You may have missed the reports in April about Willand, a pretty little village in Devon that is 2cm (0.7 inches) closer to god each year (from the heliocentric view, of course), yet no-one knows why:

The connection to OSM is a little tortuous, but real.

The University of Nottingham has a Geography department, and it has spun off a commercial company called Geomatic Ventures Limited (GML). GML has created a United Kingdom Relative Deformation Map using results from the Sentinel-1 satellite. Here is the blurb from the mangomap site:

United Kingdom Relative Deformation Map

A relative deformation map of the United Kingdom, generated from ~ 2000 Sentinel-1 images acquired between October 2015 - October 2017. The data was processed using the Intermittent Small Baseline Subset (ISBAS) InSAR method. Each pixel represents the average vertical height change over the period of observations in millimetres per year.

… See full entry

As part of the #cittasenzamemoria project, the verification of toponyms dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele III in Campania was updated.

The data comes from the map of OpenStreetMap aimed at creating a free content cartography of the world. The map information is freely accessible under license ODbL and updated every day. To facilitate the consultation, the toponyms are also available on the dedicated online map. A total of 50 names were identified below:

id name City

… See full entry

I am working on the Turkmenistan page in the OSM Wiki, seeking to add information I’ve acquired during my tour of duty here in Ashgabat. If you have suggestions for information that should go on this page for purposes of preserving institutional memory, please sing out! If I don’t possess the information I’ll try to find it during the time left on my tour of duty.

This entry is for my reference and for anyone who is interested in cleaning their motorways.

I have decided to do some clean ups and fixes along a motorway (mostly linking roads) here in Australia. I think this is important for GPS usage, or otherwise clarity sake whilst viewing. I want to list the things I did to cleanup and otherwise improve.

Fixing Roads

This one should come as no surprise. It is important to use a good imagery source and offset by GPX. Keep in mind that people driving will be in different lanes, so align the road to be in the centre of this.

Different lanes should not be mapped as individual ways.

Use of destination tags on linking roads and junctions (e.g. offramps and onramps)

This one is important for GPS navigation. Here are the tags that I’m going with:

destination= This tag is for whatever the sign says, I reserve this one mostly for a Suburb or City name. Use a semicolon to separate multiple names: City 1;City 2. Mapillary and OpenStreetCam help here.

destination:street= The name of the road that is at the end of the linking road.

destination:ref= The reference number of the road that is at the end of the linking road.

destination:network= I think this one is unofficial, but I use this if the destination has a network.

Adding/Improving junctions

Someone has already done a good job at adding most. However where I am, motorway junction nodes are only present when the exit has a ref number (e.g. Exit 32). This isn’t good for exits which don’t have numbers. So to areas which didn’t have any. I’ve added them and used the destination tag on them instead.

I have also added destinations tags to existing ones where needed. These were placed as per the wiki’s instruction.

Making transition roads at junction

Although the placement=transition tag isn’t official, I like to use it on the slight bit of road that connects the motorway to the motorway_link road.

… See full entry

Turkey Run was certainly worth the trip. The trails are awesome! Trail #3 isn’t very dog friendly though, just so you know. You can spend hours and even days just hiking around the trails and doing fun things. There is horseback riding, canoeing, rafting, and tons of other things. We’ll definitely have to come back to this place later.

.

As of today, interactive (Kartographer) maps no longer display in the language of the territory mapped; instead, you’ll read them in the content language of the wiki where they appear—or in the language their authors specify (subject to availability of multilingual data). In addition, mapframe, the feature that automatically embeds dynamic maps right on a wiki page, is now live on most Wikipedias that lacked the feature. (Not included in the mapframe launch are nine Wikipedias [1] that use the stricter version of Flagged Revisions).

If you you’re new to mapframe, this Kartographer help page [2] shows how to get started putting dynamic maps on your pages. If you’d like to read more about map internationalization: this Special Update [3] explains the feature and its limiations; this post [4] and this one [5] describe the uses of the new parameter, lang=”xx”, which lets you specify a map’s language. And here are some example maps [6] to illustrate the new capabilities.

These features could not have been created without the generous programming contributions and advice of our many map-loving volunteers, including Yurik, Framawiki, Naveenpf, TheDJ, Milu92, Astirlin, Evad37, Pigsonthewing, Mike Peel, Eran Roz, Gareth and Abbe98. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed.

The Map Improvements 2018 [7] project wraps up at the end of June, so please give internationalized maps and mapframe a try soon and give us your feedback on the project talk page [8]. We’re listening.

… See full entry

This is a translation of this article in Russian. Far from perfect, but understandable, I hope. Written by Ilya Zverev, CC-BY.

