StreetComplete was designed by Tobias Zwick and launched in 2016 as a handy “low-bar entry” field capturing application for OpenStreetMap. In the following 2-3 years it rapidly rose to have a share of 3.9% of contributors favoured application, since it requires no real prior expertise in OpenStreetMap. The beauty of it is that it exploits the opportunity of a mapper being in situ where some features have been mapped, but lack details about their attributes, and tags on the OpenStreetMap database.

The UX is good, even for the experienced mapper it masterfully detects the absence {not to jump down a rabbit hole, but very like my favourite Pink Floyd Album } of tagging details, and then it supports the insertion of the correct tags with menu systems that are visual rather than everything being list driven. Perfect for being on the move, a car passenger or a leisurely walker. This is not supposed to be a review of the app, but you can probably detect that I am a fan.

With some help from my friend Amanda who downloaded the .pbf, and extracted all the editor traces of StreetComplete here I was able to get hold of a csv of all of the Ireland edits and then use that to make a heatmap, with some help from RustyB. The heatmap shows, what we would expect, greater use of the app in Ireland’s cities and large towns.

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Working on an upgrade of OpenSnowMap.org map style, I knew I had to add single trees mapped natural=tree, natural=tree_row and barrier=hedge. I figured out I had omitted them in my rendering when I was about to map some … that were already there.

When testing the new style, it comes out as a nice surprise that in some areas, countryside micro-mapping is really impressive :

Clearly, rendering all those trees gives a far better idea how the landscape look like there.

I expect that this new style will come live within a few weeks.

Paglat a place that is rich in biodiversity and culture. If you will try to search Paglat in google maps, you will be mislead by wrong information about the place location. You will find it’s location inside another Municipality. Apparently Apple Maps was accurate about Paglat’s map and geotag location. Yes interesting indeed about google maps location of Paglat.

Established and created in 2001, under the Muslim Mindanao Authority Act No. 12 otherwise known as the Regional Law creating the Municipality of Paglat on July 9, 2001, which was ratified by its constituents during the September 29, 2001 plebiscite.

The mother municipality of Paglat was General Salipada K. Pendatun (GSKP) or to simplify it Paglat was a Barangay curved from GSKP.

Paglat’s boundaries or adjacent Municipalities are President Quirino province of Sultan Kudarat, Pandag province of Maguinanao, Tulunan province of North Cotabato, General Salipada K. Pendatun province of Maguindanao.

For me personally, the pleasure of mapping is not only in the process itself, i.e. arises during mapping, but a substantial part of it comes from the thought of being able to help other people. Let us all make the world a better and happier place through mapping!

The amount of segments used to represent a curved feature is based on assumptions. For example, an editor may interpret a mapper’s input by merging points that are too close together. Many aspects of the editing process depend on the drawing of curves, and many parameters are assumed by an editor.

A drag is a gesture well suited to mapping curves. Instead of lifting from a trackpad - an event which can throw the mapper’s precision off - the mapper drags along the feature’s centerline. Such a mode provides more consistent levels of mapping detail, a speedup in which a mapper can trace features, and a more natural feel to mapping. However, it requires more assumptions by the editor used.

In order to draw a line, one may drag from a way. The same gesture may move the map using merely a capacitive touch. I wonder what the current state of dragging is in all of the editors. Does a feature lack curves because it is closer to an urban grid or because it is tedious and/or arbitrary to map.

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Changset ID # 107053042

Cork County Council in conjunction with TII (Ireland’s authority for major roads) are in the process of building a bypass past Macroom and Ballyvourney in Co. Cork, Ireland.

Recently, I was travelling back from Killarney and noted that the road had been re-aligned. I quickly captured some GPD traces and have now updated OpenStreetMap with the new roundabout and re-aligned N22 (the bypass will assume the N22 name I presume when it opens).

This was a relatively nice edit to undertake. While I only had one trace to work with, it was good enough to get a rough idea of what needed to change. I also had to amend the N22 route relation(s) - there were two; one in each direction. I didn’t have a whole lot of experience editing these types of relations but the josm interface was intuitive.

As always, I wanted to validate my work (especially as I was editing a primary national route in Ireland). ra.osmsurround.org is a great tool for that so I checked both relations for issues (see relations 3147725 and 558006).

I expect more changes in the coming months as work progresses on this road.

