I’m now done with Palisades Park, the next place in Bergen County I was planning to do. It went by so quickly! Only eight days of mapping and I’m done. I added more than a thousand buildings, changed a bit up with schools, and more!

One thing that’s interesting is how there were no parks other than Overpeck County Park that were already on the map.

I have really loved Palisades Park for quite a lot of time. High population density, for example, is one of the things I love to see. At over 16 thousand people a square mile, all boredom is immediately released! At night, the lights in the apartments just give a great feel overall. Palisades Park just gives me a vibe I can’t explain very well, but it’s a good one.

Next up is Hackensack. After that, I will probably start editing other countries.

Also, I have reached 500 edits yesterday while doing a bit of edits in Jersey City! I was planning to finish Palisades Park for 500, but decided it would be fine.

It was very fun to map Palisades Park. I’m ready to see what Hackensack has for me!

Below is a link to Palisades Park on the map.

Our new organised editing guidelines, as the DWG is now calling them, are on the agenda of the next OSMF board meeting.

I will attend it to present our guidelines and answer questions. In the meanwhile, here is my report. I’m also happy to answer any comments below.

We at the DWG are, first of all, thankful for all the constructive input we have received, from the advisory board, the humanitarian mapping initiatives and the mapping community.

This version of the organised editing guidelines took a lot of work to prepare. We have received and integrated a lot of feedback to reflect consensus and existing good practice.

We have looked at what similar policies would exist, on OSM or in other organisations. I believe that no other project, open or proprietary, has faced this exact issue before. On OSM, contributors generally understand the current policies on automated edits and imports. We have written the organised editing guidelines in a similar way, while adopting a slightly softer approach – not following the organised editing guidelines isn’t an offence per se. Elsewhere, Wikipedia has numerous policies some vaguely similar, but the problems they face are quite different, and their policies tend to be a lot more complex.

Internally, we have looked back at past problematic edits. We have carefully written the guidelines and defined the scope to prevent those problems without creating loopholes or negative incentives like encouraging salami tactics. They are not meant to apply to community activities like mapping parties between friends or making a presentation on OSM at a local club, but only to ‘sizeable, substantial’ activities. We want something that doesn’t scare casual events off while letting us regulate a geography class gone berserk or a misguided volunteer mapathon.

We also don’t want to set hard limits in stone since they would have to go back to the Board constantly if we need to refine exactly what falls under the guidelines.

… See full entry

Thursday, October 11, 2018

As we reminisce and go back from the first meeting of CWTS++, we students are excited about the things we are going to do, new things that we will learn, and new skills that we will develop. Now, we learned new things above our expectations. We learned values which helps us to be inspired and motivated in helping other people in their communities. We able to do things that can help and serve not only for an individual but also for the whole community that doesn’t need to go hand in hand but through the use of our technologies even if we our at home we can serve and help many people. By that, our instructor conducted a program called Mini Mapathon which is the goal of the program is to give opportunity for us students of CWTS++ to apply or pass the things that we’ve learned and experienced to other people who doesn’t know about what we are doing or why we are doing it. Therefore, we were asked to bring our own guest in the mini mapathon so that we can share our knowledge that we’ve learned and also to inspire and encourage people.

On our second mini mapathon, we also did the same thing in the previous mapathon. First we started from the introduction of our guests. Second, our instructor gave us a short trivia about the very first Philippine map. Third, our instructor let us introduce open street map to our guest. Fourth, our instructor showed the statistics on how well are we doing in the class. And lastly, we shared our knowledge about mapping to our guests and taught them how to use Java Open Street Map(JOSM) for them to use it as a tool to manipulate the data that they have in mapping.

… See full entry

Colleagues, I present to your attention the amazing thing - puzzle with the map OpenStreetMap:

Well, you know, it’s been a while since I wrote an OSM editor and I found myself missing the experience.[1]

We’ve pretty much reached the apotheosis of the traditional OSM editor workflow. There isn’t any point building another iD, because iD is terrific and does everything that needs to be done. There might be some merit in building a new native power editor for macOS, say, but even that would be a marginal gain and the sort of project best attempted by a company which employs dozens of mappers.

