OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap; State of the Map Kerala 2024
The organizing committee meeting and Welcome Commitee formation will be held on 8/11/24 at 4 PM at the Veterinary University, Pookode, Wayanad.
Following this, a basic OSM training session will be organized for students of the College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences and NSS volunteers.
Everyone is welcome to attend the meeting.
It was a bright sunny afternoon in Ohio, but it was getting hard to tell from the smoke in the air.
Our Volunteer Fire Department was dispatched as mutual aid to fight a brush fire that had already burned dozens of acres. Once we got to the staging area and offloaded our brush unit side by side, I hopped in the shotgun/co-driver seat and we ventured into the woods to slowly find our way to the fire. Cell reception became practically non existent as the already mediocre network got bogged down by residents checking on each other. With sat imagery unable to load I thought OSMand and it’s offline data would be able to help us out.
We were making our way past a large pond that would prove to be a vital real world landmark for our vehicles moving to and from the fire. Even though land use was mapped I couldn’t see any useful terrain features. At one point in the past an OSM mapper simply marked the whole area as a big block of “Natural Wood” and moved on. I had to manually pin the landmarks in OSMand to give us bread crumbs to follow.
After a few hours and several hundred gallons of water being shuttled to the fire it was getting dark, but we could see the flames were no longer making progress. A county drone was now buzzing overhead and the operator confirmed that the fire was blocked by a swathe of wetlands. More fire units were stuck on the other side of it since it seemed like the fastest way to the fire from the opposite street, and they had to find their way around.
Missing Maps turned ten years old in November and it may be running a full-blown internship in its tenth year.
Partially to celebrate this tenth birthday Missing Maps member organizations met for two full days in September in Nairobi, Kenya.
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| Vojtech Rehak (MSF) top left presenting on day one of the gathering, clockwise onwards around the table: Jorieke Vyncke (MSF), Benjamin ‘Benni’ Herfort (HeiGIT), Nash Naufal (MSF), Paul Knight (British Red Cross), Zacharia Muindi (Map Kibera), Rory Nealon (YouthMappers) and Sam Colchester (HOT) taking photo |
We reflected on the fact that on 5 November 2014, HOT, American Red Cross, British Red Cross and MSF launched the Missing Maps Project. Originally stating:
It was a memorable moment for me attending State of the map Nigeria 2024 conference as I was opportune to meet and engage with professionals and volunteers from different backgrounds.
All the away from Zaria in Kaduna state, Northwest of Nigeria down to Ile-Ife in Osun state, Southwest of Nigeria for State of the map Nigeria 2024 conference. Since it was a long Journey I had to stop at Lokoja, Kogi state for a day. The following day I continued the journey down to Ile-Ife, Osun state. The venue of the conference was at African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology (AFRIGIST) inside Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state, Nigeria.
It was a good beginning starting the programme with an opening mapping party. The opening mapping party started around 6:39pm with the introduction of attendees. A welcome address was done by Dr. Victor Sunday who welcomed everyone to the opening mapping party. Thereafter, the session was handed over to Mr. Calvin Menttor from Ghana who introduced the attendees to OpenStreetMaps.
The programme started by 9:35am with an opening prayer followed by the singing of the national anthem. The introduction of guests to the high table was done and the opening remarks were given by Prof. Lazarus Mustapha Ojigi. The welcome address and the goodwill message were delivered by Dr. Victor Sunday.
A while back I had taken a look comparing my local OGL to others in our area that were approved and listed on the wiki. Noting the similarities to existing documents I added our local cities as well per their attribution requirements. This differs slightly from documentation the that the legal working group has produced here https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/OGL_Canada_and_local_variants
I’ve not heard back from the legal questions email with my question after a few days now. But wanted to keep productive and provide supporting due diligence I am able to help out on. This seemed like a reasonable platform to use for such.
