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Interesting op-ed on the role of street names in promoting democracy in the ‘‘New York Times’’:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/sunday/north-dakota-addresses-voting-id.html

It also shed some light on how house numbering came into use in historical times.

This week I flew through Istanbul for the third and fourth times in a month, this time en route to Doha from Ashgabat. Since Fly Dubai no longer serves Doha, it takes 24 hours for me to get to Doha via Istanbul on Turkish Air, versus four to five hours via Dubai in the good old days, due to the lengthy layover in Istanbul. The good news is I love Istanbul, having lived there 30 years ago, and use the layovers to visit old haunts and old friends..

I was surprised to find somebody had mapped the American Consulate General in Istanbul as a office=commercial, and set about correcting that. I then discovered that every other consulate in Istanbul was mistagged amenity=embassy. Embassies are in capitals, are defined by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and are headed by an ambassador or chargé d’affaires. Consulates are a different animal, as defined by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and are headed by a consul (if a consulate) or a consul general (if a consulate general, which is just a bigger consulate). .I have gone through Istanbul with my electronic red pen, correcting this mistagging plus adding multilngual names (for some reason the Chinese consulate general was identified solely in Ukrainian).

I turns out the wiki entry for the diplomatic=consulate tag contains erroneous information and people are systematically mistagging consulates. I need to take this up with the Data Working Group. Consulates are not embassies, and we need to strive for accuracy in our map.

As you can see in this area (osm.org/edit#map=17/33.64045/-112.09096), it appears that every possible feature that can be rendered onto the map has been placed on it… houses, driveways, swimming pools, speed bumps, etc. You cannot barely see anything other than a mass of white dots representing the end of the driveways as they terminate at the houses they belong to (you can’t even see the outline of the houses through all of this unless you zoom in).

Maybe I am wrong, but it just seems like this is WAY TOO MUCH being shown, and it takes away from the true purpose of having a map for people to see the world around them.

Does anyone feel the same way I do about this?

See, this is why OSM and similar communities are amazing. I’m still pretty new around here, and even though I’ve gotten pretty deep into some of the wiki pages and JOSM functions, there are whole aspects of OpenStreetMap that I’m just not aware of.

But when a user like myself starts stumbling into these other aspects, experienced community members are there to help. Thanks once again to Leif Rasmussen’s input, it’s clear that my #DigitizeRacine efforts still needed a bit of refinement (typecase issues), and were also likely to be considered an Import.

For now, I think it’s best if I hold off on uploading additional changesets to #DigitizeRacine and get my import planned out in more detail. And fix those ALL CAPS items!

Dear all,

Today, v4.16.0 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

• Changing societal amenities color to less intensive
• Adding rendering for natural=strait
• Adding rendering for leisure=track on lines
• Adding icon for amenity=vehicle_inspection
• Adding icon for leisure=sports_centre + sport=swimming and leisure=swimming_area
• Adding icon for tourism=gallery
• Changing color for aeroway=apron in aerodromes
• Moving amenity=post_box to z19+
• Moving amenity=atm to z19+
• Replacing icon for information=tactile_model
• Ordering amenity_lines by layer
• Small documentation and code fixes

Thanks to all the contributors for this release including dryo, a new contributor.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v4.15.0…v4.16.0