But we certainly haven’t reached the limit of OSM editing. The traditional workflow was never designed for integrating third-party datasets, for working with street-level imagery, for surveying on a smartphone, for QA. These activities were unheard of in 2006 when JOSM and Potlatch 1 were first conceived, but are big parts of today’s OSM data landscape.

So we should be experimenting with different editor experiences, to see if we can attract wider contributions through presenting an alternative workflow/UI.

… See full entry

Looking around using OSMinspector I find many routes are invalid. Green ones are good, the black/grey ones are bad. You can zoom out (but need to zoom back to get the result) and pan around to your bit of the world.

Why are they invalid? And how to ‘fix’ them? In my part of the world they look to be simply taken from V1 to V2 with no processing. And many of them are not ordered sequentially. It is simplest to do the minimum required to obtain a valid V2 route, but what is the minimum? Well .. from my understanding and experimentation the following looks to be required.

A simple Bus Route in OSM Public Transport V2.

The minimum a route relation with;

In the route relation the tags;

• type=route
• route=bus
• public_transport:version=2

Then as members with the role ‘platform’;

Bus stops at the top in sequential order from the start to the finish. You don’t absolutely require all the stops but need the start and finish as a minimum, hopefully you’ll have a few more. These need each to be tagged as a node with the minimum of

• highway=bus_stop
• public_transport=platform
• bus=yes

Ways next;

to show the roads taken, again these must be in sequential order from start to finish. There must be no gaps. No need for roles here, forwards/backwards are not used in V2. The ‘role’ in the relation is left blank.

Desirable;

These are not essential, add them if you want.

The route relation can have tags for

• from=*
• to=*
• name=*
• via=*
• roundtrip=yes/no
• operator=*
• ref=*

As members all the relevant bus stops, or at least most of them. The stops too may have name=, ref= .. too much time required to gather these for me.

Checking:

Use OSMinspector to check your route works to some degree.

Some Australian samples; relation 3550083 and relation 7258397.

If you really need more details then OSM bus routes .. I find it too long and tedious. The minimum works in the vast majority of cases, if you need more then you ‘ll have to read the long detailed text.

… See full entry

I have created an experimental QA report about unclear iD Editor translations. ( same translations AND different osm keys! )

if you know any language - please check / fix !

• google sheet : “iDEditor-Unclear_translations-2018oct05” ~450 unclear translations pair
• see more : https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2018-October/039688.html

Languages sorted by FREQ of unclear translations :

• 61 tr
• 59 he
• 50 uk
• 40 da
• 38 it
• 36 ro
• 30 is
• 29 pl
• 27 lt
• 26 ast
• 25 ca
• 24 zh-TW
• 21 no
• 21 fi
• 20 vi
• 20 sl
• 20 ko
• 20 gl
• 20 el
• 19 lv
• 18 hr
• 18 fa
• 18 ar
• 16 sv
• 16 mk
• 16 et
• 14 sr
• 14 sk
• 14 ru
• 12 zh-HK
• 12 zh
• 12 pt-BR
• 12 pt
• 12 es
• 11 zh-CN
• 10 nl
• 10 id
• 10 de
• 10 af
• 8 ta
• 6 hu
• 6 eo
• 4 so
• 4 ja
• 4 dv
• 4 cs
• 4 bs
• 2 te
• 2 ms
• 2 ckb
• 2 bn
• 2 bg

•Yesterday, dated October 4, 2018, each group of mappers brought their guests. The guests were from different sections or courses or even friends from other schools are welcome. The guests introduced theirselves and tackled how they were persuaded to join this program. The discussion went well particulary the talk about “Bayanihan”. The guests also shared that they can speak some native dialects.

•We also discussed “Mapping Process” and I was called to give some information regarding this topic. Openstreetmap was also introduced to our guest. Also, the difference of google maps with openstreetmap. There was also a mapper who shared his experience in “Mapathon” that he attended last Sunday. Our professor also called some mappers to discuss how to sign up in openstreetmap. We demoed it in front of them for them to understand.

