Just trying to wrap my head around all this lol. I’m new to my area and where I live, the river is in my backyard. On here, the river is close but not my backyard….i think it’s wrong….

The last bit of Stonebridge Park was mapped yesterday. The City Farm is NOT part of that district but I took the opportunity to walk some of the paths & take some pictures so that you could go “Ooh look! Middle-aged horses close to some houses!”.

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Who I Am:

• I am Steven Johnson, active mapper since 2008
• I am currently an organizer for the TeachOSM project.
• I teach geography & OpenStreetMap techniques at GWU Geography.
• I often map around WashingtonDC with MappingDC, though not as often as I’d like.
• Here are my HDYC stats and my YOSMHM heatmap.

Why I OpenStreetMap:

• High granularity of features, supports mapping at a human scale. Some places have a very rich set of very detailed features. The growth in #sidewalk channel indicative growth in mapping at a hyperlocal level.
• Descriptive and flexible tagging schemes for those odd features and how we tag things to keep them found and useful. There are some thoughtful and measured chats going on the #tagging channel.
• OpenStreetMap is nearly ubiquitous, accessible, and available to virtually anyone with some kind of device, worldwide. Which never ceases to amaze me.
• OpenStreetMap is an unparalleled tool for teaching geography. No other tool offers direct access to geographic techniques at a comparable price. Armchair mapping and field mapping encourage development of skills in spatial reasoning and abstraction, location awareness, and how to read the landscape. This informs much of my motivation for the TeachOSM project.
• A sense that OpenStreetMap is as much about democratizing information and investments in digital citizenship as it is about mapping.

What I hope to do:

OpenStreetMap is a maturing project and the OSM-US organization is maturing with it. My hope is that these will lead to increased capacity to respond to the needs of a growing community. With the on-boarding of an executive director, we will have greater capacity as an organization. With this increased capacity, OSM-US has opportunity expand our programming, build an inclusive community of users, and collaborate to refine our ecosystem of mapping tools.

Here are three key priorities for 2019:

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A new release is ready for download. Read more about this release here

need to learn how to fake my location

Stonebridge Road is an otherwise unnoteworthy road in Nottingham NG3. It came to my attention back in April 2016 when I tried to get some opendata from the local GIS department. I pointed out that Central Government had told the Ordnance Survey to share their data publically (giving all relevant links) but, in spite of them also committing themselves to sharing public data, the GIS dept said they “would not be permitted by Ordnance Survey as this would basically be providing people with a copy of their product”. The triangle of what is now known as “Stonebridge Park” thus remained a white spot until recently when finally we got some satellite imagery that could show it. Mostly (some houses are still not on those tiles).

Having spent March 21 mapping much of it here are a couple of features.

The estate was redeveloped as a Radburn Design in the 1970s from former Victorian housing and, whilst many of those 1970s houses were demolished in the 2010s, the street layout was largely kept. The council tried to make some improvements. Here are some of the new houses in Jersey Gardens:–

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I have noticed several instances where another contributor has modified entries I have made over the preceding months and years, without advising me. Having initiated a discussion with the reviser and received an explanation that I felt was inadequate, I provided further explanations and requested the reviser to reverse the changes that they had made, and that I would agree to taking the matters over which we disagree to an open forum, if there was still a disagreement.

At this time the revisions I disagree with have not been reverted, and I have heard nothing further from the reviser.

I can make the reversions myself, which will involve significant work, or I can choose to abandon OpenStreetMap altogether, on the basis that there is no effective protocol to protect my contributions from changes without notice or discussion.

I welcome comments from other contributors on the protocol for dealing such conflicts of opinion.

• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

Well, it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?

In the intro I pointed out what had kept me prevaricating & not surveying for 22 months.

Next was the discovery that OSMTracker v0.7 was utter tosh since it would not produce viable tracks on my phone.

Next was that in addition v0.7 also had most GPS missing from the photos, and that diary was a howTo Fix the Photos, putting GPS back into them.

Finally this diary sees me re-install OSMTracker v0.6.11 and go out tracking recently-built houses within Stonebridge Estate on March 21. There were a number of discoveries:–

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A friend got me a set of Soviet military maps dating to the 1970s and 1980s, which are uncopyrighted and unlike Soviet military maps of foreign countries contain original cartographic data and are not based on stolen copyrighted materials from foreign sources. I have thus begun examining them when the weather is bad for usable data. Two new route numbers emerged, the P-3 and P-10 national highways, which have been duly added to both the map and the Turkmenistan wiki article. The maps have also helped identify some villages on roads less traveled, where the names were preserved from the Soviet period into the current period (not many, but a few, and every little bit helps).

