Waymarked Trails is the map for all things route - hiking, cycling, skating and horse riding. It has been a long standing wish of many users to have hillshading and contours on the map. So last week the site has received a new feature that allows you to choose a different base map. The first addition to the available base layers is OpenTopoMap, a beautiful map crafted in spirit of German topological maps. To try it out, go to the settings menu (the little cockwheel on the bottom of the page) and choose the new base map from the drop down menu.

Many thanks to the friendly folks from OpenTopoMap for all their work creating the map and for allowing Waymarked Trails to offer it as a base layer.

Thirumala Temple in Harapanahalli, photo taken from: http://www.tripmondo.com/india/karnataka/mattihalli/

Harapanahalli, is a Taluk of Davanagere, Karnataka. This place is very commercial and has more schools and colleges than other taluks in Davanagere. A Hindu festival “Thirumala Jathre” takes place every year in the temple in Thirumalapura (2 km from Harapanahalli) which is in the image above. The people of all castes participate in the festivities by making Pooja(praying) in the temple, they celebrate this festival grandly.

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at 25th And Main Street in Vancouver, BC area, next to the bookstore on Main and 25th Ave.

Hi everyone! This is my first user diary here!

Recently I’ve began to map the area around the towns Le Thillot, Fresse-sur-Moselle, Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle and Bussang. I’ve lived in this area for a few years and still visit multiple times a year. When I pulled up the street map I saw a lot of missing features, badly-maintained maps and inconsistencies.

For example, importing the land register (Cadastre 2014) has given a lot of strange shapes (e.g. cutoffs in buildings when an area line cuts through it or non-orthogonal shapes). Although satellite imagery is often misaligned/warped in this hilly landscape, some buildings are obviously in the wrong place, too small, rotated, etc. It’s hard to fix these without good quality aerial imagery, but in some cases it’s easy to see what’s wrong. Not everything will be able to get fixed though.

Misaligned buildings in Le Thillot:

Driveways:

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Well… It’s been a while since I’ve written in my OSM diary. Not much has happened since then, other than me editing (rather sparsely if I might add), and not really telling anyone what I’m doing. Well, that’s going to change soon. Sooner or later, with proper permissions if need be, I’m planning to completely redo all administrative boundaries in Cabarrus County, North Carolina.

I recently came to know about the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and it absolutely horrified me. I learned that many young girls are cut in a “cutting season” and that starts in December in many parts of Tanzania. While this procedure is regarded as a rite of passage, this is a harmful procedure that can cause infection, cyst, urination and menstrual flow problems, infertility and death. Tanzania Development Trust is trying to help these girls by rescuing them and providing them a shelter but the problem is, Tanzania is not mapped. To reach a village that is in the middle of a vast plain is already hard and doing it without a map is near impossible. What us mappers can do is provide them with a map that can help many girls avoid this unnecessary process.

The current task is here: http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/3134#

I am mapping. Hope you will join too.

Yesterday my brother came by for a visit. He wanted to go for a short walk in the forest. So we drove to a place that we had planned to check out for some time. According to some an old quarry map, there was supposed to be a quarry for black granite in a forest area. The exact location was quite uncertain, and it was not entirely clear if the thing existed at all.

So we parked the car were the road ended and started walking along an road created by forestry machinery. We searched but could not find any trace of any quarry. Finally we gave up, but on our way back to the car we decided to try another old forestry road. After a few hundred meters we spotted an bare rock surface that looked interesting. It did not have any quarry, but instead several cave entrances. The caves were quite small, but still! These caves did not exist in the swedish cave database, which made them a very nice find!

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Munnar Hill Station (Photo credits: Ashley Ann Mathew 🙂)

My hometown Munnar is a beautiful hill station located in south western Kerala, known for its tea plantations that cover the countryside like a picturesque green carpet. Munnar town is situated at the confluence of 3 ( “Munnu” in Malayalam) Rivers ( “Aaru” in Malayalam) and hence the name Munnar. The modest beginings of the town and plantations were laid during the British Raj and it has today morphed into a quaint little town that is a favourite with nature lovers. It is the nearest town to Anamudi peak, which is the highest peak in South India. The Eravikulam National Park is another tourist attraction, that is home to flora and fauna such as the Neelakurinji flowers (that blossoms once in 12 years) and the Nilgiri Tahr. Other famous landmarks include the Tea Museum, the Mattupetty dam and the Indo swiss farm.

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Am seeking names for three monuments in Ashgabat traffic circles that do not appear to have name plaques. The traffic circles at the intersections of Atamyrat Nyyazow and Gorogly, Ataturk and 10 yyl Abadancylyk, and Galkynys and Beyik Saparmyrat Turkmenbasy are unidentified…but they must have names! I think I’ve identified all other monuments located in traffic circles in this city.