Comparing the latest “reviewed and approved” OGL from Guelph https://explore.guelph.ca/pages/open-data-license
To Edmonton and Calgary which are in turn based on the Alberta licenses. https://data.edmonton.ca/stories/s/City-of-Edmonton-Open-Data-Terms-of-Use/msh8-if28/ https://data.calgary.ca/stories/s/Open-Calgary-Terms-of-Use/u45n-7awa/ https://open.alberta.ca/licence
The majority of the documents and verbiage are identical, the differences i am able to note are as follows:
We’re thrilled to announce that our OpenStreetMap Kerala Annual Community Meetup 2024 has now been officially branded as State of the Map Kerala 2024! Heartfelt thanks to the OpenStreetMap Foundation for swiftly approving the license—this may be the first time a regional State of the Map is hosted in India, and possibly even globally!
This year, we’re excited to partner with Meta, FOSS United, TomTom, DhiSigma Systems, Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (KVASU), and National Service Scheme. We’re also grateful for the support from Sahya Digital Conservation Foundation, Geominds, and community partners Wikimedians of Kerala User Group, OpenDataKerala, Swathanthra Malayalam Computing Community, and the OpenStreetMap India Community. Updated List availabile here.
If you have some expertise the problem of correct rendering of border disputes and some spare time, then your help is welcome. If not, than of course you are welcome too!
Therefore I opened a discussion on this topic: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/border-disputes-inconsistency-in-data-and-redering-who-can-help/121126/5
Just been out this morning and surveyed Arran Road on foot. Around 40 businesses to add, plus two burger vans (oh, yes). When I was a youngster, the whole place was approx. 10 large factories, now it’s been much extended and the old factories have been subdivided into many small units. Should keep me busy for a while.
Attending the recent hack weekend in Berlin, I got inspired to work on a neat feature in overpass turbo. Honestly speaking, in the past few years, the tool did not the amount of attention from the developer’s (my) side that it deserves. What came clear to me at the hacking event is that a lot of people still use it on a very regular basis and that it is an invaluable part of the OSM bag of tools, which was really nice to hear.
So, what someone proposed was to extend the current query wizard feature to also support the styling of the results using mapcss. What I took from that suggestion was that it should not be hard to implement a dedicated helper dialog that auto-generates MapCSS to style the data according to the values of a selectable tag and color palette. And I’m glad to say that after a quite productive two days, there’s now already a beta version already available to test out on overpass-turbo.eu.
the arch of September has its feral grip slapped free from the gators grip of October, I’m holding fast to turkeys and dipping my head in the gravy
Year 2016.
I recently had the privilege of attending the State of the Map (SOTM) Nigeria 2024 conference in Ile-Ife, Osun State, and I am deeply grateful for the experience and the opportunities it provided. I was fortunate to receive a partial grant that covered my transportation, accommodation, and meals, allowing me to participate fully, and I am truly appreciative of this support.
The conference, centered around AI-assisted mapping, drone technology, and open geospatial tools for advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), was an incredible learning experience. The sessions led by professors, doctors, and online hosts highlighted the potential of these technologies in addressing real-world challenges.
I am especially thankful to Dr. Victor Sunday, the National Coordinator of Unique Mappers Network, for his encouragement and support in making this experience possible. The distinguished speakers greatly enriched the conference. Prof. Kamorudeen Folorunso Aleem kicked off the event with an insightful session on Open Geospatial, AI Technologies, and Geospatial Data Policies in Nigeria, which set the stage for critical discussions on data governance. Prof. Lazarus Mustapha Ojigi, the Executive Director/Professor of Geomatics at the African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science & Technology (AFRIGIST), shared his expertise on Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Geospatial Mapping and Modelling Techniques for Achieving Sustainable Development Goals in Africa, providing valuable insights into the integration of AI in geospatial analysis.
Cashless payments have increased dramatically lately, specially during the COVID-19 “main years”. Still, paying in cash can be crucial as a resilience method (think internet, power, banking system outages). It can be used as a great tool to slightly improve privacy. Paying in cash at a cashier usually is an option, but machines handling cash could be preferable, for example:
Tag payment:cash:machine is suggested to map the status here. Possible values:
Currently mapped objects in Latvia - where green indicates a present cash machine, orange - explicitly tagged “no”.
The State of the Map Nigeria Conference was indeed a unique one. Packed with a lot of excitement. When I said it was fun I really mean it. All the guest speakers both online and in person did very well and I personally learnt a lot from the conference. The conference was held from 8th to 11st of October 2024.