Finally, I checked to see if other map providers had picked up on the change. Funnily enough it appears that Google have picked up on it (possibly using data from Google Maps’ users) but in much lower detail. I guess their algorithms detect something is up but don’t know how to deal with it properly yet. 1-0 to OpenStreetMap!

p.s. Driving round the roundabout 3-4 times was quite fun and a great way to get a good trace for it.

Images

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Just for the record (because I’m telling everyone), I’m transgender! 🙂 I’m transitioning to live openly and honestly as myself, as a woman now. 🙂 (To my LGBTQ+🏳️‍🌈 friends, I’m simplifying for the cis 😉) My name is Amanda McCann, and for pronouns they/them is fine, but she/her is nice. Auf deutsch, meine Pronomen sind „sie“.

My old email addresses will still work, but amanda@technomancy.org is my personal email address, and amanda.mccann@osmfoundation.org for OSMF Board matters.

On github, I’m amandasaurus on github, Amᵃᵖanda on the OpenStreetMap Wiki, and @Amanda#2524 on Discord, am{ap}anda on IRC

Like always, I am open to good faith questions from OSMers on LGBTQ issues. If there’s a question you’ve always been afraid to ask, you can ask below as a comment, or email me. 🙂

Don’t forget one of the rules of OSM: Have Fun! 🏳️‍⚧️

Are you part of a local chapter, or a local community, putting together an organized project, or developing software? We’d love to hear from you at the OSMF Board meetings. Please get in touch with us or comment on this post.

Over a year ago, the OSMF Board began inviting Local Chapters to present at our monthly Board meetings. It has been consistently great to hear about OSM activities around the world directly from the people involved. Very useful for the Board and those keenly interested in Foundation governance to get as full a picture as possible. Thank you to OpenStreetMap Italia, OpenStreetMap á Íslandi, OpenStreetMap France, FOSSGIS, FLOSSK, OSM Ireland, and OSM UK!

We realized there’s more voices we could hear from, and over the past two months, have opened the door to any OSM community and other projects like software development.

In May, Jochen Topf shared his experiences developing key pieces of the OSM software ecosystem. And this month, Feye Andal shared work across the incredible OSM-PH community. Next month, we have Sarah Hoffman coming to talk about nominatim!

There is so much happening across our amazing community. For the Board and others involved in core governance in OSMF, we want to have this front and center to our efforts. We appreciate the time everyone has spent to share their work with us, and encourage everyone else to signal your interest!

I hope you and your family are safe, healthy, and happy in this challenging time. I have been meaning to write this post since I became the Regional Director for the Asia Pacific Hub early this year. However, I decided to wait until I had something specific and useful to share with you all. Recently, we have made a few important decisions that I am thrilled to share with you through this post.

First, we have decided to name the Regional Hub as ‘Open Mapping Hub- Asia Pacific’.The ‘Open Mapping Hub’ name will also apply to the hubs in three other regions. I believe that this decision is profound and far-reaching. Although HOT is supporting the establishment and operation of the hub, we did not want to narrowly name it something as ‘HOT Asia Pacific Hub’. We want to ensure that the hub creates an accommodating and equitable space for everyone interested in contributing to the OSM movement in the region. We want the hub to be as inclusive as possible.

Those who attended Tyler’s talk at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in December 2020 should not be surprised by this decision. In his talk, Tyler committed to shifting HOT’s focus from HOT to the wider OSM local communities. The name ‘Open Mapping Hub’ intends to encapsulate this very spirit. We are extremely excited to start our journey with this new name, and I would like to thank everyone who participated in the naming discussion.

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Last September 2020, the OSM-Philippines community released the Call to Correct Narratives about Geospatial Work [in the Philippines]. We’re provided with an opportunity to share our own narratives and showcase the local community’s initiatives through a documentary-video produced by Amazon Web Services – Philippines.

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How-To Add the WMS dataset “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” to JOSM as a layer

After adding the layer, I was able to get the location and a visual representation of the “verkeersborden” (traffic signs) as registered in the “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” dataset, as a layer on my OSM map.

Dataset “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen”

Read information on Verkeersborden Vlaanderen about usage, rights etc.

