Today marks the official beginning of Google Summer of Code 2019! Given that, it might be a good time to introduce myself and let anyone interested know about my project for this summer. So let me begin with a few words about myself:

About me

My name is Iason Manoloudis and I am a Computer Science student in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece. I’ve been working on my application for OpenStreepMap as well as on the OSM2World project for some time now and after some back and forth with Tordanik, my application has been accepted! Working with an open source organization is a first for me and I really look forward to get more and more involved in the numerous aspects of OSM.

Regarding the project

Regarding this summer’s project, the main focus will be around implementing traffic sign rendering capabilities in OSM2World. This extends from “basic” speed limit signs to destination signs on highways with non-standard text, all the way to more generic implementations like svg texture support and more. The various tasks of it touch a (I could say) rather wide range of the existing codebase and for anyone interested, you are of course welcome to see more details on it in the application document. So far I have committed a small contribution as I get to learn my way around the project and, as it seems now, this exciting part of in-depth discovering a large project will never stop until the end of the summer.

I will make sure to post updates on the work here, in this diary, so stick around for weekly / bi-weekly entries as we go through this exciting period!

Or zip codes as they’re called in the United States.

The Nominatim geocoder has trouble parsing address queries when its OSM database table contains invalid postcodes. For example when a building in OSM has addr:postcode=TX set then Nominatim will make an entry “TX is a postalcode in the United States”. When a user searches for an address containing “place1, TX, USA” Nominatim will search for “place1, USA near postcode TX” which might return a place by the same name, but outside Texas.

The technical solution is to disregard any data which doesn’t confirm to the country’s postcode standard, here 5 digits with optional 4 digits (“12345” or “12345-6789”). Not import into the database, skip in an intermediary step (calculating postcode center point or boundaries) or skip during query time. Nominatim issue 2017

In the meantime why not correct OSM data, could be fun.

First I went for obvious garbage: ‘$x1’, ‘null’, ‘0’, non-printable characters and such. Not a lot.

Then any postcodes not starting with a number. That turned out hundreds of city names (with or without postcode), street names or states codes. Splitting those values in iD editor was easy. For those formatted “TX 12345” I used the level0 editor state-by-state, it’s faster but still very manual.

Lastly it will be postcodes which are 3-4 or 6 digits. That will take the longest and often require local knowledge. Those “123XX” I think have little value, no search engine can make effective use of partial postcodes. At least in the US postcodes are not hierarchical enough.

… See full entry

ok, I know what you thought when you saw the title, but I’m not talking about changing the whole map. I know that the Mercator map is the most straightforward and orderly one there is, but why can not it be automatically changed to Winkel-Tripel when approaching or leaving far enough so that the map only shows the countries and continents? (for example, in the zoom level 14) I say this because in this way I would not change the order of the map and I would show the earth represented in a more correct way, that is, I do not see any problem. (sorry for google traductor)

Above is a small panaroma of some of the buildings that currently front part of Carlton Road close to Nottingham town centre. Behind the camera is the ancient ecclesiastical parish of Sneinton whilst in front of the camera is the (relatively recent) ecclesiastical parish of St Luke, which is within the Civil Parish of St. Ann’s (which, for the sake of accuracy no longer exists, since it is subsumed into the Unitary Authority City of Nottingham, but does still exist as the political St. Ann’s Ward).

I live in St. Ann’s (although my neighbours call it Thorneywood) and was amazed moving here at the number of:

1. Religious places (churches, mosques, temples)
2. Public Houses (‘pubs’ — drinking establishments)
3. Psychiatric Institutions

… See full entry

After almost four and a half years in Turkmenistan, Ann and I will depart in June upon completion of my tour of duty as U.S. ambassador here. My successor was confirmed by the U.S. Senate this week and so I must depart to make room for him. Since we started mapping Turkmenistan, we have posted over half a million ground-level images on Mapillary, over 280,000 edits, created these wiki articles:

Ahal Province

Ashgabat

Anew

Balkan Province

Balkanabat

Dashoguz

Dashoguz Province

Districts in Turkmenistan

Gazetteer of Ashgabat Street Names

Lebap Province

Mary (Turkmenistan)

Mary Province

Turkmenabat

Turkmenbashy

Turkmenistan Geoname Changes

Tag:office=diplomatic,

and expanded the Turkmenistan wiki article to approximately 10,000 words. We have dug up authoritative lists of all municipalities in Turkmenistan, created from scratch a gazetteer of street names in Ashgabat, and added over 11 thousand roads and streets.

Alas, our contributions will mostly come to an end with our departure, but I hope that people I have trained over the past four years will continue to contribute to the Turkmenistan map in OSM.

Its very important to have data that is freely accessible to generalpublic

At this moment, I’ve learned a lot from this past 2 weeks specially in using JOSM. Although I have lots of mistakes, but it teaches me to become smarter in using this application and editing. It made me realised how certain things are important when it comes in editing because it may affect the accuracy of data. Right now I can say that I improved a lot from day 1 up to this moment yet I still need to enhance my analyzation skills and my speed in mapping.