After the usual Saturday grocery shopping (at the newly reopened supermarket in the Bagtyyarlyk shopping center, which was closed for months for unknown reasons), I collected the names of the last monuments in traffic circles along Dowletmamed Andalyb kocesi for which no names had yet been collected. All the monuments are now named in OSM! They are (the occasional descriptions below come from the local newspaper):

Andalyb and … Hoja Ahmet Ýasawy: Šahyr binasy (Poet’s Monument) // 18 meters tall, depicts a blossom inside of which are an ink well and giant quill pen, symbols of poetic inspiration … Aga Berdiýew: Döredjilik binasy (Creativity Monument) // 20 meters tall, symbolic tongues of flame, 30 meters in diameter. … Magtymguly: Erkanalyk binasy (Open Spaces Monument) … Görogly: Alaw binasy (Flame Monument) // three steel columns reaching upwards in the shape of flames, representing a communal hearth, prosperity and sufficiency, evincing the Turkmen people’s deep respect for “dastarhan”, the tablecloth of abundance … Galkynyş: Öşüş binasy (Development Monument) … Atamyrat Nyýazow: Jebeslik binasy (Solidarity Monument) … Oguzhan: Dowamat binasy (Constance Monument) // Spherical construction of six columns in the shape of the moon, symbolizing the six sons of Oguz Han. … Ýunus Emre: Ebedilik binasy (Eternity Monument) … 10 ýyl Abadançylyk: Zemin binasy (Earth Monument)

Spent part of a lazy Saturday morning checking out map notes left by other mappers in Ashgabat, editing corrections into the map based on a) their suggestions, b) my verifications from ground truth.

So I found the ruins of another sawmill in a forest. OK I had known about it for some time, though I was not sure it was much left or not. On an old map from the 40s (Ekonomiska kartan) it was visible and on an orienteering map from the 80s it was marked as a ruin. So I figured there might be something interesting there.

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A few years back within the [Tendring District] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendring ) of England I started to place Notes on OSM when local government granted planning permission permitting development of new dwellings, roads or change of use of buildings i.e. an office building becomes a residential property. It’s a semi automatic utility which might feature in a future diary entry but for now let’s focus on OSM Notes.

I’ve created quite a few Notes and they’ve become difficult to manage. I needed a visual map highlighting notes that have not been reviewed for years so I, and others, can focus on returning to the oldest Notes updating and closing accordingly. After some thought I created this available at [UMAP] (https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/tendring-openstreetmap-notes_97621).

The rest of this diary is about how that’s produced.

Summary

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It seems only fitting that, as Mapperley was famed for the Chase, that it’s householders should love horses:–

Past street art:–

• Marshall Hill Gargoyles
• Gedling Lions
• Gedling House Elf
• Gedling Stick-men
• Wollaton Water Dog
• Phoenix Farm signs
• Nottingham Plaster Boys n Girls

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).

KeepRight is a data consistance and quality assurance tool for OSM. It’s been around for years and years (since at least 2009). I used it ages ago and forgot about it. But it’s still around, still updating, still checking OSM. Some of the checks don’t make sense everywhere, so use your head and mark things as false positives if needed. If you’re looking for some mapping & gardening, open it up, have a look at an area and fix up the map.

Every day I have been adding and fixing OpenStreetMap data. I have learnt and contributed in creating data of the highest possible quality in collaboration with the OpenStreetMap community.

Over this year I have created, edited and modified around 44,000 changesets. 😃

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river gets narrow for a small segment for no apparent reason

should fix this and loop elsewhere on the rio grande: osm.org/#map=14/34.9269/-106.6742

Usually when meeting old timer GIS users in academia or government, there are a bunch of questions I get asked about how OSM data fits into the more traditional GIS model where data is organised into shapefiles and layers.

Since I could not really find a simple article which explained the difference, spent a few minutes today to come up with a (possibly) easy to understand benefits table for someone in Government. Its not technically accurate, but could quickly help pitch the idea for opening up more data.

Its still very rough, feel free to contribute any suggestions/improvements that could make this useful.

Here is a snapshot of recent history & developments within the suburb of Nottingham called Mapperley, and explicitly the private road called Podder Lane which I mapped a few hours ago.

This is what most of Podder Lane looks like today (1st photo below) and what the last 10 yards looks like (in my experience, the 2nd photo is an extreme example of the ‘normal’ condition of unadopted roads):–

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We’ve released a new version 0.9 of our open source routing engine GraphHopper. Read here for more information. Also the ‘car’ profile is now available for GraphHopper on openstreetmap.org