My current mapping is on the eastern edge of Gedling. Gedling prides itself as a village, with an Anglican church that was established in 678 A.D. (the current church is a youngster at 1089 A.D.). Today, someone that lives in a bungalow at Field Close at the rear of the church was proudly pointing out to me the Peregrines that lodge in the niches of the spire. The tower is 90 feet high (27.4m) and the spire is yet another 90 feet, so that gives those dive-bombers an unrivalled perch for launching their attacks.

In spite of it’s history, Gedling is now more or less just another suburb of Nottingham. It does, however, skirt the countryside and I’m mapping on the edge of that country, so here are some views.

Want any Horse Sh.., er, Manure?

Glebe Farm is an abandoned stables just outside of the residential spread that has crept up Lambley Lane. It has suffered decades of blight due to development, the latest of which (“Gedling Access Road”, or “GAR”) looks like it may go ahead. There were some horses in the East fields, a Detectorist scanning the West fields, and below is Milo the dog, an energetic bull terrier that belongs to the lady that looks after the horses. Milo leapt up at me & introduced my buff-coloured trousers to the farm speciality (there are twin piles of the stuff in abundance near the gate if your garden needs any).

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As a part of our data transparency efforts at Mapbox. We created osm-edit-report which helps anyone visualize our teams contribution to OSM.

Just to give a measure, the data team added 0.3 Million objects, 0.2 Million tags, and 3 thousand changesets last week.

This is how the numbers look:

Since this data is so huge to grasp at one go, we also have filters which help trim down data and focus on a particular group.

• Filter by users.

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A new version of Potlatch 2 with several improvements and bugfixes:

• ‘New-style’ multipolygons are supported, where the tags are placed on the relation rather than the outer way. When you edit such a multipolygon, look at the bottom of the tag editor; you’ll see that it’s displaying the relation tags rather than the way. If you do want to change the tags on the way, you can choose that from the little dropdown menu there.
• Pop-up dialogue boxes are now generally resizable.
• In the Advanced tag view, long tag values now wrap onto multiple lines.
• The background menu is now usable on smaller screens.
• A ‘Clear all’ button on the Bookmarks menu.
• Shift-drag to zoom into a particular area; shift-click + or - to zoom three levels at a time; and you can now zoom out beyond zoom level 14, in which case no data will be displayed or loaded.
• Shift-< and > jump 10 nodes at a time along a way.
• Code now compiles with Apache Flex as well as with (older) Adobe Flex.
• Plus a bunch of other small fixes.

Potlatch 2 is somewhere between ‘active development’ and ‘maintenance mode’: there’s no massive new features that I’m planning, but I intend to keep making small improvements to it along these lines, plus extra features as and when I’m doing some mapping and figure out a way to make it easier or quicker to use. OSM is lucky to have such an excellent default editor in iD, which gives P2 the freedom to develop as an efficient and comfortable editor for those who like its way of doing things.

Vandalism on UP campus

After checking some data of our campus I spot odd additions to the campus map. a User edited some information regarding the name and added some shops that did not exist. I contacted them and asked to revert changes made. Will monitor and follow the steps to correct data if not corrected.

“Love and Compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive”. - Dalai Lama

Hello, voting members! I am Ahasan, I belong to the coastal district Khulna of Bangladesh. I truly believe in humanity and continuously strive and work towards humanity because my motto in life is ‘if you want to leave a mark in the world, work for the humanity’. This ideology motivated me to expand OpenStreetMap in Bangladesh to make open geospatial data for all and to create OpenStreetMap Bangladesh (OSMBD) community and then work for Humanitarian Open Street Map (HOTOSM). I am truly honored to be nominated by Pete Masters in the global arena of HOTOSM. I express my heartfelt gratitude towards him for believing in me.

Who am I?

• I am a Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System graduate from Asian University of Technology (AIT), Thailand.
• I am also a graduate in Environmental Science from Khulna University, Bangladesh.
• Diploma in Climate Change Vulnerability and Humanitarian Responses at Jointly University of Hawaii-USA, United Nations University, Keio & Okayama University-Japan, National university of Samoa and Asian Institute of Technology-Thailand.

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This is a follow up of my recent diary entry about the centre of Rome and in parts a reply to Warin61’s comment to that post.

Generally

I believe the local people usually know where the centre is. They tell you when you ask them. Give it a try, I bet you’ll see that you get similar answers.

I would expect this most central spot to be often in front of the townhall (maybe sometimes the cathedral) or the main market square (in traditional towns) or likely both. Maybe the train station can be such a center as well (in more recent towns which developed after the railway was invented).

One criterion could be: where would you go to protest something. If you were to gather together with “all” citizens, where would you go.

