This is my very first entry here. Written from El Mapatón OSM, an OpenStreetMap event at Almería.

At tonight’s Vancouver OpenStreetMap meetup we were wondering about the state of drinking fountains in Vancouver. The tag is amenity=drinking_water.

A search in Overpass Turbo tells us that in the rough boundaries of Vancouver 112 water fountains were mapped.

In the open data catalogue of the City of Vancouver 239 water fountains are listed. That means we have a coverage of less than 50 % of Vancouver’s drinking fountains in OSM. Errors in this assumption might include duplicates and outdated data in OSM as well as drinking fountains which are not operated by the city.

I’ve seen for a while that my county’s fairgrounds are unmapped, but I haven’t mapped them as I have been unable to figure out a good way to tag them. Yesterday I was going though local notes and I saw one that was asking if the fairgrounds were indeed at the location there are at. This got me intrested in tagging them again, so I asked on the OSM-US slack for ideas on how to map them. A few sugestions I got were to use the amenity=festival_grounds or the leasure=park tags.

I like the sound of the festival_grounds tag, it seems like it is just the right tag for a fairgrounds. Then I opened the wiki…

The description on the page for amenity=festival_grounds is describeing an outdoor music venue. The page doesn’t have anything that even resembles a county fairgrounds. This doesn’t add up, so I head over to taginfo to see how the tag is used and where. It has 101 uses total, so it’s not used that much, but it’s more than a couple uses. I can’t use the map on taginfo because the tag is not used enough, so I do a search with overpass-turbo. Overpass shows a asortment of uses around the world, but mostly in America and Europe.

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i am so happy to contribute to humanity with my spare time for the first time after learning how to map.

Go catch Lukas Martinelli’s talk on validating every change on OSM this Saturday at 10:30AM in De Donato at State of the Map 2018 in Milan. “We will present how we have built bulletproof protection against the daily vandalism and newbie mistakes we see”. Here is the SOTM Talk Summary.

Places on OSM where we have found vandalism from OSM edits on the day of 2018-06-19

You can review these detections on OSMCHA with the reason Flagged for review by Mapbox.

My home PC is now Devuan and I’ve lost all trace of how I previously set Debian up to be able to transfer osmtracker files between my home PC and my Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow smartphone connected using a USB cable. So, here it all is again, but this time under Devuan 2.0 (ascii).

tl;dr:
1. On the phone enable Developer Options and change the USB default to MTP.
2. On the Desktop install jmtpfs + mtp-tools, then mount
3. Use Thunar to access mounted disk + transfer files

Xfce is my desktop environment & Thunar the File Manager. Once mounted (below) and whilst the phone screen is unlocked it is possible to browse/copy the phone directories with Thunar in the normal way. The jmtpfs README states that “tools like find and rsync work as expected”, although I have not yet explored this.

One item that is currently missing is that, whilst USB Mass-Storage devices are auto-mounted upon insertion & can be stopped/unmounted from Thunar, that is not yet available for me with the phone. You thus need to use the terminal to both mount, and to unmount the phone before removal.

There is every chance that you need root for this on your phone. I wanted to be able to mount the phone from my desktop and thus then use either GUI or terminal to move files created whilst surveying using OSMTracker on my smartphone.

Here is the info detected on the smartphone model after installing mtp-tools:

$ mtp-detect

Listing raw device(s)
Device 0 (VID=19d2 and PID=0307) is a ZTE V880E.
   Found 1 device(s):
   ZTE: V880E (19d2:0307) @ bus 1, dev 6
Device info:
   Manufacturer: Vodafone
   Model: VFD 600

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I’m now back editing OpenStreetMap. I’ve got some outstanding messages in my OSM inbox, which I should get to at the weekend.

Pony rides on Terrace Place!

With the recent addition of displaying notes in iD (see my last blog post), we wanted to allow users to also add notes. Preview the feature by enabling the notes layer under map-data, or see an example. Please let us know if you find any critical issues before the next iD release this week.

If you’re curious about where notes are headed, consider several of these feature discussions. The top of our list includes adding filtering by open/closed status, location, date, and importance, and categorizing notes to make them more useful. Please comment below to let us know how you use OSM notes.

Cheers! -Thomas Hervey

Whew! Couple of hours cycling and tracking and taking notes today in almost 30°C weather. Too hot for a Finn like myself, although you get a nice breeze when you are cycling. And my main goal was to map amenity=drinking_water places so that helped me to stay well hydrated through out the day. And I went swimming afterwards to the ocean.

What a great hobby for an outdoorsy person and you get to know your area really well, even I go to places I have never been to in this 15k pop. town.

State of the Map conferences celebrates the essence of the amazing communities that form an integral part of the OpenStreetMap. These conferences continue to strengthen the relationships that contributors around the world build both online and in person. The whole team at Mapbox cannot wait to connect with new and familiar friends around the globe at the many OpenStreetMap events happening this year.

Here’s the map of all events, find the interactive one here

Take a look at our event-full calendar for this year:

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Hi,

If there are any mappers in Uusikaupunki, or nearby, and you want someone to map with, maybe we could work together. I’m male, in my late thirties, I don’t have a car, only a bicycle. I have been mapping for a few years every now and then.

Sama suomeksi.

