A small snippet from my recent survey off Mapperley Plains, Notts.:–

The householder was a retired chap & explained that, when he & his wife got married & bought a house, some so-called friends had said that the two of them were now “Up the creek” (splendid friends, huh?). So, in response, they decided to give their new home a name:–

Update 2 July 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that use photos stored in Mapillary are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I hope also on yours).

(This post is cross-posted from a recent post on my blog and adapted for an audience already familiar with OpenStreetMap.)

An overflowing bánh mì, a tray of tender bánh da lợn, a can of soybean milk: my treat after every monthly trip to the little Vietnamese grocery across town. Mekong Market was my Sunday Bible school of Vietnamese culture in a childhood as distant from Asia as one could imagine, in Cincinnati. Snacks, sauces, and canned foods defying translation lined the shelves; in the refrigerator, a variety of mystery meats wrapped in aluminum foil each bore the same place of origin: Chicago.

One Labor Day, my family made a trip up to Chicago to finally see the bustling Vietnamese community whose clearance we had happily bought for years. We made a lot of road trips back then, often just spur-of-the-moment driving through the peaceful countryside. But since we were headed five hours away to an unfamiliar city, we needed to plan ahead. As the resident map enthusiast, I was to find directions to the Vietnamese supermarket in Chicago using our new Internet connection. We’d enjoy some phở for lunch and bring back enough fresh ingredients to avoid Mekong Market for a little while.

A search for “Vietnamese markets in Chicago” on AltaVista turned up an article from The Washingtonian describing a cluster of supermarkets, phở restaurants, and bakeries on Wilson Boulevard. I pasted the street address into MapQuest, specified “Chicago” and “Illinois” to make sure I got the right “Wilson”, and printed out the directions.

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University of Virginia Library has GIS data for buildings in Loudoun county (and lots of others), and the terms of use say the data “is publicly available and can be reused and published without restriction, so I figured I’d start importing it into OSM using JOSM.

This first upload was a residential neighborhood to test the workflow.

Who are you?

I’m half German half Polish. I’m living in Bavaria in Germany. I’m a car navigation professional responsible for innovation management. Previously I worked with navigation maps and city modelling. Years before I developed specifications for 3D city models for the German government in Hamburg. Then I started to work for one of the biggest car navigation companies. I made the first trials for 3D data acquisition with laser scanning used now e.g. in Here products. I also taught for 15 years constructive geometry and technical representation techniques at the Technical University in Hamburg. My hobbies are my family, 3D modeling, painting, photography, geography and molecular medicine. I decided to use the polish part of my full name instead of nickname because I believe, I have nothing to hide when I map.

When and how did you discover OpenStreetMap?

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While I was fixing a lot of stuff around Sarajevo, it occurred to me that we don’t have a way to render Muslim cemeteries - an important landmark of the cityscape there, and in many other parts of the world too, I’m sure. Some big cemeteries are even divided into Christian and Muslim sections.
Adapting one the existing rendering patterns was easy enough:

So, how does one officially propose a new way to render an existing feature?

We cannot (unfortunately) use Google Satellite to directly help us sketch buildings. I’ve spent the past 14 months using Bing (and now a week occasionally using DigitalGlobe) under JOSM to draw the outline of houses throughout Nottingham NG3/NG4. In my neck of the woods, DigitalGlobe is much newer, whilst Bing is less blurry, but Google normally knocks them both into a cocked hat, being both very new & as sharp as a pin (wistful sigh).

SomeoneElse showed me Google-3D — on a laptop/desktop hold down the <Ctrl> key whilst you use the mouse to move the satellite view & you will get 3D rather than 2D (I believe that this is accomplished using the 45° Imagery). I now use this imagery to re-walk the path that I took on my earlier survey + check the backs, etc. of the houses for all the bits that I could not see from the street when making the original survey.

In the past various MPGs have reacted with fury to me taking photographs in their vicinity (and have even tried to cause me serious injury), and there is a link between the location of these characters & missing sections of StreetView. I also know from many, many conversations just how common the irritation/anger is over Google’s street photography amongst Nottingham householders. This next bit will possibly cause their heads to explode.

In ordinary circumstances, pressing the + key on the Google Satellite view will eventually switch from overhead-satellite to StreetView (if it exists), and that change occurs in spite of the 2D/3D setting. I’ve discovered how to get closer without switching. Astonishingly close.

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Setting up OSRM is very easy because it’s using Docker. Here are the steps to take to set up your own router. You can run this locally or on a server. To see this in action check out https://mappingdc.org/bike-router/.