Riding the wave of Google Maps pricing news, Tom Chadwin reminded everyone of benefits of using open source solutions, and concluded with these words: “You now have a concrete compelling argument to those who have always asked: “Why not just use Google Maps?”.

Have I got a platinum argument towards a metaphorical Google Maps: because your open map does not have any future, that’s why. It doesn’t even have good POI coverage, unlike Google, which has franchise owners lined up with location offerings. Because it presents not a dozen grumpy dudes turning every data contributor down, but a nice mat with “Welcome” on it.

That’s an exaggeration, of course. We’ve got a great, beautiful map, which in many areas not only excels — it doesn’t have any alternatives. Nowhere else can you get a reasonably correct road graph. No other map would allow for estimating population density. Nobody would provide you with the data to install a copy of a service in a closed network.

With that, it is hard to not notice that OpenStreetMap is dying. Not because we’ve got a database for a map, or that we don’t have moderators, or the data is not split in layers, like Serge complained. For a technically skilled person it’s impossible to believe in the fall of OSM: the data is detached and decentralized, which is eternal by definition. On top of that, it is free (as in beer) and a million editors contribute to it: why isn’t every website using it?

… See full entry

No. That doesn’t work either. I can now see the point why OSM wants all route variants as a separate relation on their own.

It is just showing up as a black background in both Google and Firefox. Any news? Nothing came up trying to google it.

Just created relation 8276636, which I have called an augmented_route. The idea is that it points to ‘the’ bus route (in a given direction), but also contains meta-data about that bus route, such as which bits are optionally not served etc. A simplistic rendered could still look inside and get the first member, which is a normal route and render that.

The other members of this augmented route are all relations, being variations to the route: alternative pathways and short runnings (and the reasons for those).

I don’t want to do it as a super_route as, that is already used to group many routes, not group routes with their variants

The idea is that routing or rendering software will optionally add/subtract these route variants, according to whatever conditions govern them. These variants generally involve matching node-pairs in them with the same ones in the ‘main’ route, and replacing them with their own contents. Obviously, this will require a bit of disambiguation to cope with self-crossers and the like, but I don’t want to add ‘role=junction-point-1’ or the like yet, to members in the main route.

I also need to have a think about how these variants can be made to affect ‘interval’ type tagging. E.g, adding an optional short-running might double the frequency from 2BPH to 4BPH.

Obviously, I haven’t thought this all the way through yet.

I began documenting Delhi’s mapping of bus routes on the wiki, so that others can join the effort.

Bus 427 became the first route to be completely surveyed by traveling. 764 became the second.

A new workflow evolved -

1. First, I learned about creating local notes in OsmAnd
2. Then came the knowledge of OsmAnd’s ability to export them to a GPX file. This lets me open my OsmAnd notes in JOSM.
3. Then came JOSM’s “Convert to data layer” (right-click on a GPX layer -> Convert to data layer). [1] This makes a data layer with one node for each note. The text is in a note= tag.
4. And today I got the idea to convert the note= tags to name= tags (select all the ‘note’ nodes with Ctrl-A, double-click on the note= tag, and change the key from ‘note’ to ‘name’) to be able to see all the note text while editing. Sweet!

Editing this way in JOSM also allows me to see the notes sorted alphabetically. Double-click the note/name field, click the arrow for the drop-down menu, and tada! I haven’t yet put it to this use, but I’m excited at the prospect of it letting me concentrate my edits to a single route when working with bus sightings.

[1] Ooooh. As I wrote this, I discovered that you can also “Download from OSM along this track” and “Precache imagery tiles along this track”. Faaaaaancy!

Just found openstreetmap. Seems like a great Idea. I have used waze editor before but this seems easier.

I’m finding it hard going mapping bus routes, due to all the various anomalies and trying to shoehorn that into OSM’s guidelines.

I’ve just put together some 8 relations, all notionally the same route number in the same direction. This is a maintenance nightmare, but I suppose I could come up with some sort of tool for automatically checking for consistency.

Doing them as seprate relations, as OSM requires, now makes it meaningless to put an interval tag on, because, as separate routes, they don’t look at all “regular”: the interval is only meaningful across the whole set of route variants.

Having to do a route as e.g. 2 relations, just for a minor peak-only variant is insane, the main reason for which is this:

You can’t tag a small section of a route (unless there’s a way of putting arbitrary text in line with stops and ways in a relation).

I need some form of route segmentation, which will be supported by the renderers, and which will be seen as a contiguous route by any routing software. If I can’t see any sane pre-existing precedent, I’m going to have to do my own thing. I’m imaginging a structure like this:

interval=60 Stop1 Stop2 Way1 Way2 interval=15 Stop3 Stop4 Way3 Way4 Way5 Way6

Stop3 Way3

I just began my contribution to hot task #4490 Beledweyne, Somalia-2018 Flood Crisis Project 01. I hope to map a reasonable number of buildings and roads so there can be effective response.

