I am Itorho Abigail, an undergraduate in the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. I am a member of UniqueMappers, a subsidiary of YouthMappers team.
I was privileged to become a member of UniqueMapper team, after meeting with my school’s chapter director, Mr Sunday. He reached out to me and gave a detailed explanation on what YouthMappers team is all about. After the briefing, i volunteered to be a part of this great organization. I am dedicated to service for humanity. I choose to be involved in the daily affairs of the world. I had always thought distance was a barrier, but i was proven wrong. UniqueMappers team gave me an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world from the comfort of my home. I truly am grateful for this opportunity.

Today I mapped for Mozambique.

With the equipment largely bought, the big hurdle is to work out a route. Asking around it took a few attempts to get some feedback and I was beginning to fear I would have to work out a route manually. Then Rorym suggested the graphHopper routing engine, which is made to solve this type of problem. I was cc’d with a Peter Karich the founder of the company, who kindly offered me an API with 300 locations to help work out the route. Rory had done a project to walk through Dublin by not passing by a pub which he blogged about, unfortunately, that blog is no longer online, but it seems to have been a manual process, which a blog on grasshopper shows how the process is simpler with their software. https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2015/11/15/publess-routes-graphhopper-edition/

So that evening I spent most of my time reading through the two blogs about routing around or to visit pubs. Also out of curiosity had a look at the northernmost town on the Irish side of the border, Muff, and saw five or so crossings just around that area and a few choices as to how to go past them all. A nightmare to plan and remember.

… See full entry

Though I am also involved on mapping in Canada, I still do not forget to keep updated with many infrastructure projects in the Philippines under the “Build, Build, Build” program under Rodrigo Duterte, as well as other major infrastructure projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) not covered. Here is a list of some Philippine infrastructure projects I am working on since then:

NLEX Harbor Link

This expressway has opened in March 1, 2019, but it required some tweaks, such as the curved sections in Karuhatan (Valenzuela), the sections on Philippine National Railways (PNR) right of way, and the C-3 interchange (connects to Radial Road 10, and scheduled to open by December 2019). There is significant work modifying or deleting buildings affected by the expressway’s construction, and modifying the future connection with Radial Road 10 (a directional T interchange for the spur that connects to Radial Road 10).

Cavite-Laguna Expressway (Laguna section)

There is adjustments at the rotunda (roundabout) on Mamplasan Exit with SLEX, the new southbound lanes of Laguna Boulevard is marked open (except it needs some on-the-ground verification by other mappers), and South Boulevard, which connects to South Forbes Park and Ayala Westgrove Heights in Silang is extended east toward Laguna Boulevard.

Metro Manila Subway

Construction of this subway line, the first of its kind in the Philippines, began in March 2019, with only the Quirino Highway and North Avenue to be constructed. The whole route has been mapped, but since most portions are to be constructed soon, only the Quirino-North Avenue segment has been tagged as under construction.

Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway

Thanks to new GPX tracks and partial coverage of Bing imagery, portions of the Binalonan-Pozorrubio leg of the expressway has been realigned, and the southbound ramps of the Pozorrubio interchange has been corrected

Candon Bypass Road

… See full entry

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!”.

… See full entry

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:

… See full entry

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:–

… See full entry

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:–

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry

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:–

… See full entry