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

Hi, we PUP san juan students had a very long day yet a happy and experienced day, out of 25 students today, only a few attend their session today, and I hope our instructor was not disappointed to us, but that is not gonna stop us for mapping, we map our neighbourhood as part of our assigned task in mapping, actually it was due last week, but our instructor gave us consideration due to heavy loads of projects, assignments and finals, we need to present our assignments and projects next week. Today we map our neighborhood yet Ive lost my fieldpapers, some of my classmates already map thier assigned task, and upload thier fieldpapers, but ive lost mine, so my instructor gave me considerations so I have to do it again, but Ive encountered problem, when I download my neighbourhood all i can see is black picture, so we really know theres a problem at some point, so I will just do it in my home. So that time i dont need to focus on just a single problem, what i did is map some maps, that needs mapping, so i can contribute to our projects, as ive seen my classmates mapping thier neighborhoods, ive observed that there are already familiar, and that helps them to have more friends on their streets, mapping is helping people to know where are going, but familiarity to streets where you live helps you to encounter more people that are polite and friendly, this day in mapping class helps us to be a better version of ourselves to be friendly in our neighbourhood, yet we mapped our neighbourhood, next week we will present everything we’ve done in mapping, cant wait to share all ive done to this organisation that let us helps people in different way.

UPDATE 2019: This project was finished and really nice. But it was too non-standard and removed.

Summer 2018 project - Personal

osm.org/relation/8616814

As we started CWTS++, we were given a task to map our own neighbourhood by the end of our first semester. All of us were from different places, which can be a benefit to Open Street Map on having valid data from us mappers.

I started mapping around my neighbourhood during the time where Mapillary and Open Street Cam were introduced to us. Before I used these applications, I had my time used by remembering the features around my own neighbourhood. I started asking my parents and other relatives if they’re familiar with the streets and houses because all of us where staying at one place for a very long time.

The tools I used for the entire mapping that I’ve done were Mapillary and Field Papers because with these two, you can easily map everywhere you go with these helpful and time consuming methods. The first thing that I used was Field Papers. We were taught how to use it and by the end of that day, I have my own printed layout of our own neighbourhood. During my vacant time, I often go around our neighbourhood to add details which Open Street Map still doesn’t have. As I write down the details, I also look into the imagery that I can see from what the Field Papers has. Some of the buildings where unseen due to changes of the community. Next application that I used was the Mapillary. From all of the tools that were introduced to us, I find this as my favourite weapon during mapping. I find it very clear and accurate when it comes to its features and it’s really useful especially to maps.

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New Organised editing guidelines was proposed by DWG. I show my “negative” opition on that guidelines.

At first, I think the previous Directed Editing Policy was a good proposal. I like that. I really pay my respects to DWG’s works.

Most important point

• Scope is very vague. It could be applied to “mapping parties between friends” even it negate. I like the previous “Director/Directee” idea.
• Imports without any advance discussion are not acceptable. Use other service.

Previous Directed Editing Policy was better idea

• It says individual community members and organised editing groups are at same level playing field.
• must/should/may are properly used. I can easily understand which items are more important.
• Almost no duties for organised mapper/contributor/directee. Indicated duties are for general OMS mappers, those are not special for organised mapper.

Individual

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Thanks to some excellent feedback from the community, the #DigitizeRacine project is moving forward with great efficiency.

Microsoft’s building footprints seem to be fairly accurate for Racine County, and often only need minor corrections, or a garage or two added.

In refining my landuse areas, I came across a few areas with no sidewalk. I went looking for a parcel map to reference, and came across the WI State Cartographer’s V4 Parcel dataset. Not only does this give me the parcel boundaries I wanted, but it includes address information, and is freely available for public use.

So, after a bit of pre-processing, I’ve joined the parcel address information to Microsoft’s building footprints, then split the resulting layer into a few thousand manageable chunks. I’ve always liked the task management method that HOTOSM uses. I grab a section or two, work on those to completion, cross them off the list.

At this point, I think the focus will shift towards the building footprints, as those are currently not in the OSM dataset. Whatever my opinions on landuse areas, those are already present, and refining existing data can wait. Adding buildings with accurate address tags is now the primary task; landuse will be the next phase. The state parcel layer also includes some zoning tags, which may be helpful in determining landuse areas.

One of the contributions could be used to improve the quality of OpenStreetMap is by importing existing datasets. However, if you don’t pay close attention, you may end up doing bad imports. Here, we collected some suggestions to guide you to import existing dataset into OSM correctly.

