interferes with it’s touch-sensitive design, which becomes a real pain after a short while. In spite of it all I managed whilst mapping to get a couple of photos of interesting house numbers to show here…

The first (above) comes from very close to last week’s MPG. I think that some may think this a little twee, and the mixture of Japanese-inspired artwork & renaissance-inspired cherubs is certainly odd, but I don’t care - the owners like them & so do I.

For a complete contrast (below) how about this black cat (you can possibly detect traces of rain on the lens here):

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Purpose: to help on easy identification and zooming in undermapped areas, mainly for roads still missing on OSM map, on basis of IBGE data (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics - Data publicly available according to legal statements).

Documented at (in portuguese): “Situação do Mapeamento de Estradas no Brasil”.

Feeling the lack of some data that could easy identify and help to improve on basic mapping in undermapped areas of Brazil, regarding accessibility, I’ve firstly decided to try to do a single georeferenced PNG image showing where there could be these areas, generated with QGis to use in JOSM with Piclayer plugin. Then tried a TMS layer.

Our community keeps doing great efforts on mapping. Mostly metropolitan and urban areas are well mapped for general accesibility. Also are rural and inner country roads linking main urban zones. Many data recently delivered for legal public use by IBGE is helping on the mapping on OSM. These data lead to identify many other roads that area still missing on OSM. Almost no data from GPS layers in the huge areas of inner country, as expected too.
So I’ve started trying to do a map that could help to identify roads from IBGE that are missing in OSM.

These two sources of data were used on this Comparative Map:
* roads from the .shp of IBGE (compiled untill 2015);
* roads from the current state of OSM map (2nd half of 2016), obtained from geofabrik.de (file “roads.shp”).

The methodology adopted was as simple as I could attempt to do in QGIS: just overlaying IBGE ways (in orange and yellow) with OSM ways (in dark blue), so to highlight IBGE roads, no need for overlapping analysis. Just colors:

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OpenStreetMap is a great source of information related to the necessity of people. It is one of best source of data in digital format. . In this MAP we get specific data. It is very helpful for the people .By this map anyone can get information about their queries and export data according to their purpose. Anyone can upload data and also use data to their necessity .It is the only digital map in the world which data is free. GIS specialist export data in GIS format , Architect use data in another format . It is very helpful for Disaster Risk Management . It is the great source of information that is very helpful to conduct any search and rescue operation . Dhaka City Red Crescent Unit a sister concern of Bangladesh Red Crescent Society conduct many search and rescue operation . OpenStreetMap is very helpful for their work . Bangladesh Red Crescent Society arranged training on Openstreetmap for volunteers in collaboration with International Federation of Red Cross &Red Crescent Societies and American Red Cross . In this map, data is uploaded by the Community . So the authority decided to train the Community . In this concern Dhaka City Red Crescent Unit organized training on OpenstreetMap under Data4Action Project .

In 2-3 September,2016 Dhaka City Red Crescent Unit organized training on OpenStreetMap for the student of BRAC University, one of the renowned Private university in Bangladesh.This training was held at Architecture Department of BRAC University. This training was started sharp at 09.30 am and it solely attended by 25 student and teacher of BRAC Unibersity. The main vision of this OSM training for the students was enriching their skills by using the open geographical data to identify the hazard, disaster , the vulnerability of any area , navigational and other humanitarian purposes .

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OpenStreetMap 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 the people .By this map anyone can get information about his queries.It is also helpful for the organizations who helps the vulnerable people. 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 & rescue and relief operation in disaster.In this map data is free so its usability is granted for everyone.it is easy to upload information in this map so anyone can contribute information. Osm data is helpful for VCA. By using this data different NGO, Government, International organization can continue their relief operation.It is also helpful for research work. After all we can say that osm data is very helpful for people for society as well as country.

Manjurul Islam

Strange occurrence happened today. While waiting for the shops to open, I recorded the names of the stores in this strip mall. One office appeared to be a computer themed consulting firm, with GPS systems in their window. When I researched the company website, I found they specialized in GPS systems for sports, and they used openstreetmap in their sport device solution! This was a pleasant coincidence, but how odd that they had not even entered their own office into OSM. I will not link to them in this post, in case the situation makes them appear poorly, but you could find them in my edit history easily enough. Good seeing people using OSM data in a variety of ways. I think these people are focused on real-time data from their sensors, but perhaps not very interested in the completeness of the street maps.