The map of Turkmenistan is actually useful. Today I needed to buy an elastic bandage, which involved a trip to a pharmacy. We have mapped enough pharmacies in Ashgabat that finding two pharmacies nearby was easy. The bandage was made in Dashoguz, and cost 16 manat (about $4.50 at the official exchange rate).

I’ve long wanted to see a true map of the world’s languages. We know where languages are supposed to be spoken, but where are the real borders, where are the little enclaves? Recently I finally got the server space to download the global OSM data and look for myself!

For this project, I take the primary ‘name’ tag of any points, and using Jan Lelis’s unicode-blocks Ruby gem, determine where its characters fall in the Unicode block system. This blog post is in English speakers’ familiar “Basic Latin”, “Latin-1 Supplement”, and “General Punctuation”, which are common enough that I’ve filtered them out from this map.

Explore

You can view the map at mapmeld.com/osm-unicode-coverage/ and data and source code are on GitHub. I think Europe and Asia, being the largest files, may have been undercounted or only partially read by my script, but it still shows all of the expected language coverage.

Local Language Hotspots

Tifinagh (ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ) is used alongside Arabic across North Africa. In the past five years, OpenStreetMap users started labeling all Moroccan cities in Latin, Arabic, and Tifinagh script. You can see a handful of other locations in Algeria and Libya.

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Today was my first data editing in open streetmap. I was working on project #5795 - Jeremie - Mapping of the unsafe places based on gender - Women Connect Challenge - Haiti. I was editing streets and buildings. I hope to regularly work on humanitarian projects. I’m very exited to have found a link to this site on LinkedIn. Can’t wait to keep working!

Well, not really, but welcome heavy rains are drenching Ashgabat and environs. This is good news for the wheat crop and sets the stage for successful cotton planting in another couple of weeks. This is a desert, so rains in winter and spring are a blessing.

For collecting ground-level imagery, of course, it’s not that good. Today I scouted a couple of textile mills to nail down their names, but could not really collect imagery, so did it the old-fashioned way–scribbled their names onto a FieldPapers printout. While at it I found a couple more street names in an Ashgabat suburb, Yasmansalyk, and then came home to update Bereket based on imagery collected some time back but never analyzed. So rainy days are good for something in cartography, too, not only agriculture!

Dear OSMers —

The Proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on copyright in the Digital Single Market COM/2016/0593 final - 2016/0280 (COD) is a European thing.

I’m Canadian, in Canada.

There’s nothing I can do about your laws.

Please don’t act as gatekeepers of the world’s map by taking away features as a “protest” against something that users can’t change. I’m sure the EU is quaking in its boots over the inability to query OSM today.

Update: apparently there’s a banner with a link to https://savetheinternet.info/demos on the map today. TIL there are folks who don’t adblock everything.

If you are into cycling and own a Garmin Edge device, chances are you already know about http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ - this website produces maps for many GPS devices, the Edge being one of them. There is a great write-up about it here - https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2013/05/download-garmin-705800810.html

I used http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ many times in the past but it became difficult and time consuming when, for instance, you wanted to combine different states (USA) or even if you want to create a map of the entire USA, also, the “TYP” file used to create the *.img files from this site does not produce a good detailed map that show all the detail that I wanted to see on my device. While searching for alternative solution, I discovered mkgmap, spliiter and http://download.geofabrik.de/ . Mkgmap & Spliiter are tools that you can use to manipulate the *.osm.pbf files located in geofabrik and create Garmin *.img file that you can then transfer to your GPS.

The command-line options for both mkgmap & splitter can be overwhelming for some so I have created a FREE windows app that can be used to create your own maps using these tools. To see it in action, go to: https://youtu.be/1lc-mW3cKkA . Pre-compiled maps created using Edge Map Creator: http://edgemapcreator.mooo.com/Maps

Enjoy!

Hosted by Kate Ricchetti

• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

After installing OSMTracker v0.7 on my Android SmartPhone on the Ides of March, then using it the next day for the first time, I discovered that not only did it not track (a touch of an existential issue for a GPS Tracker - how come no-one noticed that before?) but photos taken with the App also were lacking almost all GPS info within the metadata, making them useless for Mapillary.