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Cross posted from mcld.co.uk

On Wednesday we had a “flagship seminar” from Prof Andy Hopper on Computing for the future of the planet. How can computing help in the quest for sustainability of the planet and humanity?

Lots of food for thought in the talk. I was surprised to come out with a completely different take-home message than I’d expected - and a different take-home message than I think the speaker had in mind too. I’ll come back to that in a second.

Some of the themes he discussed:

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I revisited Antwerp City and to my surprise drinking water fountains had appeared.
I checked the data from the city and found it to be rather good. Not so in Brussels. https://www.antwerpen.be/nl/stadsplan/stadslagen/53f366528cf0099572b1378a/drinkwaterfonteintjes

The markers collapse too soon or expand too late for the map to be useful. But the coordinates are very precise. I wished there was a method to copy them in OSM. Anyway thanks to yours truly, OSM is now much better than the official map.

I don’t like the new drinking water fountains. They are of concrete and metal with a low and a high faucet. You can only drink from them. The advantage is that they do not necessarily need a gutter. osm.org/node/4706323436#map=19/51.20538/4.39898&layers=D

Strangely there is a blind spot on the map to the south of this fountain.

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/p9D

I do not doubt that most of the Antwerp drinking water fountains will work in the summer. Not so in Brussels. But I cannot set their stateofrepair to OK without revisiting them. That can easily be done in the app “Drinkingwaterfountains”. Yes folks, some people map drinking water fountains in the summer without checking if they work.

The Province of Antwerp, or some of its politicians have always been strong advocates for drinking water fountains in their recreational parks and along the main bicycle ways. But the place of those fountains is their best kept secret. “The drinking water company is also involved”, they say.

I still have to resolve three notes, and then I am sure hat I have a 95 % accurate picture of the whole province. osm.org/note/974600

osm.org/note/974600

osm.org/note/973196

Or I could place notes all over the place. No don’t worry, I am not that silly. But my three notes might not be visible between all the old and silly notes.

… See full entry

Used Mapillary today for the first time to map the approach road to Taze Zaman, a new suburb of Ashgabat. It gobbled up all the memory of my iPhone 5 very quickly. The interface with ID is very cool and made editing very easy; on the negative side, I’d like an auto mode that doesn’t shoot the entire memory wad in only ten minutes. OpenStreetCam is much more memory efficient, though it lacks an interface with ID.

I’m going to try to map out more bike paths around metro Denver, CO. Here are some resources to help out:

*https://www.denvergov.org/content/dam/denvergov/Portals/708/documents/2017-Denver-Bike-Map.pdf *http://bikedenver.org/resources/bike-maps *https://www.bicyclecolorado.org/ride-colorado/colorado-bike-maps/

I’m still learning what is possible in OpenStreetMap and just how easy it is to add and edit material. I’d encourage anyone to have a go at this. Every little improvement or addition makes the map more useful and accurate.

Can someone please do something about the spammers? I am a regular reader of the OpenStreetMap Blog feed, but recently they have been overrun by spammers that abuse the user diary system and go as far as to peddle software cracking (warez).

Extra: Another thing I noticed is that the OpenStreetMap signup page does not have that “I’m not a robot” captcha, which is a far cry from the days you had to figure out nearly-indecipherable words. If there was one, it would significantly reduce automated spammers.

Extra II: But the captcha I refer to helps Google Street View, even though it will be some time before OSM can excel in the street view sector. So what now? Panic?

Actually, failed is too strong a word. Annoyed or disappointed is better.

I am on a vacation in Bilbao which is a lovely city with friendly people, photogenic streets and very good food. But I can’t use Osmand or Maps.me to find streets named in any of the tourist guides of even by the locals including the very nice staff at our hotel.

Why? Because the directions are in always in Spanish/Castilian and a year or so ago the many of the name=* tags for the streets here were edited to remove the Spanish names and have only the Basque names.

I have been consciously observing street signs and they are consistently are in both Basque and Spanish. Usually with Spanish on top. It is my understanding that OSM multilingual tagging calls for having all languages on the signs tagged. I have no issue with replacing the Spanish with Basque on the default name=* tags. But the Spanish names should have been put into name:es=* tags. That would allow visitors like myself a chance at a much better experience.

Imagine being able to find the street given to you by a friendly local who assumes, correctly, that you speak no Basque.

Not that it would have helped much with Maps.me as I don’t see any setting in that app to specify display or search on anything other than the default name=* tag. Osmand does have a setting for specifying the language but I don’t know how well it works as the data is not in OSM for it to work with.