This day, our instructor introduced another technical skill to us and they invited some of their friends to teach those skills. I learned somehow even though I feel like I am new to that lesson that he taught because I already forgot my knowledge about html.

After the third week of Kaart’s internship here in the Philippines, I can say that I am getting more consistent on every task I do. I even organized my workflow properly, so that I can finish my work faster. Also I recheck and validate my edits before I upload many times on each tasks, which in that case it lessen the small errors. I can definitely say I improved better than last week workflow.

I would say the whole week is based on reflecting on our errors. Each corrected or fixed error help us lessen the error that we miss or created. It leads us to improve ourselves better and to lessen it. Thinking about errors, I missed a lot of small and big flaws but it sure helped me to look after those.

At the end of the week, we had a workshop which is about Leaflet. Leaflet is a widely used open source JavaScript library used to build web mapping applications. Since I have a small background in HTML, It helped me understand it. At the end of the workshop, we did a exercise of locating our school and adding details like a marker point and highlight box.

Heres a picture of combining what I’ve learned in MapBox and Leaflet.

… See full entry

On this third week of our internship, it made me think about the career path that I’ll be taking. Being a first student that is currently taking the course bachelor of science in information technology, I saw how important it is to take my course seriously. Being under this internship made me see a different side of the tech-world. What struck me the most while thinking about my career path is the way how I’m doing things now will make a huge difference in the future.

Technical skills have been thought to us during this internship program. This skills can be used to create a vast variety of information. What makes this internship interesting is that the more we know, the more we don’t know. Learning about relations made me think of how important each tag is used. The more we map, the more we encounter new tags.

Today, leaflet have been introduced to us. Based on what I’ve understood leaflet can be used to show maps on a website or apps. We were tasked to make a fairly basic map after a couple of examples. To the best of my ability I was only able to make the most basic one. I thought of creating a mobile app after doing this, though my skills are lacking. I am thankful since I got to learn how to use leaflet.

This is the third week of my internship at my school. This week we are still focus on road connectivity, besides from that we were introduce on the basics of Geo-coding. And by now I am aware that I am still developing my mapping skills in terms of accuracy due to the fact that some of my work were invalidated. So my level of aligning something specially on road and being conscious on the whole imagery is improving, somehow. I am also aware on how to fix certain errors/warnings that are complex rather than ignoring it.

So basically this week, my efficiency in mapping is improving. Looking back at my previous work a lot and realising that my work back then was on the status of poor. Now I am able to offset properly I think and more dedicated on mapping not just the primary problems of what is presented but taking the time to see the details of a image and the logic of the place that I am mapping.

By next week, I hope that my knowledge in mapping expands more.

Nominatim is the geocoder / search engine that powers the search box on the main OpenStreetMap site. The software indexes all named features in OSM and certain points of interest, and assigns ranks of importance scored between 0 and 30 (where 0 is most important). To augment the accuracy of rankings, Nominatim also uses page ranking of Wikipedia pages to help indicate the relative importance of osm features. This is done by calculating an importance score between 0 and 1 based on the number of inlinks to an article for a location. If two places have the same name and one is more important than the other, the wikipedia score often points to the correct place.

… See full entry

Here is a small evidence of why one should rather avoid mapping “individual” dunes:
they’re usually moving.
Sometimes they may even move across the oceans…
Below is what I could roughly, localy measure, with help from Sentinel & Landsat.

Saharan dunes - Adrar, Algeria
Direction of movement: SW ~200m / 30years
There where the wind turns the corner, at osm.org/edit#map=6/24.375/-2.875
(or zoom to osm.org/edit#map=15/24.3750/-2.8750)
(timelapse made with: https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/ - Landsat-5 1987-2011; Sentinel-2 2015-2019)

Harmattan wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmattan): this wind always goes east-west direction from Sahara, many times throwing parts of the sands it carries on brazilian coasts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds), like at

… See full entry

I have been testing precision localization for a few years now using RTK, PPP calculations, and RTKLIB. Since a few weeks, I have my own GNSS base, which allows me to generate gpx traces with an accuracy of a few centimeters, or a few tens of centimeters. Here is an example of about 15 overlapped gpx traces:

I think I’m not the only one interested in high-precision localization, and the arrival of smartphones with dual-frequency gnss receivers will probably accelerate the movement, which is a great thing for OpenStreetMap. Of course, I send these traces to the Osm servers, and they are available for everyone.

… See full entry

Usage of OSM Data

Facebook has been using OpenStreetMap data in its maps around the world since Spring 2018, as announced at State of the Map 2018[1].

The data has only been imported once (at least for the UK) after filters and checks were applied. An updated is expected in 4-6 months.

Editing OSM Data Facebook has been contributing to OSM via AI-Assisted Road Tracing and Kerala Road Import.

(osm.wiki/Facebook_(company))

Bringing third-party data into OpenStreetMap has always been a pain point. Simple bulk imports can bulldoze existing community work and cohesion. Editors such as JOSM or even Potlatch 2 have extensive merging functionality but a steeper learning curve and little ability to remap/rewrite data internally. Yet third-party data can often be valuable - especially if it was originally hand-collected to the same standards that OSM volunteers work to.