 ~/DCIM/Camera$ identify -verbose IMG_20190316_092818.jpg | fgrep GPS
exif:GPSAltitudeRef: 240/100
exif:GPSInfo: 686

It was a short session and only 43 photos, but I did not want to waste them if it could be helped. Somewhere in my searching I came across two really old plugins for JOSM which worked to fix that absence:

• Plugin: photo_geotagging
• Plugin: photoadjust
• Wiki: photomapping techniques
• Wiki: photomapping within JOSM
• Wiki: Geotagging Source Photos (old)

How to Add Geo-tags into Photos within JOSM

My phone is a cheap model from Vodaphone (SmartPrime-7, model VFD 600, Andoid 6.0.1) and has been able to add a full set of GPS tags to the photos that it takes with the built-in utility from the get-go, let alone when using OSMTracker. Even so, after taking photos under OSMTracker-0.7 and exporting a GPX (track-file), even though the gpx contained lat/long/compass for each photo, the photos themselves did not.

April update: Location needs to be switched on for BOTH the smartphone and the camera. They are independent actions within my model.

Step-by-step

Inside JOSM:–

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• Info
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos tl;dr:
  •Do not use v0.7 of OSMTracker, since it will not track
  •It is not enough to switch Location ON within your smartphone before tracking, you also need to switch Location ON for the camera, else no GPS metadata.

I’ve made use of OSMTracker v0.6.11 since starting surveying for OSM on 21 March, 2016. It does not do a lot (GPS track, take GPS-located photos + voice notes), but it does them simply, easily & well and — more to the point — in my opinion that is pretty much all that you need whilst surveying.

There is just one thing that I would like to see added to OSMTracker, and that is for the GPS direction (probably GPSImgDirection) to be added to photo’s exif. That would allow Mapillary to know which direction the camera was pointing in when the photo was taken, which would assist it’s processing of the photos after being uploaded.

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It all started with a bad edit. We in Juno rely on routing over OpenStreetMap roads, and notice every change that breaks the map matching. One day, we encountered a pretty big breakage caused by reversing some one-way roads. Turns out, all sources available to mappers, and even proprietary alternatives, like Google Street View, were obsolete enough to validate the edit. I told the story in my FOSDEM talk, but the main point is that it gave me an idea.

How fresh a source can be? We’ve got plenty of these, but they all are very old. GPS traces come very slowly, and people still trace lines from ten years ago. Satellite imagery is updated once every few years. Street View photos (that is, Mapillary) is always older than you’d like. If something, like a street direction, has been changed in past two months, you’ve got no way to know it and reflect it on the map, save for surveying it yourself. It’s okay for a small village, but not for New York.

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Casey here,

The Butano CERT team has received some mapping equipment and a modicum of training from Capt. Ari Delay of CalFire.

Most of the time the CalFire guys are local and are familiar with the area. During the fire season crews rotate up and down the state… and so there is an effort underway to provide them with updated hyper local maps.

So we’re mapping with their kit; and iPad with GPS, a Dual GPS puck and a funky app called GISKit Pro. In using that gear we found that most of the basemaps are rather… oddly off WRT the roads in our community

They take the resulting KML with a custom set of features of interest to the fire fighters, and push them into their ArcGIS system for eventual publication into a number of tactical systems. ( the trucks get tablets with GeoPDF files, for example. There are some mobile and PC based apps for deployment and kitting.)

We use regular basemaps when tagging, and have decided to correct the OSM maps for our actual road layout. That makes it easier for our volunteer team to accuratly map features given the difficulty of GPS reading in our canyons.

• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

On a day in May 2017 2 crack-heads† tried to kill me as I was mapping. They failed, I dialled 999, the police attended & in the end decided to ignore it (no CCTV, and the police sergeant claiming a lack of resources to investigate).

I guess that it is simple middle-class naivety on my part but I was profoundly affected by what I thought of as the refusal of the police to defend me.

The UK government has taken away the right to bear arms from all except the police, military & criminals (thank you Tony Blair). A former member of the Territorial Army that I know was recently asked to help clear his parent-in-law’s house following her death and discovered viable pistols + shotguns in the attic. He took the pistols back to his house and shortly afterwards was descended upon by the police. I counted 15 police at one stage standing around chatting outside his house + an unknown number inside. The whole palaver went on all night until the next morning, including police film-crews with portable floodlights conducting interviews outside the house with other police. The entire family is now in shock & clearly suffering from PTSD.

I had a touch of PTSD myself for the next 19 months, spending most of my time after the crack-head incident inside my house. I certainly could not face any surveying. In the end it was obvious that I had to drag myself up by the bootstraps and do something — in effect, re-boot myself.

Some little leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan were most useful but I was almost out of them. So, I spent time updating those promotional OSM leaflets and getting them printed.

Whilst huddled in my burrow Mapillary had spent it’s time vandalising my photos, all 6,200 of them. So, I spent time attempting to undo the damage using their blur editor. They ignored all my work.

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