Just spent three days exploring parts of Balkan velayat, including the Yangy Kala Canyon, plus attending the dedication of Turkmenbashy city’s new international seaport. I am presently uploading several thousand Mapillary images, which will take several days at our local internet speeds, so check back in a week or two for updated ground-level imagery. I also collected names of some villages in Balkan velayat on the road between Balkanabat and Archman, and will be adding them as time permits. Lots of fresh data–now just need to find time to enter it all!

I’ve decided to give this interval thing a try. Main problem is reconciling it with the requirement that all route variants have a relation to themselves. My route has two ‘core’ variants, one of which is a short run of the other. The ‘1’ variant runs at 2 BPH, and the ‘2’ variant also runs at 2 BPH. This is obviously a total of 4 BPH for anyone wanting to travel both to and from points on the common section of route. However, they are engineered so that they interleave, and that the 4 BPH really is ‘one every fifteen minutes’, as opposed to four buses spread irregularly about within the hour.

This is one reason I’d like to have route segments; we could specify the interval for alternative routes, short-runnings, and telescopings without having to use heuristics to infer it by spotting common parts of routes.

This particular pair of examples (relations 8,257,900 and 8,265,640) are midday-only buses (‘midday’ within the definition of the interval tag). Can someone check I’ve done it right, please. The defining characteristic of this route/variant is that it serves a village, which is effectively inaccessible due to traffic congestion other than between 0900 and 1500. There is one other such trip, in the afternoon peak, but I’ve omitted that, as I’d rather understate the availability of buses on that route.

external gps devices arent as easy to use with android as they are on iphone. you need a separate provider app to act as an intermediary between your phone and the external gps and for some reason it wont automatically reconnect to the garmin glo when its turned on.

i use one phone for mapillary and another for navigating so it gets pretty tedious having to connect and disconnect both of them every time i want to map something… so i made this:

setup

• download Tasker (paid app, €3)
• download Bluetooth GPS and get it set up and connected to the garmin glo
• download these two profiles
• place the files into the “tasker/profiles” folder in your main storage
• in the tasker app, tap the “profiles” tab on the top left and import the files you just added to the folder
• once theyre imported, go into the triggers of both profiles and add the MAC address for your glo (tap the search icon on the right to get a list of available devices)

 

connecting

just power on the glo and wait for tasker to detect it.

by default, tasker scans for bluetooth devices every 2 minutes so depending on what point the scan is at, it might connect straight away or it might be closer to the 2 minute mark.
the scan time can be changed by going to “preferences/monitor/bt scan seconds” but scanning more frequently will use up more power/battery so it might be easier to just get into the habit of turning on the glo a few minutes before you need it so it will have enough time to connect.

its also best to turn on the screen when youre trying to connect this since tasker will only scan every 10 minutes when your phone is asleep

minor annoyance: if you restart your phone, the bluetooth gps app has to be opened once for the profiles to work again

disconnecting

when youre done using the glo, power it off and tasker will disconnect the bluetooth provider app. this is done automatically on some phones but not on all so its easier to leave tasker handle it

… See full entry

My Ph.D research is “Mapping of Malaria and Factors of Vulnerability in Rivers State, Nigeria”. Essentially, we are looking at the current prevalence of malaria and the spatial and temporal variations of malaria infection in the state from 1999 to 2017.

For the prevalence study, we will be collecting blood samples from consenting patients in Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs). There are 383 PHCs in the state and we decided to use a conventional sampling technique called Systematic Point Sampling to select our study centres. We (members of UMT) have embarked on our field trip to pick the spatial entities of all the PHCs.

As a member of UniqueMappersTeam, I am enjoying the privilegde of working with the team to actualize this phase of my work. It couldn’t have been possible without them (us).

Very unsure about how best to present bus routes in a concise manner. I don’t want to have to put the whole timetable on OSM, as it would become OOD very quickly.

Numbering the variants seems a silly idea, as that would make it difficult to add new ones or to split existing ones. I can’t think what else to do, though, so I’ll do it like that FTTB.

I don’t want to put every minor variant on, because it would make people think that there is a regular service, when it’s just occasional (and how to define 'occasional' ?) and I don’t want to miss routes off, as it will make it look like there’s no service at all.

Maybe I should add some form of BPH or BPD tag ? Should BPH relate to the average across the whole day, or just within the section of the day where it operates ? I can’t just add text like ‘no service after 1900’ as that would depend on which section of the route we’re talking about. I could do that if we could map routes as segments, but we can’t; we have to do each entire route variant as a separate relation.