This and future diary posts also appear on my blog.

After introducing MapRoulette 3, the micro-tasking tool for OpenStreetMap, I would like to follow up with a series of ‘Insider’ posts. Each of them will highlight an interesting feature or function of MapRoulette.

This week, we will look at Virtual Challenges.

Challenges in MapRoulette

MapRoulette consists of Challenges, which are groups of similar Tasks. An example is the Embassies missing representing countries Challenge by user johanemilsson. It asks you to add missing country=* tagging to specify which country the embassy, consulate or mission represents.

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OpenStreetMap evolved since many years. Millions of contributors are helping this project to grow everyday. Inspired by some of my friends, Karnataka and Ireland evolution projects, I wanted to vizualize different parts of the world.

Sharing simple animated GIF that I created using Mapolution on Docker on my Mac showing different countries’ OSM edits over years. The snapshots are taken for every 30 days from the starting date.

Sri Lanka (January 2015 - July 2018)

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August is the Philippines’ National Language Month. So I took the time to translate this diary in my local language, Filipino/Tagalog, which can be found here. _________________

Late last year I’ve been fascinated with the concept of and started advocating about “inclusive mobility.” For me, inclusive mobility refers to a state where everyone and everybody are free to move everywhere and have access to all modes of transit, and all roads and bridges are passable.

It was amazing to see and experience the streets of Milan. I believe they have reached the state of inclusive mobility where both automobiles and differently-abled pedestrians have been taken into consideration in the transport planning process.

Getting to SotM 2018 at Politecnico di Milano…

For this year, SotM was hosted at the Politecnico di Milano. There are a lots of ways to reach the venue. maps.me suggests either by car, walking, cycling (bike share programs are available in Milan but I wasn’t able to try it :( ) or train (but no tram?). In the first day of the conference, I traveled alone because I woke up late and I didn’t want my mates to wait. But they instructed me how to go there (thank you Geoffrey and Tima!). I opted to take the subway from Republicca to Milano Centrale to Piola. At Piola, I found myself walking towards the wrong pin location and walking around the area for 40 minutes under the heat of the sun! I was so lost that I decided to ask a stranger to point me in the right direction (thank you!).

So yeah, I missed 1/4 of SotM Day 1. But good thing there are recorded videos of the whole conference which can be found in Youtube.

Inclusivity, diversity and representation…

Before writing this diary, I watched the keynote address by Kate and Heather which I missed. Heather discussed the 5 components/values of being an “open” organization/community by OpenOrg. One (1) of it is inclusivity, which she stressed to be one of the hardest part.

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In the last few days I’ve been working at adding schools in the Azores. The Azores islands have a lot of these, scattered along the villages and cities of all islands.

Work consisted of adding buildings, pitches, roofs, and creating amenity=school areas on school grounds of all schools managed by public entities. Additional information such as addresses and contacts were also introduced.

Here’s the changeset: osm.org/changeset/61385366

Emanuel

A few weeks ago i started my next mega project on osm. This one includes adding surface tags to all the freeways in the Valley Of The Sun

It’s been a long few weeks, and a lot of work. But as of today i am 25% done with the project. Included in the project is adding streetlamps, walls and fixing any errors i find along the way. I’m also aligning the roads as i go to better fit the newer imagery. More updates will be added the next few weeks as i make more progress.

Thanks! Hans (aka) TheDutchMan13

Been working on getting the lakes in Hammerfest and Kvalsund mapped. I’ve transitioned from hand drawing lakes to using OCR on satelite images in order to make the task of mapping the lakes plausible.

“There are empty territories, but then a question arises: if they are completely empty, then why should they be mapped? For some reason, the local people decided that they don’t need to map that.”

“We, as white men, are very privileged, and we simply do not see obstacles.”

“Maybe in some form we will use the technologies made back in 2008-2009 for Osmarender”

“Why women can not program themselves an editor understandable to them, use tagging schemes that are necessary for women…“

“What this is about, is that Mapbox ruined the vector tiles for OSM.”

“To sum it up, we see that OSM is turning into Google Map Maker.”

Last week there was a big OpenStreetMap conference in Milan, where I obviously went. There were a lot of great talks, I met a hundred awesome people and shared many ideas. During the conference I wrote a live feed with thoughts and photos, though in Russian. That’s why I don’t plan to write a separate blog post: I’ve written enough.

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State of the Map 2018 reinforced the diversity of the global OpenStreetMap Community and also lit a torch into the future of the OSM. This blogpost highlights my experiences in Milan and my key takeaways from the conference.

From the day I received the news that I was granted a scholarship to attend the conference, to the day I landed in Milan, it was all an awesome experience. The OSMF through Rob and Dorothea, provided wonderful support to make sure we all got our visas approved, and flights and accommodation booked. Visiting a new place can be intimidating, but thanks to the wonderful support everything went smoothly.

