Waterford Walls is a street art festival that has been taking place every year in Ireland since 2015. there are still one or two that i havent found yet but ive got most of them mapped out at this stage so it should make it easier for others to find them, especially the ones that are off the beaten track. here are some Overpass turbo queries that show where they are:

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/JRF (2018 walls are shown in blue)
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/JRD (same search but with artist names and years displayed)

or you can use OsmAnd on Android (Play Store, F-Droid) or iPhone (App Store)

- search for “mural”
- select “Artwork type: mural” in the search results
- select “Show artwork on the map”

tap on a marker and drag the window up to view more details. if you have an internet connection then scroll to the end and tap on “online photos” to view any nearby street-view images that might be on Mapillary

One of the cool things about SOTM US is that there’s always a lot of first time speakers. They keep the conference fresh with new stories, topics, ideas. I am part of the SOTM US organization this year, and our goal is to again welcome a lot of first time speakers in Minneapolis, September 5-8.

I remember the first time I presented at a SOTM. It was in Girona in 2010. I was extremely nervous and I had many doubts about my topic and the way I had planned to present it.

But it turned out great. People were interested in what I had to say, had great questions and the experience encouraged me to get more involved with OSM.

So if you have an OSM story, and you have never done a talk at SOTM US, I would really like for you to submit it. To help with that, I am hosting a Zoom session next Monday. In this session I will walk you through the CFP process and I can give you feedback on your talk idea if you want. You can also ask any question about speaking at SOTM US or anything related to it you are curious about.

So mark your calendar: Monday May 13, 8pm ET, SOTM US CFP info session. Join via zoom. (Phone dial-in available also.)

If you are planning on joining the session, I’d appreciate it if you sign up.

If you’re all good to go and just want to submit your talk, please just do so here!

… See full entry

19th December 1997

On 3rd May 2019, I became a mapper with openstreetmap.

If you remember in Going completely offline with Vespucci last December I gave some insight in to the improved offline support in Vespucci 13.0. Now that version 13 is available, I need to loose a couple of words on how to generate the files.

The original mapsplit application was created back in 2011 by well known OSMer Peter Barth, at the time it was used to prepare input for OSM2World. The slight rework that I started late last year adds support for producing output in MBTile format (instead of copying a couple of 100’000 or so files to your mobile :-)), higher and variable maximum zoom level for the tiles and an optimisation pass.

… See full entry

don-vip speaking, originally from JOSM Twitter account:

I read many incorrect statements about the new Java license from Oracle on the German OSM forum mentioned in weeklyOSM 458. Let’s see in detail what all is this about.

First of all, a little bit of history/terminology. Java was created in 1995 by Sun. We call “Java” both the programming language and the platform that runs JOSM (JRE = Java Runtime Environment). Several platforms, from multiple vendors, exist.

The JDK (Java Development Kit) contains the JRE but also developer tools (mainly, the java compiler). In 2006, around the release of Java 6, Sun announced its intention to open-source Java in a new project: OpenJDK.

OpenJDK is badly named, like OpenStreetMap. We don’t only map streets… Well OpenJDK project does not only concern the JDK but the whole Java platform (language, spec, tools, APIs, etc.). @speakjava explains it nicely.

Sun open sourced many things from Java into the OpenJDK project, but not all things. In particular, Windows/Mac installers and deployment technologies like WebStart were not open sourced (we don’t know why).

It means OpenJDK is only a “source code” project. Building it is very complex, and nobody took the pain to distribute free binaries for Windows & Mac. Only Red Hat did it for Linux in the IcedTea project. If you have 100% free Java on Linux, it’s thank to them.

In 2009 Oracle bought Sun. They didn’t change things radically until recently. So even today most of Windows and Mac users are still using proprietary JRE binaries from Oracle, that are built upon open source project OpenJDK.

Oracle made a very good job in releasing Java 8 in 2014, then Java 9 in 2017. We even collaborated with them in mutual good faith. Then, all hell broke loose.

They changed the Java release cycle to to a fixed 6 months schedule (2 versions per year). We are now at Java 12 (which is by the way the most unimpressive version of Java: nothing new in it).

… See full entry

Today I did one of my favourite hikes and tried to add missing paths to the map. Most of the way, there’s a clearly visible path on the ground but there’s sections in between where you just have to navigate through fields by yourself.