•We taught our guests on how to map using openstreetmap. The guest easily understood the procedures on how to map. We used JOSM to map and do some tasks. Mr. Erwin guided us while we were mapping. Our guests, mapped the typhoon Ompong region structures where they will find missing roads and buildings. Land fields are mostly what they found that’s why its hard for them to find buildings. The challenge with this is that the buildings we’re too small to identify if this is a building or just plain site. The guests enjoyed the mapping lessons and they were happy that they were able to acquire new knowledge from it. They were thankful for the opportunity.

… See full entry

Team Leader Saviour Owujie and his member Blessing Oshoma and Emmanuel Ikeogu got me to digitize some places in Buguma, Asari-Toru Local Government Area.Grateful,exciting introduction indeed.

Today i contributed to the mapping of Joinkrama flooding in Rivers State by mapping some building. it was a memorable experience owing to the fact that it is my first time on OSM and using such an app for mapping.

I just finished mapping River Edge today! It was pretty quick compared to Paramus and Alpine, Alpine being 5x larger by area and Paramus 8x.

While mapping River Edge, I also decided to go finish mapping Teterboro, which was already practically done. A few buildings, areas, and airport grass were some of the things I added there.

Next up is Palisades Park. I chose Palisades Park because of two reasons: density and memories.

I will probably do Hackensack next. After that, I probably will start mapping in more countries than just the United States. I’m really looking forward to that!

I’m also pretty happy with my ranking on HDYC-currently 14 in the United States. Additionally, I hit 400 edits a few days ago! I’m making a lot of edits real quickly, and this will hopefully continue. Look at Bergen County now, and you can see the improvement on the map.

You can click below to see River Edge:

Thanks to Ambrose,Dubem,Precious and Ify for you amazing contributions to FGM Mapathon last weekend.Thank you UniquemappersTeam see leader board http://www.missingmaps.org/leaderboards/#/map2endfgm

Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting and female circumcision, is the ritual cutting or removal of some or all of the external female genitalia. The practice is found in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and within communities from countries in which FGM is common. This year 2018, maps were created in OSM to help fight against FGM and took great part in it and believed to have made a significant impact. Although I emerged 5th in the rank on the map2endfgm leader board I was appreciated for my huge effort and contribution. “Thank you so much for participating in our global mapathon, Mappers in over 60 countries added over 49,000 buildings and almost 7000 km of roads to help protect girls at risk of FGM in Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, Mali, Guinea, Uganda and Niger” (A Message from Crowd2Map, UNFPA, YouthMappers).

I’m currently working on updating the streets and addresses locating within and immediately surrounding the Pueblo of Pojoaque. The streets that were seemingly added from tiger data do not necessarily match what is the reality here. There is also very little address data because this is a rural area in New Mexico. I’ve noticed that a larger number of businesses are using OpenStreetMap. I tend to think of this updating as literally putting Pojoaque on the map.

So I did update of the OSM data that we get as CSV export from WhiteBikes database. I had to take care of few troubles - export is not exactly CSV, data order differs, but at least they are consistent. I think it can’t be automated and changes should be reviewed, I did it by hand as I want to see which data modified. There are around 50 bike stands in the city.

So, lets see what did I have to do:

Prepare list of stands from database, in a format similar to previously retrieved data

• download new data from whitebikes at * censored *. In case that website is saved as HTML and not as pure text try to use view source + select all - copy - paste into file.
• It is in format of CSV (spreadsheet) that can be loaded into office if needed.
• But it is in incorrect format, so it has to be adapted beforehand.
• Replace all commas by dot. Replace all semicolons by comma.
• After this change it will be CSV (Comma-separated-values) and it can be used in excel.

• Though, there may be still some issues - semicolons are sometimes used also in text, not only as separators.

• import into office spreadsheet editor (excel, calc) and make it nice and aligned by station number:
• add new first column, fill it with numbers 1-100
• set other columns for sorting, sort them by number (they may be reordered from database export)
• align them with the numbers in first column, fill in empty lines for numbers that are not present

• export into CSV again (see sample file export-2018-09-26-ordered-with-gaps.csv)

• now, you can compare old and new csv with your favourite compare tool (Meld, WinDiff) and see it nicely aligned, see the differences that happened.

You may have to modify files to match some general differences (for example http to image changed to https, and such), (as example see sql-2017-03-26.csv and sql-2017-03-26-ordered-with-gaps-look-like-new.csv)

… See full entry

I’ve been wanting to write an explainer for this for a while (even before this diary comment). The problem was that I wasn’t aware of a Docker example that (a) was reasonably up to date and (b) was designed around tile serving (rather than style design for example).