Streetsigns aren’t useful from my experience. Often the centre is inside the main pedestrian area (typical for Germany, where many historic city centres have been pedestrianized) and it is generally so big that you will get signs in the outskirts indicating “city centre”, but when you arrive there will not be a sign stating “this is the city centre”, the signs will simply stop indicating a centre when you are in a central area (they might indicate “all directions” now, but that’s a different story, maybe to be told another time).

Exceptions

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You can contact me at my email ID nagesh.sa.blr@gmail.com

A new user deleted over a 100 features including the place node in the centre of Montauban, a large town in France.

Just reverted both these changesets:

• https://osmcha.mapbox.com/47075660/
• https://osmcha.mapbox.com/47075279/

Caught and reverted in 15 hours! A few tools where one can review changesets from new users apart from the history tab:

• osmcha-newmapper
• osm-discussion
• osm-suspicous
• newestosm

OpenStreetMap has a wikidata tag which lets us connect OSM objects to their corresponding Wikidata items.

(Technical note: it’s a “same as” relationship - i.e. the tag asserts that the two items in different systems refer to the same entity. However, sometimes things in OSM are split into multiple objects; and sometimes one object in OSM actually refers to multiple items in Wikidata. So it’s actually a “many-to-many” matching, not “one-to-one”: a single OSM object sometimes has multiple semicolon-separated Wikidata identifiers, and multiple OSM objects sometimes have the same Wikidata identifier.)

There are over 600,000 OSM objects with the “wikidata” tag. OK great, job done? I mean, nothing’s ever “complete” in these big open-ended crowdsource projects, but if we have more than half a million crosslinks between the systems, that’s really good going.

BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM!

Using the tag to jump from OSM to Wikidata works fine. But from Wikidata to OSM? Well, there’s no persistent way to link from wkd->osm, simply because OSM’s identifiers are impermanent - they’re not guaranteed to continue existing, or to continue referring to the same thing. So it’s not particularly sensible to store OSM identifiers in Wikidata. Instead, an Overpass lookup is required.

For example, on the OSM Wikidata page I found this friendly Wikidata interface called “Reasonator” - all very nice, but instead of cross-linking immediately to the OSM object, it offers a little “Overpass” link which you can click to do a dynamic lookup.

The effect is that it makes Wikidata->OSM connections indirect, obscured, only-for-those-who-know-they-want-it. If a Wikidata coder says “OK great how do I jump to the item in OSM?” you first have to teach them what Overpass is and how it relates to OSM, then how to use its query language, how many queries a day you’re allowed to do on Overpass… bleh.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

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Congratulations to the people of OpenStreetMap who are the first to show the actual newly completed route and links. Not yet on TomTom or Google maps and don’t think about seeing it on OS. Brilliant. Robin

There a very useful feature in JOSM which I just discovered now: when looking at the history diffs of an object and you choose the coordinates tab, you get a map visualizing the geometry in a map.

From time to time people are moving the Rome node.

I found it interesting to see how the position changed by the time. This is the complete position history of the Rome node:

The node creation on 2007-10-15. Back then the local map was empty and a node anywhere near the centre was perfectly fine, but the editor decided after 10 minutes he could do better and already refined to a location close to where the central point commonly is associated with (the Campidoglio).

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Yesterday, Paris became a bicycle shop named France and today the Zimbabwe capital Harare became Hwinidi offices. This time the edit was from iD. The Mapbox data team caught this while reviewing edits on https://osmcha.mapbox.com/ around 13 hours after the edit.

Yesterday I saw that the hospital in construction in Mechelen looked like a real hospital on the map, though it was surrounded with an area “landuse=construction”. As I am a beginner I dared not change this. I placed a note, and as this area on the map is not a canvas for notes pointillism yet, it was quickly discovered and corrected by a more experienced mapper. osm.org/#map=17/51.05150/4.47494

Dear HOT members,

I have accepted the kind nomination by Martin and Blake, as I would love to join the HOT Board to put my knowledge, skills, network and passion to use for the strategic planning for the future of HOT, and to support the community as a researcher, geographer, disastermapper as well as networker.

HOT has come a long way since the Haiti earthquakes. We have a growing number of HOT members and volunteers that are active in mapping, working groups and in building and directing our community. Thanks to this growing community we also have increasing OSM data coverage in vulnerable and disaster affected countries, as well as more and more advanced tools to facilitate the data collection and validation. Therefore, HOT became an increasingly globally distributed and acknowledged community, with a growing number of local chapters that has proven its potential, effectiveness and value in numerous disaster responses, as well as long-term community mapping and Missing Maps projects.

There are however also open questions, e.g.: > * How well do we know our community, and what are their needs? > * What is the impact of our work? How can we better identify and meet the needs of potential data users? > * How can we detect deficiencies in the OSM data, improve validation and data maintenance processes, and assure a certain level of data quality? > * How can we better support and encourage local mapping communities, and link remote and local mappers?