I have started a new wiki page to document changes to geographic names in Turkmenistan from 1992 forward. Since geographic names are established by the central government by decree or parliamentary resolution, there has to be an official document attesting to each change. My current intent is to collect as much information on name changes between 1992 and the present as possible, then to maintain the page into the future. With a lot of help from some friends in Ashgabat the page is started. There are still citations of government decrees and resolutions missing but with luck and more time perhaps we can find them, too. As time permits I hope to upload copies of the relevant decrees and resolutions for reference.

While doing all my editing, I was getting warnings concerning attempts to abbreviate the suffix on a name (e.g. ‘St’ instead of ‘Street’). Earlier today, I was traveling out of town. The person I was traveling with had her Google based navigation software operating in voice mode (i.e. it would speak the name of the turns and how far it was to the next one). At a particular intersection, it said we should “turn left on Main Saint”.

That was the moment when fully realized how automated software could misconstrue a name suffix, by not fully understanding the context it was written in. Time to make sure I get every one of the fully spelled out.

It’s been a while since I have organized a field survey mapping party. I wanted to write up some instructions for the participants, and realized that there may very well be techniques and methods I am not aware of. So I thought I’d share what I wrote to the group and see if you have any ideas on how to improve on it. Thanks! Oh and if you’re in the Salt Lake City area, please join us tomorrow at 10am!

Message to field mapping party

Here’s a quick run down of common ways to do on the ground surveying for OSM. I recommend any (combination) of the first three, but if you feel adventurous, feel free to give any of the other methods a try.

… See full entry

Moderators refuse to remove a spammer selling pot

Early this morning there were so many spammers from China trying to flog devices to crack ATMs that it filled up an entire page + half of the next page (~30 posts, multiple usernames, but likely same/small cadre of spammers). At the end of a bunch of reports I reverted to “just look for the entry ‘wftg’ at the end of each diary”.

About 10 hours later I reported a spammer for the third (or possibly the fourth) time for trying to sell pot. The diary moderators have refused to remove him. I’m afraid that I lost my rag with this one:–

Why has this spammer been left in place; is he related to you?

There is a spam-link in his profile. His a/c was created on the same day that he created the profile spam-link + diary so that the SEs will also list his profile. Are you in his pay? That is the only reason that I can think of for not removing this user.

Autopsy

… See full entry

There’s been countless times where I was mapping someplace far away, and I’ve wanted to ask a local mapper for advice or help.

There’s not many ways to do that effectively, or easily.

An obvious thing to do is to leave a note either on the feature I have a question about or as a map note. Then hope that someone local reads notes. Or you can find local mappers through the Neis ‘Who’s around me?’ tool, but I find that it turns up a lot of stale mappers (who are not active anymore.) Also the tool is not open source, and you can’t integrate it with other things.

I don’t find either of those options very satisfying.

So perhaps we could have an API that queries for local mappers in a radius.

That begs the question what a local mapper is, in technical, queryable terms. A simple approach would be to look at changesets that have a fairly small bounding box, are close to the point you are interested in, and not too old. Group those by mapper, and that will give you a reasonable proxy for ‘local mappers near a point’.

I whipped up a proof of concept API that does just that.

Here’s a request that fetches local mappers near the center of Münster, Germany:

http://localhost:5000/mappersnearme?lat=51.9610&lon=7.6247

This returns, after some waiting, a list of mappers as JSON:

[
    [
        375,
        1760129,
        "lowlander"
    ],
    [
        100,
        8339,
        "mtmail"
    ],
    [
        78,
        423913,
        "alan1209"
    ],
...

Each record has the number of local changesets, the OSM user ID and username. The list is ordered by that last number so that the most active local mappers should appear at the top.

Here are the mappers at the top of the Münster local mappers list:

• lowlander
• mtmail
• alan1209
• mappermarko
• madmaxms

Looking at these mappers’ edits, they all seem to be mappers who may be able to answer a question about a local mapping issue. A promising result!

… See full entry

Some of you may have heard of the upset around the introduction of “scoped storage” in the upcoming Android Q (10) release, see for example androidcentral

So why should you care about this change, after all it promises to enhance users privacy, and it isn’t exactly new that the goog doesn’t really care about burning developers time?*

Well there is a special angle to this new feature for “geospatial” apps, it essentially inhibits direct file access and assumes content can be accessed as a stream of bytes. That is all fine and dandy if you are writing something that just access pictures, videos and other media files, but it breaks down as soon as we are using larger structured files.