However, this docker example was recently mentioned by its author on IRC. It’s based on the building a tile server for 18.04 instructions and also handles importing data and running the tile server afterwards.

First things first, I installed Centos 7 on a virtual machine. I got a “minimal” iso image for that from here. I installed it (which involved turning the network on inside the installer and selecting the disk to install on). I also set a root password and added a non-root user (I’ll use the example “renderaccount” below), and noted the IP address that it obtained. I did a “yum update” to install any available software updates.

There are a few sets of instructions for “installing Docker on Centos” - DigitalOcean have one, and there’s one here which also contains lots of other useful information. Following the instructions there:

su -
yum install yum-utils device-mapper-persistent-data lvm2 wget
yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
yum install docker-ce
systemctl start docker

If you then do this:

systemctl status docker

In the output you should see “active (running)”. Do this:

systemctl enable docker

in order to have docker start every time and then exit from root and do this from you’re non-root user:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

So that you can control docker from that non-root user. Log out and back in and do this:

docker container run hello-world

It should say “Hello from Docker!” to show that everything is working OK. If instead you see “permission denied” it probably means you haven’t logged out and back in again.

… See full entry

A lot of the counties around here provide publicly available building footprints. Mine doesn’t. Inspired by some of the more rigorous OSM efforts that exist in the broader community, I am committing myself to my home community of Racine.

Beginning with the City around me and broadening out, I’m going to work on getting all our buildings added to OSM, and fix some of the validation errors lurking in the data. Seems our local editors like to combine landuse ways with highways, but the common convention is that this is incorrect. Lots of ungluing to do. Other things, too.

An effort like this needs its own hashtag, I think. So: #DigitizeRacine

We’ll start with rough building footprints, just to get everything on the map. Later, house numbers, porches, more specific tags, all that. But for now, I’m just going to churn out some rectangles.

Edit: also seems that the landuse areas will, at their corners, follow the curb. But why follow one curb and say “landuse doesn’t include the street”, and then completely cover whole swathes of other streets? I’m going to break them up into block-sized areas. I’m of the opinion that this is more information, too, as it gives the actual curb locations.

As part of global mapathon i have trained my friends to map with OpenStreet Map so that they can also participate in the struggle to bring an end to female genital mutilation in tanzania and the whole world as well.#map2endFGM. Crowd2map tanzania.

The rewrite of template relation is done. Almost all pages are changed. The template is currently the 47th most transcluded page with more than 5200 wiki pages using it.

Reflections on the work done

• Writing on the template page to call the module (new Lua code for the template) was more of a struggle than I thought.
• Parsing of longer pages is possible now (even though that was simplified as the parsing limits were increased while I was working on the template) (reference page osm.wiki/Beijing_Bus).
• While working I figured out that this template has more functionalities. So, I eventually also included translations. That was not planned at the beginning.
• Few users spoke up when I asked them for reviews. However, this was still helpful.
• With all waiting for speak-up and coding, it took me 27 days to perform this change (on some days I did not work on it of course). I will speed up in future actions.

Work to do

• Changing templates “area”, “way”, and “node”. You are again invited to suggest things and review my work. The basic goal is to align them to “relation” by using a common appearance and to increase usability on long pages.
• Change the dropped features to a fixed wiki text: There used to be the option to use the template, without passing an ID to the template. This used to result in the template showing the text: “relation not defined yet”. The new template does not offer this ability. In order keep the old pages, I would like to edit the relevant wiki pages in a semi-automated process. I will request this separately (automated edits code of conduct) ideally after changing the other templates as well (for which I also plan to drop this functionality).

If you want to get a first glimpse of my plans, please refer to current documentation of the relation template. I am basically planning to do the same things on the other templates as well.

It was awesome contributing to the fight against FGM by mapping buildings and roads in places where FGM is practiced. Am so happy knowing that my contributions count, also I just hit my first 1000 buildings today. Congrats to me and #uniquemappersteam#map2endfgm#Hotmicrogrant2018#FGMTanzania#weekendchallenge