Adding a WMS dataset as a layer in JOSM

1. Navigate to https://verkeersborden.vlaanderen/opendata.php
2. Capture the links to the WMS datasets:

• De Grafische weergave van de verkeersborden uit de toepassing Verkeersborden.Vlaanderen

• De afgeleide data op basis van de verkeersborden uit de toepassing Verkeersborden.Vlaanderen

In JOSM

1. Open in the menu “Edit” > “Preference”;
2. Select in the left pane “WMS TMS”,
3. Click on the button “Add a new WMS entry by entering the URL”; the “Add Image URL” dialog box opens.
4. Enter under (2) “Enter GetCapabilities URL” the URL, e.g. “https://opendata.apps.mow.vlaanderen.be/opendata-geowebcache/service/wms?REQUEST=getcapabilities”
5. Select the layers
6. Enter under (7) a name for the layer, e.g. “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen”
7. Click on OK

My post Zone 30 speed limits: using OSM next to “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” had already some helpful replies.

When you are tracing every time you go out of your house, it will appear on the Public GPS Traces that there is always a single point coming to your house, revealing your location. The best way to remedy this is to trace every road inside your community to prevent hotspots from becoming to obvious.

Jalan Sutera Pines

In March we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our first pub meeting of local mappers in Nottingham. I’ve written a bit about on-line and in-person meetings held this year, but much more a set of reflections about how the group and its meetings have panned out over the past 10 years.

I hope there are some nuggets of value to others either already running such meetings or contemplating doing so.

Lastly, a big thank you for everyone who has come along over the years, and to Kyle who prompted me to write much of this in the first place.

In this post we are excited to share some of our recent research into organized editing on OSM. This relatively new line of research has been motivated by two observations. The OSM community has seen a dramatic rise in organized editing over the last several years. This new presence has continued the historic debate on the role organized editing should play in OSM. We became interested to study how the editing habits of these new actors differed from the community as a whole, but were surprised by the lack of accessible data. We decided to use the public tools to create computational methods of understanding different editing behaviours to classify editors as being part of the organized group or volunteer.

Following is an attempt to share some of our initial results. We’ll begin by outlining a new method we created on classifying users based on their profiles. Then we’ll share some features we extracted that may affect whether a user is organized or volunteer. Finally, we’ll show initial prediction results.

Extracting a list of users

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The OSMF board has finally published the draft for the OSMF attribution guideline they have been working on - together with the firm intention to approve that in the next public board meeting without changes. This is unfortunately reminiscent of previous cases of the OSMF board developing policy and documents internally among themselves without public scrutiny and presenting them to the public as a done deal, ultimately with often very sub-optimal results.

So these comments are less in the hope that the board will revise their work style and discuss policy openly and publicly with the community from the start because they realize that this yields objectively better results and more to help the community understand the (in large parts somewhat confusing and difficult to understand) text and its provenance and implications.

The background of the attribution guidelines

I will not present a full history here - largely because it would make this text too long to read in a reasonable amount of time but also because much of that history has not been open to direct public observation and can only be reconstructed from minutes of LWG and board meetings which inevitably only show a selective record of history.

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What a pleasure to find out that Esri permits mappers to access their collection of past imageries known as World Imagery Wayback.

Map it like the early noughties!

Why older imageries can be useful, some might argue.

It was already stated in the diary post that “The older imagery may include the features you are editing with better clarity or relative accuracy.”

Indeed. So, this was proven during one of my edits made today.

Other mappers might consider me as a waterway mapper junkie. Yeah, I’m so very into it, when the right mood comes.

Straight into today’s anecdote: a KartaView picture suggests there is a nearby waterway.

The freshest Maxar imagery indicated so too. With a caveat.

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The Riverside Estate was missing all buildings and addresses. Roads haven’t been refined for over five years.

I’ve spent 3 days of my holiday to improve the estate’s mapping.

Done

• Update St James’ School buildings, roads, and tags
• Review Estate Roads
• Build Telephone Exchange area
• Build Cranmere Court care home building, car park, paths, green space, and fences
• Add house buildings, tagging apartments and bungalows when necessary
• Add garage areas and alleys
• Add Substations
• Review green spaces
• Add turn-around spaces at dead ends when necessary
• Add full addresses for all buildings
• Review surrounding land use tags
• Review and add footpaths

Todo

• Add house boundary fences
• Review surrounding common green spaces
• Review residential area boundary
• Review School land boundary

Discovering OpenStreetMap (OSM)