For me the fun began in Dubai where I met other scholars and participants Arnalie, Montshy, Iyan, and Eugene on the way to Milan, traveling as a group made it more fun and easier. The train ride from Malpensa Int. Airport to the Milan Central station took about 55 minutes, and then a 15 minutes walk to our hotel welcomed us to Milan.

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It’s always something hard to describe when philosophical things bump into your mind. And it even gets more sophisticated when you start to meditate.

A week ago, when I first stepped onto the soil of Milan along with curiosity and anxiety, I felt lonely. I walked aimlessly on the plaza under the glorious shine reflected by the Duomo and wandered around the Sforzesco Castle: everything just looks so different.

However, the loneliness didn’t last long. At the moment I entered the campus that morning, I met my wonderland. I felt so excited to see so many people from different backgrounds gathering together, talking about their experiences with OpenStreetMap. I was deeply impressed by the opening session which transmitted envisions towards the application and development of OpenStreetMap.

I listened to a variety of talks during the three days. I learnt creativity from that emoji map. I learnt the need and difficulty to transform the basic data structure. I learnt new methods to make AOIs. I learnt the efforts to maintain and grow a local community. And others too…

I’m not going to elaborate things and thoughts about talks, workshops or lightning talks much here because beyond the knowledge and technologies that I learnt from those wonderful talks, I would like to focus on more important discovery in this dairy. It helped shape my cognitive values, and will benefit me a lot in my future study and daily life.

People who travelled a lot always tell me how different the outside world is. But they merely views the scenery and feel the culture, they hardly exchange thoughts with other people. This world is about people, people who have great minds and unique stories to be told.

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How the OpenStreetMap data was made available to people’s smartphones

After the Nicaraguan OpenStreetMap community crowd-sourced with over 250 interested citizens the data of their capital’s public transportation system in OpenStreetMap, a schematic paper map was created from this data.

In a next step the community wanted to offer state-of-the-art routing applications to the visitors and inhabitants of Managua. For this, the data from OpenStreetMap was combined with also crowd-sourced schedule information by the Sofware tool osm2gtfs. The result is the common format for public transport data - GTFS -, which was then possible to include into existing applications, where the data can be used now:

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Managua is available in the following mobile aplicaciones

Transportr: Public transport route planner for Android. Because its convenience and its characteristic of being Free Software, it is the best option for users of the collective transport.

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I would like to start practising to mark some of known trees like coconut, mango trees. How do i get started. I have iphone 8 plus. Thanks

The Nicaraguan OpenStreetMap Community started some years ago a public transport project to create the first proper bus map of a Central American city. Once the data has been collected in a collective crowd-sourcing process directly on OpenStreetMap, a paper map has been created. In a next step this data should be made available in different applications. The most obvious and best path was to rely on the common format GTFS, which can be easily integrated in most public transport routing solutions.

At this point, checking different options to convert OpenStreetMap data into GTFS - unfortunately none was satisfying. Within this desk study I also stumbled over the python script osm2gtfs, by Torsten Grote, the creator of the great Free and Open Source public transport application Transportr. This script was targeted to only work for Florianopolis in Brasil. It grabbed data from OpenStreetMap, parsed online information about schedule from the bus operators’ website and created a GTFS out of it.

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Wetlands and swamps once dominated the western part of Ba Ria Vung Tau province have been converted into industrial parks and seaports. The remaining parts were gradually transformed into shrimp farms to meet the export-driven demands of the economy.

The mangrove forests which used to occupy all the swamplands are now limited to riversides only. If this trend continues, the landscape will be transformed into factories and apartment buildings in the next 10 years.

URL: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/10.6303/107.0178

Over the last couple months I’ve been busy fixing mapping in North Andover, MA, where I currently live. Issues with the mapping here in Massachusetts have largely been because of a lack of addresses, street data, business data, and stagnant notes left on the map for upwards of 4 years or so.

I’ve been very active with a couple projects as of late:

North Andover Addresses and Street Overhaul; Massachusetts Address Import notes

This project is progressively going through all parcels within the town and manually adding each address to the building, plus adding driveways, and assigning building=garage or shed as necessary. Plus, drawing in sidewalks as separate ways and correcting intersections and turn restrictions as necessary. It’s a slow process, because there’s so much to verify and add, and I’m doing this process largely on a block-by-block process, alone. This has gotten massively easier lately, however, as I’ve learned how to use JOSM to some extent, and discussion started about a Massachusetts wide address import, of which I provided details on how to do such an import using JOSM and the Conflation plugin. (Details of the current import effort are documented here: osm.wiki/Import/Catalogue/MassGIS_Addresses) Let’s delve deeper into this…

The Massachusetts Basic Address Points is a database divided by town with POI / point data encoded at the center of building polygons for addresses, however the data for streetnames and housenumbers have tags that need renaming, and all the streetnames are in upper case. We had lots of talk on the talk-us-massachusetts list and discovered several issues: 1. Is the title() function appropriate considering the possibilities for false positives, and how many such positives would there be (McCoy Street, YMCA Way). 2. How would you handle data conflicts with multiple addresses to the same building. 3. How would you split up the data import so that it doesn’t cause havoc on the server?

