Coding for Google Summer of Code officially started yesterday. I’ve started working on it and so far, things are going good. In this entry, I’ll briefly describe what my project is and does.

The Project - AutoBound

I will be working on building a plugin for JOSM that can automatically identify the rooftops of buildings in a given map area. This will make it easier for contributors of OSM to easily mark buildings and add data.

The tool will have two parts: 1. The Front End — This will be written in Java and will act as an interface between the user and JOSM. The plugin will allow users to select an area on the map. The satellite image of this area will be Base64 encoded and sent to the Back End. 2. The Back End — This part will be written in Python. The Back End will have endpoints listening on a port (default: 5000). When it receives data from the Front End, it is decoded and processed. Image Segmentation is done by a Deep Learning model that has been trained to segment rooftops in an image. Then the position of the nodes that can create a boundary for that rooftop is calculated and is returned to the Front End, where it is displayed on the Map View to the user.

The Back End will also be made available as a Docker image to make it easier to use.

The Timeline

GSoC gives students three months to complete their project. For the first month, I will be working on the Front End of the Plugin. I will be pushing all my code to the GitHub repo every day. For the following two months, I will be collecting and preparing data to train the Deep Learning model, training the deep learning model, integrating it with the endpoints, testing the working of the entire stack and adding documentation. The code for the server will be pushed to this GitHub repo. I will also be posting updates on my work every week on Medium and here.

Spent a long day visiting in the Maybury area of Woking. Before going to the pub, I wandered around a few streets and noted addresses and peculiarities. Though some areas of Woking have had houses added, I could find little evidence of addresses. There also did not seem to be any recent local ‘heavy mappers’… In my opinion, it is better to add buildings as approximate shapes with addresses, rather than to spend time drawing the precise shape of each. We are not town planners and, I suspect, that one of the main uses of OSM is for finding location, not for discovering who has a curved bay and who has a sun-lounge, or garden shed??? My general approach is to draw the residential building: if detached house then add address; if semis then draw two attached houses; if more multi then decide between terrace, apartment, or just ‘residential building’ and add address points using interpolation lines where survey or evidence is vague. What more does the User want?

Accelerating Sanitation and Water for All (ASWA II) project aims to achieve sustained access to basic sanitation and safe water supplies, as well as the long-term adoption of hygiene practices, across 10 focus countries. ASWA II builds upon the momentum achieved through ASWA I.

The project aims to improve the health, nutrition and wellbeing of the vulnerable population in 14 rural districts especially women and girls through sustained use of safe water supplies, sanitation service and sustained adoption of hygiene practices.

To achieve this humanitarian goal, OpenSteetMap Bangladesh Foundation (OSMBDF) is collaborating in creating GIS based WASH Inventory by facilitating training on data collection process using aswa ii apk.

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I have been mapping the little village Tchankada of my friend Cyprien in Benin lately. It’s not much work, but it was exciting enough for them to have their village mapped for the first time, it caused a wild story night.

Shortly after this, I contacted another person that mapped in this region, because having a local person helping can be useful for others as well. His main concern was to know the street names of the many streets around there.

There aren’t any.

My friend’s house is known by the family name inside the village, and the bigger municipality receives their mail at a post box in Cotonou. When he studied, and I mailed something to him, I used the post box of his university, and that arrived well.

For a long time, I was completely unaware about where my friend lived. Any description fell short. It’s also really hard to explain lat/long to local people, and the lat long I did receive was way off. Until my friend started to use my quickly hacked together app https://whenwhere.cf, which is basically a proof of concept for OLC for offline usage without maps. It worked brilliantly! I found his place on the map and he walked to some other places as well to add them to the map. He used it before in Cotonou to find the place back where he was before.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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