Dear all,

Today, v4.13.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website) has been released. Once changes are deployed on the openstreetmap.org it will take couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

Changes include:

• Increased shield distances on roads
• Added icon for shop=ticket
• Added icon for shop=houseware
• Added icon for shop=charity
• Added icon for shop=second_hand
• Added icon for shop=interior_decoration
• Added icon for amenity=bureau_de_change
• Added icon for amenity=casino
• Added icon for amenity=boat_rental
• Updated shop=department_store icon
• Small documentation and code fixes

Thanks to all the contributors for this release.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v4.12.0…v4.13.0

As always, we welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues

It’s no secret that I’m trying to figure out how to simplify mapping of public transport to bring it within reach of all mappers. All without losing the ability to map stops, lines and itineraries in full detail without any limitations. My vision is that a stop with no discernible objects in the middle of nowhere and a stop with all possible equipment should be mapped exactly the same: as a NODE next to the highway/railway.

There are many stop_position nodes I added over time that don’t serve much of a purpose, but then there are some that PT_Assistant’s validator actually started to depend on. It’s those that ‘terminate’ itinerary variations.

Maybe we should get terminology defined first.

What I call a line, is represented as route_master relations in OSM (and confusingly found in routes.txt in GTFS). What I call an itinerary or itinerary variation is represented as route relations in OSM. And stops, well I’d say highway=bus_stop, railway=tram_stop, railway=halt to begin with and public_transport=platform + mode of transport, if you like.

Anyway, stop_position nodes as indication of where an itinerary starts/ends (and splitting the way on those nodes) does make sense.

I still wouldn’t add them for each and every stop though, I still wouldn’t add any details like name on them and I definitely wouldn’t add them to the route relations though. That’s what the nodes next to the highway/railway are used for.

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Building detection at Villa Imelda, MacArthur.

For the last couple of weekends I’ve been tinkering with Robosat to detect features from aerial imagery. At its core RoboSat is using state of the art fully convolutional neural network architectures for semantic segmentation.

Daniel posted an excellent walk-through to run the RoboSat pipeline on openly available drone imagery in Tanzania.

This post follows Daniel’s guide for detecting buildings in drone imagery in the Philippines. The goal of this exercise is for me to understand the basics of the pipeline and find ways to use the tool in identifying remote settlements from high resolution imagery (i.e drones). I’m not aiming for pixel-perfect detection (i.e precise geometry of the building). My main question is whether it can help direct a human mapper focus on specific areas in the imagery to map in OpenStreetMap.

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I created way which has _link tag for the first time.I did not have ever edited road.So, I may have made a mistake.

Change set is here

MAPS.ME is a great app, and Ashgabat users suffering from high internet costs (the highest in the world, we are told) have found it a cost-effective way of uploading POIs. In certain important respects, this is a boon to mapping Ashgabat and other cities in Turkmenistan.

There are, however, two issues. First, the mappers often mis-tag POIs, either because they don’t know English too well (some mappers tag all medical or health facilities “amenity=hospital”, for example, including pharmacies, clinics, and ambulance stations), or because MAPS.ME’s limited universe of point tags doesn’t lend itself to proper tagging. Second, because MAPS.ME’s offline maps are updated relatively infrequently, multiple mappers add a POI multiple times, so you end up with two or three new entries for the same POI. This has created a fair amount of work for me, cleaning up after entry of POIs that either duplicate an existing node, usually consolidating all data from multiple entries, or simply correcting tags. I’m not complaining–there are worse problems (like vandalism), but it does take time.

The good news is that this weekend temperatures in Ashgabat will be well over 100 Fahrenheit, mid-40s Celsius, so I have a great excuse to stay close to the air conditioner and edit the map.

In Argentina we discussed and finally have a new highway hierarchy criterion.

Proposal is kind of loose so we can adapt it in different situations. I used it on my city and I think is an opportunity for other to understand the process. Specially if you live in a city similar to mine.

Context: Resistencia has 300,000 inhabitants, at East there is an important satellite city Barranqueras that has 50,000 inhabitants, at Southeast Puerto Vilelas has only 8000 inhabitants, at West you find Fontana, 20 years ago a town with 10,000 people, now 40,000 people. Resistencia is a wide city with a weak infrastructure, less than 40% of its streets are paved, and there are big areas where main roads are unpaved avenues. Its checkerboard city plan has “avenidas” (avenues) each 1 km, inside that avenues there are very few avenues. It is situated on a flooding plain, there is not any rocky outcrop, average precipitation is 1200 mm a year and it never snowed. Unpaved streets are maintained with gravel, mainly when they are in a public transport route. There are so many unpaved streets that it is very difficult to have them in good conditions all the time, more difficult when it’s rainy season, so public transport streets are heavily used because it’s very common that are the only one in good conditions.

Trunk: in a medium size city we shouldn’t have any trunk street. Exceptions are roads that get here: RN11 and RN16. In big cities it could be possible we find trunk internal roads.

Primary: under our scheme they are “trunk avenues”. In Greater Resistencia they are the main access to the cities, except for Puerto Vilelas.

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You can now preview OSM notes in iD by pressing ‘F’ to open the map data pane, enabling notes, and zooming in. Much like on osm.org, you can toggle on and off the notes layer, close / reopen notes, comment on them, and follow links to a note or its creator on osm.org. Give it a try and let me know what you think! We are compiling feature requests such as filtering, note templating, etc. Also, feel free to search and open issues related to bugs or desirable features. Before the next release of iD, expect an add Note button as well (as seen in the image below).

Additionally, along with Bryan Housel and Marc Farra (my GSoC 2018 mentors), I am researching how OSM users use notes. We hope to make notes more useful, more consistent, and potentially a rejuvenated outlet for stronger socialization and communication across the OSM community. Therefore, if you have feedback on how to improve notes (or what you use notes for), please comment below! In my next blog post, I’ll provide more fuel for ideas by sharing note features that we have already started working on.

Until next time,

-Thomas Hervey

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