Classic example a MBTiles format file containing images or vector tiles or anything else, or a geopackage file and so on. Now there are workarounds of sorts, but they essentially all require copying around potentially multiple GBs of data, potentially duplicating it on device and are not really practical or user friendly.

A further twist is that a user will typically want to persist larger downloads over app de- and reinstalls, data in app private directories doesn’t survive this. For example vespucci creates a separate directory exactly to circumvent this issue.

See https://commonsware.com/blog/2019/03/26/death-external-storage-can-haz-file.html for some more information and https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/128591846#comment50 is a comment from a well known Mapbox developer (in case you are wondering why the later doesn’t turn up when googling, yes, the goog doesn’t actually index its own issue tracker).

Now, after protests, google has essentially pushed back enforcement of this by a year to Android R, but that is just kicking the can down the road a bit.

*In the case of paid devs, well they are paid, the others are simply expected to spend a couple of $1000 per year equivalent amount of time to accommodate whatever google has decided to break this time around,

The first pass of street renaming (and generally cleanup) for High Springs has begun. These corrected names are a result of photographs taken on 1 May, and the GPS data being cross-referenced to maps with the old street names. In some cases, the old data was poorly coded, and a correction has been attempted. Many more streets remain to be updated. Note that all street directions are now based on a county coordinate system, and not the center of High Springs.

I have decided that adding every single address including apartment and building numbers to OSM in Shanghai is not a realistic short-term (or maybe even medium-term) goal.

The good news is, a lot of Shanghai is divided neatly into neighbourhoods (小区, xiăoqū), and once you arrive at one of these neighbourhoods it’s relatively trivial to find the exact house.

An example of one of these neighbourhoods: osm.org/way/1074383316

Therefore, a realistic goal to make routing relatively usable for the general public is to add all of the neighbourhood names, and the lanes that run through the neighbourhoods. Then when the user arrives at the neighbourhood gates he can follow the signs to the right building or ask the security guard (there’s always a security guard).

Dear all,

Today, v4.21.0 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 - Removed unused world_boundaries-spherical.tgz file from scripts

• Switch to osmdata.openstreetmap.de for water & icesheet shapefiles

• Started using ST_PointOnSurface for some label placements

• Adjusted index for military areas

• Adjusted starting zooms for labeling of administrative areas.

• Revert rendering of healthcare key

• Stop place some place labels when the objects become too big or at high zooms.

• Only render capes as points and render them like other points.

• Only render ferry lines from ways, not relations

• Improved developer internal documentation

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

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v4.20.0…v4.21.0

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

I’ve been re-riding my city by bicycle this year. My goal was to visit more of the roads I typically ignore. My progress has been much faster than I expected due to extended cold weather keeping me in the city instead of riding out on the highway.

JOSM is great at displaying multiple GPS traces at once. I even managed to load up all 1,400 of mine though it took some time.

I saved a local copy of the road network in an .osm file and have been crossing off roads in JOSM as I visit them. I’ve come across a few unmapped roads and paths on my journeys while doing this. The first time I rode the city back in 2014 I found hundreds of unmapped service roads.

Using the pruned road network file I use mkgmap to create a map overlay for my Garmin that shows me roads I haven’t covered yet this year which I update after each ride. I also have a second overlay that shows me roads I’ve never been down of which there are about 25 km, mostly high speed roads with no shoulder.

… See full entry

I got to add my first edits to OSM today. Was pretty exciting and I started with something small. I added the buildings around where I work and adjusted the outlines of them. I can’t wait to do more.

So as you know from my first two posts I have Microsoft building foot prints and county address data, two good sources of data. Both worth a import on there own. However we want to make the most efficient use of our mapping time so Mike came up with a way to conflate the data sources. And save a lot of time! Importing data into OSM has a good bit of overhead (still worth it). As I’ve talked about before you have to go get the data, figure out how to process the data with a procedure for Tracking, coordinating, and QA. Then once you figured out all of that you have to have local community buy in and go through the mailing list where your proposal will be vetted in a public way. So where it makes sense, it is worth thinking about using your available data sources in conjunction with each other to minimize going through that over and over. Now it does come with some additional risk, your proposal will face more scrutiny the more complex it is. And simpler single imports might lend them self’s to more mappers helping you with it. That’s a judgment call you will have to make. Im going to stay fairly high level in this post if you want to know the nuts and bolts of everything there is great documentation that Mike wrote on the GitHub https://github.com/OpenStreetMapSC/MergeAddressesAndBuildings and osm.wiki/Spartanburg_County_Address_And_Building_Import

… See full entry