OSM Live Conflation is a new tool and workflow that builds on the approach taken by OSM Conflator, Cygnus, the JOSM Conflation plugin and the Potlatch 2 merging tool. It remaps data from vector tiles into OSM data, and lets you bring items across one-by-one quickly and efficiently.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Or if you want to play with a live instance, here’s a volunteer-collected dataset of cycling infrastructure in West Oxfordshire. (Don’t upload unless you actually want to make an edit to OSM, of course!)

User workflow

… See full entry

The OSM File Format should also account for construction accidents … a job traditionally done by the FM STEREO RDS “TRAFFIC ALERTS” that is weakly encrypted and a pay service.

The traffic or streets (for pedestrians) affected area should by default have a 12 day warning time, and this notice should be required to have at least 3 URL sources to prove that the accident has occurred. The exact XML coding should always have a version number and be revised every year until it works.

To me this RDS TRAFFIC ALERTS pay service should be a joint Government-Private Sector affair with no encryption at all. However, the EU and US+CAN and AU+NZL governments are so beyond totally corrupt that their national FM Stereo Spectrum regulators have not made the change.

Traffic alerts as an OSM layer really should be extracted separately, so that map updates can be done at least 2x per week.

There is at least one justification – [Seattle Crane Incedent]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIWZbo-1HUU

This is the English version of osm.org/user/yumean1119/diary/364501

Hello.

I have wanted to organize tagging schemes of educational institutions outside school. I conducted a simple survey to understand the current situation, using cram schools as an example.

For this survey, we focused on “Meiko Gijuku”(明光義塾), which is a nationwide chain of tutoring schools. https://www.meikogijuku.jp

When I typed “明光義塾” into OpenStreetMap Nominatim, 49 POIs appeared. (As of May 22, 2019)

Here is the result:

Number of tags

amenity=school 18

amenity=prep_school 14

amenity=training 5

office=educational_institution 4

office=company 2

amenity=preschool 1

shop=yes 1

only building=* 4

Findings and my opinions:

amenity=school and amenity=prep_school account for about 2/3 of the total.

*amenity=school is obviously considered inappropriate. I think this should be limited to formal schools (Both public and private).

*Both English and Japanese pages for amenity=prep_school in the OSM wiki pages have only one line . Also, as far as I have looked up the preliminary school on wikipedia,

I think it is appropriate to interpret it as a “high school” to prepare for advancing to higher education, but at least these “high schools” in Japan are nothing but amenity=school.

*amenity=training has been abandoned.

osm.wiki/Proposed_features/training

*amenity=preschool is the old tag for preschool and is now replaced by amenity=kindergarten.

The spelling is very similar to prep_school, and it is also linked from JA: How to map a, so a mapper may have used it incorrectly.

osm.wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dpreschool

*In my opinion,the most appropriate current tag for representing cram schools is office=educational_institution.

However, as far as I can see from Meikogijuku, there is only one person who uses this other than me.

And the wiki page says it is intended to be used for public education organizations such as boards of education.

… See full entry

State of the Map US provides a great place to share, especially if you are new to the conference. First time speakers and attendees bring new energy, stories, topics and ideas to the conference. It would be great to see many new faces in Minneapolis, September 5-8.

Do you have an OSM story, but have never done a talk at SOTM US or elsewhere? Have some questions about what it is like to present at the conference? We want to hear from you, so I am hosting a second Zoom session this Wednesday to answer any questions and help to brainstorm your ideas.

Join me and others from the OpenStreetMap US community on Wednesday May 22, 8pm ET, SOTM US CFP info session. Join via zoom. (Phone dial-in available also.)

If you would like to join the session, kindly sign up here!

To go ahead and submit your talk, please do so here!

I went to the OSCAL conference about Open Source software and OpenStreetMap in Tirana. It took me 3 years to finally decide to go ahead and do it and I had no idea what to expect when I arrived. But once I was there, I very quickly noticed that everything is perfectly fine and safe in the streets of Tirana. When I arrived at the conference I received a very warm welcome from the organisers who form a very active community in their local hackerspace. I was very happy that I could share some of my experience with OSM, OsmAND and Mapillary, and of course the PT_Assistant plugin. While walking between AirBNB and the venue, I tried to make as many pictures for Mapillary as I could, even on the bus to the airport: https://www.mapillary.com/map/im/k7CBwtE2S8quA5LUvfq19Q (They seem to need cycle highways there too, this guy is risking his life on the motorway)

I tried to get JOSM going on the computers in the classrooms, but that wasn’t a great success, as Java wasn’t installed on the Windows and the virtual machines with Ubuntu didn’t have enough memory to work very well. My plan now is to show the possibilities of JOSM and QGIS during Hangout sessions, maybe Hangout on Air. I never tried that before, but it should work quite well and it’s a great way to overcome the physical distance between us in the period between conferences :-)

Hi All,

I’m interested in exploring how we can record innovation precincts from a mapping/placemaking context. There are a bunch of landmarks in our area (Cremorne) that would enhance the maps for this area - I’m keen to explore what we can capture.

Cheers, Dave.