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Over the last years several individuals of the Nicaraguan OpenStreetMap community MapaNica.net collaborated fruitfully in various occasions with UNICEF Nicaragua to experiment with participatory geotechnologies and children and adolescents on the Caribbean coast of the country.

This is the publication note by UNICEF Nicaragua (freely translated into English):

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Article about OpenStreetMap in the print magazine of the Austrian Scientific Exchange Service (OeAD News)

For the two students Taalaikul (15), Ulsana (16) and their teacher Kaiyrgul from the remote village of Jani-Talap, which lies on the edge of the roof of the world - on the Himalayas in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan - water is the central theme. In the spring, the area is regularly flooded during the snowmelt, but after a few weeks, the wide river bed, which runs past the edge of the village, dries out for the rest of the year. The environment of the village appears dry and barren in summer, snowy in winter. The modesty of the people, but also their poverty can be felt and seen in the village. People make the most of it, having impressive patience and work together to improve the living conditions in this almost forgotten village that is hardly to find on any map.

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Recently, Microsoft released 125 million US building footprints as open data across 50 states. The data is freely available for download and use. You can read about previous release of 9.8 million buildings here.

With the help of tippecanoe and Mapbox Studio, I have visualized Hawaii dataset to know how data looks like.

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Hello everyone,

As a coach for the Open Summer of Code in Belgium, I thought the community would be interested in reading a little about it and get inspired - along with reading how many of the teams used a map and specifically OSM.

What is the Open Summer of Code

If you have never heard about the Open Summer of Code yet, it is an awesome project. Students create an open source or open data application which a real client needs. The client -often, but not always a governmental organization- sponsors the students. During the four week program, the students get relevant workshops, gain lots of experience, have lots of networking opportunities and are exposed to other Open Source projects and ideas. This all is organized by Open Knowledge Belgium, a small but amazing organisation which furthers the use of open data in Belgium.

This year 73 (!) students participated, along with 17 coaches, making this eight edition bigger then ever. Furthermore, oSoc has been more international then ever, with lots of international students and projects and having a spinoff in Spain. This first Spanish edition had 10 students whom enjoyed it a lot. In other words, don’t hesitate to contact us. Wherever you are, you are welcome as student, coach, client of partner organization or perhaps even as organizer of your own edition.

For me personally, it was the first I participated to oSoc. I had the honor of coaching two teams, quite a challenge for someone just stepping in; but whatever challenge arose, there was always some coach with the right expertise to help out. Furthermore, with Ben Abelshausen (Xivk) and Jonathan Belien (jbelien) being coaches as well, OpenStreetMap was well represented, especially when Joost Schouppe passed by as well.

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As also posted on https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/local-chapters/2018-July/000307.html (Reply there on the mailing list, to keep the discussion at one place.)

On 30.07.2018 11:31, Raphael Das Gupta (das-g) wrote:

Hi all

As already posted in the SotM 2018 Telegram channel:

Local chapters and other local organizations (or unorganizations) shall join local-chapters@openstreetmap.org (this list) at https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/local-chapters to coordinate and help each other.

Also, local chapters should inform the OSMF (or relevant working group) if they feel the board, a working group or the foundation can help with something. On the other hand, local chapters feel that by working together, they (the chapters) may be able to provide more services and infrastructure to the community without overloading the the OSMF with things that aren’t exactly OSM “core business”.

There has been discussion about whether to found a working group in which local chapters will coordinate. That shall be futher discussed on the local-chapters@openstreetmap.org mailing list.

(Note that the previous “local chapters” working group was about defining what a local chapter is and has more or less ceased action once that was done and the first chapter had been accepted. Accepting new local chapters is not done by that working group, but by the OSMF board.)

Cheers,

Raphael

I’m preparing my new project regarding Japan region. Here is some memo.

Intro

In Japan region, we OpenStreetMapper may trace governmental map.

Especially, GSI map has pretty precise and having good accuracy.

GSI map is based on KibanChizuJoho (Fundamental Geo Data) data which is protected by Japanese Survey law. KibanChizuJoho is an aggregated geo data gathered from municipalities.

Accuracy of KibanChizuJoho is 1:2500 (for urban area) or 1:25000 (for country area). My idea is to cover this 1:25000 area with OpenStreetMap.

List of 1:25000 area

GSI has been publishing those area as following tiled format.

• 縮尺2500分の1相当以上の概ねの範囲

I’ve made a geojson using a script provided by my friend.

Here is a list of municipality which has 1:25000 area. Not perfect through.

• https://github.com/nyampire/jp_25000area

This list indicates 800, out of around 1800, are target.

Challenge

Current available imagery resource is not so clear on country side. (Bing, Mapbox, DG or GSI ortho)

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