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The interview is published on the Belgian OSM Website

The Paris city node got renamed to France and tagged with shop=bicycle yesterday. This was found and reverted by user:Chetan_Gowda from the Mapbox data team 27 hours later. For some reason the tiles still show a shop, while the name has got fixed.

While inspecting the Paris node, another user seemed to have renamed the French name to Algerie 6 month ago. This was fixed after 4 hours.

Both edits came through Maps.me, but this is just as simple an edit through any other editor. Its surprising no local mappers noticed this.

Hello everyone,

MapSwipe - the mobile app that allows users to swiftly search through satellite imagery and identify huts, houses and villages - is accelerating the Missing Maps mapping process. Its output shapefiles, comprising only tasks identified as containing huts, houses, or villages, allow Missing Maps task creators to omit from projects any tasks without huts, houses and villages. In short, any tasks that do not require mapping.

However, some areas covered by MapSwipe output tasks are quite likely to have already been mapped in OpenStreetMap. A little processing of MapSwipe’s output shapefile can make it even more effective!

First, MapSwipe output can be downloaded at http://mapswipe.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/download/ or using the MapSwipe Tools which can be downloaded at https://gitlab.com/giscience/MapSwipeTools/tree/master.

Using overpass turbo:

1.1. Download the area’s building=yes and landuse=residential GeoJSON files (Wizard > build and run query, then Export > as geoJSON). The building data usually take a little while to download.

Using QGIS:

2.1. Convert the GeoJSON files into shapefiles (Layer > Save As…).

2.2. Merge the two shapefiles (Vector > Data Management Tools > Merge Shapefiles to One…).

2.3. Clip the merge shapefile to the MapSwipe output (Vector > Geoprocessing Tools > Clip…).

2.4. Select MapSwipe tasks with the merge shapefile within their boundaries (Vector > Research Tools > Select by Location…).

2.5. Export selected tasks as a shapefile (Layer > Save As…).

2.6. Invert step 2.4’s selection (right-click on layer > Open Attribute Table > Invert selection).

2.7. Export selected tasks as a shapefile (Layer > Save As…).

The shapefile created in step 2.7 will partly dictate the HOT Tasking Manager project. Further processing of the shapefile created in step 2.5 is required.

Using QGIS:

3.1. Clip the landuse=residential shapefile to the shapefile created in step 2.5 (Vector > Geoprocessing Tools > Clip…).

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Mapping in Gedling on Saturday 18 March in foul weather (it was raining hard; goodness me, could this be England by any chance?) (well, yes). My new smartphone turned out to NOT be as England-proof as my ISODRY-10000 jacket, but that’s another story.

There were one or two pleasant scenes & I thought to share them with you.

Right at the start of the track was an un-named recreation garden on Burton Road. It contained some yew trees (at the right) which sometimes is a sign of a former religious establishment in England. A neighbour said that there used to be a “big house, with stables” at the rear, but had no other information.

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OSM can never be finished, we just keep improving the map. Our tools and sources get better. We can get better aerial imagery, and this means older data can be a little fuzzy. There’s a simple way to improve OSM by looking at old data and seeing if you can improve it.

First enable the TODO list plugin if you haven’t already (seriously, it’s a great plugin), and enable that window on the right hand side. Then download a large area. The JOSM Continuous Downloader plugin can help here. The we can use JOSM’s search functionality to find old data. Let’s try to fix up ways which haven’t been changed since 2010. Press Control-F to bring up the search box. Then enter timestamp:/2010 type:way, and press enter. All old ways will be selected. Press the Add button to these to the TODO list. Double click on the first entry to start working on it. Compare it to the aerial imagery, and fix up it’s geometry if needed. JOSM’s improve way geometry feature (press W) can make this easier. When you’ve finished with this way, press ] to go to the next object. Keep going as long as you want. Upload as often as you want.

With regular “gardening” tasks, OSM will be gradually improved and made better.

After Project NOAH-ISAIAH HOT tasks and also my rural mapping in Batangas City, there is also an increase in mapping critical POI’s in the rural barangays of Batangas City, either on the lowlands or the mountainside. Schools and barangay halls are being added in rural barangays, and using names of those newly added schools or barangay halls, I trace barangays and add the nodes for them via Level0 (instead of JOSM). Rural mapping, especially of critical POI’s and infrastructure, may be useful for disaster risk reduction and rural development. Before, Batangas City has the urban areas only mapped in detail, until Project NOAH-ISAIAH started a HOT task that added buildings not only in the lowland urban areas, but also in the rural areas.

Thanks to all the efforts of local mappers, especially “Brad-M”, “digmaan” and “imeeperezveedor”, the critical POI’s (schools, day care centers, barangay halls, health centers) and infrastructure (roads and buildings) of the rural barangays of Batangas City are being mapped in more detail, like the urban areas, especially the Poblacion area. And it is possible that the city’s government, via the City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (CDRMMO) or City Planning and Development Office, may lead such mapping for disaster preparedness and response, and rural development.