1. Type of data import

According to documentation in OpenStreetMap, only these physical features can be imported into OSM. They are:

• Point: locations that can be presented by a single dot on the map, for instance, bank, restaurant or post office, etc.
• Lines: the feature can be presented as lines, for instance, roads, trails, bike lanes.
• Polygons: can be defined as a closed line, for instance, buildings, farmlands.

In the following picture, you can see how all the physical features that show and can be rendered on a digital map.

2. Data format for OSM

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Where is this location?

Firstly I want to thank mappers who had put their deliberate effort in creating and improving the data in Visakhapatnam. The road network in the most of the areas is almost mapped and there are few missing roads. As Bing aerial Imagery, Esri world imagery, DigitalGlobe Imagery looks solid, we picked them as resources for the mapping according to the updated imagery. I appreciate Martha Leena, Chanda Teresa, Naga Bhavana and Iqhra Aiman for teaming up with me for this Mapping campaign. As an initial phase we’d like to concentrate on the Visakhapatnam division

Pic credits: Deccan Chronicle

We made a plan to map the features in the following order, so that we can concentrate on particular feature and improve that.

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deleted by author

Have walked a substantial part of Watlington civil parish in two outings recently, upon resumption of my excursion through the Oxfordshire Chilterns checking the Public Rights of Way. The weather on both occasions has been magnificent and the areas have been a delight to walk and view.

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Ann and I took a break from work to fly via Istanbul to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where after 40 years of variously studying, living, working, and traveling in the former USSR I finally made it to the 15th former Soviet republic. Somehow I had never managed until last week to visit Dushanbe. Of course I could not roam the city without collecting Mapillary imagery (mostly uploaded by now) and adding to OSM interesting sites we visited, or updating and augmenting the tags on existing entries.

One of the more interesting and engaging sites we updated was the three-room Museum of Musical Instruments. Watch this video with the sound turned up!

We also stopped in Istanbul en route and I visited the old neighborhood where I lived 1988-1990. I’ll be adding names of some streets in that section of town based on Mapillary imagery.

This was successfully accomplished on 12th October, 2018 with a total edit of 8,244 to take 2nd place in the Uniquemappersteam leader board. It took me quite some days (2 or more) to achieve this great result. I thank God Almighty for the victory.

I therefore leave with my reader these words of encouragement or motivation ‘Life isn’t what you’re given, it is what you create , what you conquer and what you aim to achieve’ and Confucius will say ”The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones”.

835 Clarkson Avenue

##The Building Where I Grew Up

I was born and lived at 835 Clarkson Avenue from the time I was born until I left for college. It was a fun building to live in. It was a 4 story building and it did not have an elevator. The hallways were treated as “Public Spaces” where kids played together. We would play handball agains the hallway walls, particularly the wall in the lobby. We would use the roof as a place to hang out.

Here is a photo of the building today.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIl668gFG8MzCYrEF4QBw2NAsDK5WvjN/view?usp=sharing

On the Northwest corner of Clarkson and Utica was Red’s Garage where I bought my first car - a rusting, falling apart 1954 DeSoto (Yes, there was once a line of Chrysler cars called DeSoto.)

Here is a photo of Red’s garage and the bar next door to the garage.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RkRRl3tsUYKh7sFTsTFrCHMjxtQDE47v/view?usp=sharing

St Albans is a suburb of Melbourne, located 30 mins west of Melbourne CBD. Today it is one of the most vibrant commercial centres of the Asian Australian communities which are situated along Alfrieda Street and east of St Albans station.

It took me 1 hour and 5 minutes to add these POIs along Alfrieda St and Main Road East. I have had a chance to “re-visit” my old POIs uploaded 3 earlier in my first OSM survey trip in 2015. Yet there are many areas not covered by this trip, eg the Macedonian & Serbian shops in Main Road West, the shops in East Esplanade and Elaine Street.