A couple of months ago, the CWTS++ program ends, but our learning still continue through the internship where it’s held in school (PUP San Juan Campus). So I decided to join the internship program to experience what kind of job it is and to gain some knowledge and skills.

At first, I thought that it is somehow easy, however after our instructors introduced more info. about maps, plugins, data’s and others, it’s not a simple task to do so because I have to train myself in the decision making whether my changes are right or not, so I need to think twice or better to have a consent with my co-worker or with my instructors. But then after, I started to progress and gaining more knowledge in using JOSM application like shortcut keys in tools, proper use of tags and others that helps me to become more better in my mapping skills. Sometimes, I do have some hard time in editing because I’ve encountered some new things that are not taught during training or past lessons or I just easily forgot those things?!. Any ways, this week I’ve learned a lot and hoping to learn more.

Being part of the CWTS++ program I have been given an opportunity to join the Summer Internship. I am pleased to be here since this is new to me. After this past few days, I have learned about some new techniques when it comes to mapping and how to interpret the tags that I use.

Back then, my understanding to tagging roads were fairly basic since I interpret them at a very literal level. I did not look at the perspective of those who will be using the map that I’m working on and those people who live in that area. By being able to see and understand that, I saw how important it is to properly choose the tags that I’ll be using. Though I still make mistakes, I value what I learn from those mistakes and use them as stepping stones to further increase my knowledge when it comes to tagging. Through the help of my instructors and co-workers, I am able to do much better now than before.

What drives me to map the areas of my country is that I know that it will be a big help to those that need this information especially when it comes to emergency situations. Me and my co-workers are driven by helping those who need help in anyway possible and through mapping, we are able to make it happen. It’s like working behind the stage, what we do is very important and it makes a big impact on what is happening on the big picture.

Its has been more than a month since I had my last CWTS++ meeting at school and I can barely recall the few basics that I know in mapping. Since it was the first week and in tradition as a student I usually forget the lessons that had been taught to me by my director.

This week I mainly use JOSM which I oftenly utilise as an instrument for mapping for areas. I mostly used ID for roads because JOSM was like an unfamiliar territory to me .It was really technical as for me even until now the lessons still has not sink in properly. I learn a lot of things which includes roads that are logically near/ around a house or community. Also had been introduce to a few new plug-ins, tools, layers. Even the mapping techniques on how to approach a image was new and requires analysing the imagery. And I basically learned how to create/edit a line on somehow exactly in the middle of the road from the imagery and I had encounter new errors that are not in my capability of solving alone.

By now I am expecting myself to have like an intermediate level after this internship or something related to a higher level. I had learn that accuracy must be consistent in obtaining trust in one’s work , by that your body of work reflects you as a mapper.

After the first week of Kaart’s internship, the 2 terms in CWTS++ (CWTS++ project pilot is a service-learning program spear-headed by the MapAm❤re Initiative) here in PUP San Juan has finally helped me to apply my skills and knowledge in this internship. My knowledge in Mapping (OpenStreetMap) have went into a new level of being a professional.

Within the first week of Kaart’s internship I have experienced 2 days of training, which I was trained to be accurate in every upload. After the training, my JOSM knowledge, my logical mapping knowledge, and my accuracy sharpened. On every task that I do, I felt confident on every adjustment I make .This internship have started superbly and I am looking to forward on the next upcoming days. Everyday I gain more and more experience and that what makes me to to be accurate, consistent and fast on every task. With that said I felt accomplished and great in the first week of Kaart’s internship. I am grateful for this opportunity.

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!

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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!

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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).