I definitely seem to love this website. Afterall, it allows me to add some facilities thanks to data provided by french government services : electricity substations, monuments, post boxes, various problems, …
For today, the main municipalities I worked on with OsmOse are Paluel, Néville, Cailleville, Angiens, Cany-Barville, etc… . I also fixed merged adresses and shops so that data is associated accordingly. I started to fix issues in the Rouen metropolis as well, however it will take a few days to finish the whole city considering its size.
Little announcement : I plan to set sort of a weekly schedule to the tasks I want to do. This way, each day of the week will be dedicated to one task in particular, and will have a special name ; for example, SamedInspector (for non-french speakers, it means that saturday would be dedicated to OSM Inspector). Also, even though I will have a weekly schedule, I will switch from 1 entry/day to 1 entry/week that will contain everything I’ve done within the last 7 days.
In Part 3 I talked about changes in POI data in a small area over a period of two months. Most of those changes were due to mapping activity, rather than anything that happened in the real world over that period. But I’d like to use a similar approach to better understand how the real-world POIs are evolving.
As I mentioned in Part 3, until recently a significant proportion of POIs in this area had never been mapped in OSM. That means there is no point in the past at which OSM data is anywhere close to a complete set of POIs for this area. But we might be able to learn something from the POIs that were mapped some time ago.
I chose to look back 5 years, to August 2019. I guessed that was roughly the point at which the data was most accurate. Most POIs were added in 2017-2018, so while lots of POIs were missing, those existing in 2019 were probably still fairly accurate. This is how those specific POIs evolved over 5 years, ignoring anything newly created over that period:
| POI count | as % | |
|---|---|---|
| no major change | 135 | 57% |
| removed | 42 | 18% |
| changed POI type | 38 | 16% |
| changed name | 22 | 9% |
| total | 237 | 100% |
…and suddenly, I woke up early in the morning just to realize that I was in Lagos on 8th October. Ask yourself what brought me here? Hehehehe… Of course, State of the Map Nigeria Conference 2024. Well, well, my journey was tiring but adventurous as well. Now, let’s double our steps to catch up with other activities. It’s a movie. Oh, sorry, it’s a story. You might need a glass of chilled water. Probably!
As I mentioned in Parts 1 and 2, over the last couple of months I set out to systematically update Points of Interest in four adjoining barrios in the city of Málaga.
A few businesses really did open, close, or change hands over that short period. But the vast majority of the changes in the data reflect the OSM data “catching up” with reality: adding points that had never been mapped in OSM, or updating POIs that had changed in some way since they were last touched by an OSM mapper.
Closely examining changes over a period is a good way of revealing faulty assumptions. I noticed that three shop locations had disappeared from my data, even though I was sure there were still businesses at those addresses. They are all gyms now, and gyms are tagged as “leisure” - a tag I had completely ignored. I’ve now added leisure POIs. As with “amenity” tags, I excluded some high-volume tags such as “garden” and “swimming pool”. I now have 392 POIs in my current dataset, not 376 as I mentioned in previous diary entries.
| POI count | count distinct feature tags | |
|---|---|---|
| mid Aug 2024 | 267 | 96 |
| + newly created | 141 | 34 |
| - removed | (16) | (9) |
| late Oct 2024 | 392 | 121 |
| % change | +47% | +26% |
I mentioned in a previous post that I thought that POIs were reasonably well mapped in this neighbourhood. The numbers suggest that about two thirds of POIs were mapped two months ago. That seems respectable, but not great. There has not been any major expansion of retail space in this area recently. Some of the new additions are locations that were vacant or derelict when the area was first mapped in detail, but the majority have existed for a long time and were simply never mapped in OSM.
This is the first time I try micromapping in OSM. It took quite a while to learn the appropriate tags for some amenities, but I got there in the end. For a first, I decided to focus on an open area I know very well, which is a square in my hometown. I didn’t do much in terms of area coverage, but it is still pretty noticeable. By the way, if you want to check if I’ve done my job correctly, please note that less than one year ago, all hedges and trees that surrounded the square were torn down ; no idea why considering it looked awesome, now it is pretty dull and flat.
Here’s what it looks like, and considering how it is rendered, I can’t resist feeling proud :