So here I am with a wonderful looking OSM based maps with an amazing number of points of interest. And I have apps that can give me detailed directions once I figure out where I want to go. But I am reduced to using Google to find my destination and then I need to compare the street geometry to see where the location is on my OSM based map.

Maybe not a “fail” for OSM, but definitely annoying and disappointing.

… apparently my own memory has failed me.

Last September, I have jotted down places to be added into OSM during a (long) bus trip using the Favourite feature in the OsmAnd app. On top of that, OSMTracker for Android was also recording tracks, and I have also taken some photos.

Places near the destination of the bus trip is quite undermapped in OSM. When I reached back home, I found out that neither Bing nor Mapbox layers that has high resolution imagery. Sentinel 2 imagery can be said to be helpful, but to a certain extent. So, I have kept a backup of the Favourite GPX file, who knows, it could be reused in the future.

As DigitalGlobe (DG) has released two layers of imageries recently, I have decided to do remapping again, based on these Favourite GPX files. Many thanks to DG, apparently places across the mentioned bus journey could be (re-)mapped using the Premium (but not the Standard) layer.

However, it seems that I didn’t include adequate contexts while jotting things down… oh no, not a good news. I was not able to exactly recall some of these things. Shame.

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P.S. cannot thank DigitalGlobe enough for sharing their imagery layers.

Frinz (removed - thank you) was your classic spammer, and in this case a Profile spammer:–

• Spammer (Oxford Dictionary) (Wikipedia)
• Profile Spammer:– Someone that places their spam within their forum Profile & then places at least one post within at least one of that forum’s boards
   
  (the purpose of the forum post is to get a legitimate forum link back to the Profile, something that all search-engines (SE’s) will follow — ALL spammer activity is intended to game the SE SERPs; any uplift from direct spammer links is simply a bonus)

In this case, Frinz placed his spam within the Personal page for his Profile. His stats are:–

• Signed up: 07:18 16 May, 2017
• Edits: 0
• Traces: 0
• Diary: 0
• Comment: 07:19 16 May, 2017: Comment content: “Hi Hello!”

Fairly transparent once you understand the method & motivations.

This place is called “Tagondaing”, in Kayin State, Burma.

Interesting reading: https://agile-online.org/images/conference_2017/Proceedings2017/shortpapers/77_ShortPaper_in_PDF.pdf

Abstract

An increasing number of crowdsourced geo-data repositories and their services allows volunteer mappers to utilize information from various data sources when contributing data to a crowd-sourced mapping platform. This study explores to which extent OpenStreetMap (OSM) contributors use the crowdsourced street level photo service Mapillary to derive mappable data for OSM during their editing sessions in the iD and JOSM editors. We cross-check the location of OSM edits with the geographic areas from which OSM contributors loaded Mapillary images into the editors to determine which OSM edits could have been based on information from Mapillary images. The findings suggest that OSM mappers are beginning to utilize information from street level images in their mapping workflow. This observed “cross-viewing” pattern between different datasets indicates that the use of data from one VGI platform to enhance that of another is a real phenomenon, leading to implications for VGI data quality.

Long term goals: Complete Geoje-si, South Korea

Completed 1.Roughing all roads 2. Redraw coastline 3. Rough zoning of west part of island 4. Detailed Streets and buildings of A. Gohyeon B. Janpyeong C. Junggok D. Suwol/ Yangjeong E. Sangdong F. Okpo G. Aju H. Jangseungpo I. Neungpo J. Irun-myeon K. South east coast of Dongbu-myeon L. Mundong M. Yeoncho-myeon N. Sagok in Sadeung-myeon O. Central Section in Geoje-myeon 5. Next A. Complete Dongbu-myeon (1-2 months) B. Complete Geoje-myeon (< 1 month) C. Complete Hacheong-myeon (1-2 months) D. Complete Jangmok-myeon (2-3 months) E. Complete Sadeung-myeon (2-3 months) F. Complete Dundeok- myeon (2-3 months) G. Complete Nambu-myeon (2-3 months)

I used a road trip from Bayramaly to Ashgabat to collect GPS traces as well as several megabytes of imagery with OpenStreetCam on May 11, and today plowed through the data to update the M37 between Bayramaly and Ashgabat. In several places it remains under construction and signage is minimal to nonexistent. There is more work to be done but the roadway itself is largely done. We also found another couple of gas stations (always useful) and a good fish restaurant, the Seljuk Kafe-Otel!