I’ve written before about the changes needed to render more zoom levels than 18 with a “Switch2Osm-style” tile server.

However, sometimes zoom level 20 isn’t enough. Here:

is part of Nottingham at zoom level 20. At least one of the office names doesn’t appear (it corresponds to here in OSM). The problem is that the way that the “standard” renderd stores metatiles means that only a certain number of tiles can be stored for each zoom level (see this list post for the details). In order to store more I changed renderd slightly so that more zoom levels can be stored - see here and here for the details.

Rendering works fine at higher zoom levels (up to 28 in my example) so that all of those office names now appear. Here’s the same area at zoom level 21:

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How to find out the total length of highway per type of road / per Country in PostGIS

using the OSM postgis Script Repository This is a part of the final result.

• Step 1. - Download the North-America osm.pbf file from Geofabrik __(7.4 Gb)__

The link is here You can use this command line to download the file in linux.

wget http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america-latest.osm.pbf

• Step 2. - Load the data into PostGIS using the scope.sh utility tool

You can find the script here https://github.com/baditaflorin/osm-postgis-scripts/ The aim of this tool is to simplify the process of importing a osm.pbf file into PostGIS. Now the procedure is complicated and you first have to create the database, then to enable postGIS and Hstore on that database, etc

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I try to feature the best stuff I come across whilst mapping. This was the latest:

Others have been: Ladybirds + squirrel; Flowerpot man + Gargoyles; No Riff-Raff; Floral Abundance; Tweety Pie, Kenya Art + Plaster Dolls; Leaded Light door + another high-class door-sign. That last link also contains links to previous street art featured in these posts. I do spoil you, y’know.

Oscar – the southern lion in Slab Square – was first featured in Stone Lions of England. Here he is again:

I’ve long wanted a photo of his northern companion, Leo (although do not bother to ask why I did not photograph both on the first occasion, as I cannot recall), but I do not get into town often, nor want to stay when I get there. I managed it today, although the bright sun possibly defeated my smartphone’s circuitry:

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Now that I am more aware of all the numerous POIs around me, I find that I am driving much more slowly. People in the car behind me must get slightly agitated, but that is only because they are not seeing all the things happening on the road. I drive much more safely, when I am concerned about each crosswalk, parking space, driveway, alleyway, and bikepath that must be navigated. I am mentally checking all of them and even see the street signs in a whole new way.

Following the previous diary post on improving navigation data in Germany, around 1000 turn restrictions detected on Mapillary were reviewed and 72 notes were added on OSM where there was a mismatch with the data for community mappers to verify with local knowledge. The community response has been extremely quick to verify an resolve these notes almost within a day of them being added. The whole exercise resulted in adding 27 new turn restrictions to the map which is already highly detailed and up to date.

(Blue=added to OSM; Orange=not required to add to OSM; Red=Invalid detection or location)_

Exit and destination signs on motorways

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Funny: The Apple Store had one corner with doubble Nodes, causing an error in my software.

Dear all,

I was trying to find an OSM editor for mapping directly on an iOS mobile device, but couldn’t find anything on openstreetmap.org. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Regards, Matthias

Mapping on the flat bit of Marshall Hill at the top & a bit of the wall at the front of one house had some Ladybirds fastened to it. The woman of the house told me that the rear of their place had loads of different things attached to it, and she had recently let some spread to the front. I asked if there was a particular reason for the ladybirds, and she said “because I like them, and they look good”.

And for the same reason, here’s a little tableaux spotted at a bungalow near Marshall Hill Drive:

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Recently, a new tool was created by Martin Raifer (@tyrasd) to generate graphs of the usage of tags over time. This is a great tool that gives us more insight in what drives the choice of tags by mappers. In this diary, I compare the usage of some related tags.

amenity=public_building versus office=government versus office=administrative

We can see that amenity=public_building was added to the map features page wiki in March 2006, before it even was used once in the wild. The tag started being used later that year, and usage increased rapidly from there on. No increase in usage could be detected when JOSM or Potlatch added support for the tag. Growth in usage slowed down in 2013, and in 2014 even a decrease started. I wonder if anybody has a hypothesis for the cause of this decrease.

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