I’ve been collecting geo-referenced photos since I started contributing to OpenStreetMap. When I discovered Mapillary a few years ago, I decided to upload these photos so that other people can use them in their own mapping.

Street art in Marikina’s freedom wall

Here’s a few sequence I found interesting to revisit whenever I go to the Mapillary website (links to each sequence are included for viewing the high-res photos). They are categorized according to the mode of travel.

☑️ 🚶

… See full entry

Many companies and organizations have a group of mappers editing on OpenStreetMap. We have created a feature on OSMCha to publish team lists of users, and then filter or hide changesets created by one or more mapping teams.

This week we pushed some adjustments to make it more useful for the OpenStreetMap community. So let’s see how it works.

In the OSMCha user menu, there is an option “My teams”.

That opens the “My mapping teams page”, listing the teams your user has already created on OSMCha. Clicking on the “Add +” button, you will be able to add the details of a new team.

… See full entry

The Greek OSM community would like to hear from you on how junction:ref=* can be used on free-flowing motorway interchanges.

Examples of motorway interchanges under discussion include the M4/M25 interchange near Heathrow, and the Α1/Α6 interchange near Metamorfosi.

Whatever is decided by the Greek community may influence how we use junction:ref=* for similar interchanges worldwide.

Comments and suggestions may be posted on the key’s talk page, or the forum thread: both pages are monitored.

Originally posted here: https://atakua.org/w/landuse-conflation.html . Reposted here as it might be easier for some people to find it in the diaries.

Land cover geographic data is what is mostly represented as landuse=* in the OSM database. Other tagging schemes e.g. landcover=* also exist.

During the ongoing land cover import for Sweden [1] I learned several things that were not documented anywhere in the OSM wiki or elsewhere, as far as I know. Below are my observations on what pitfalls and issues arise during all stages of the import, from data conversion to conflation and tag choice.

Data import of zero-dimensional (separate points of interest) and linear (roads) objects are regularly done in OSM. Some documentation and tools to assist with such imports exist. Compared to them, importing of polygons and multipolygons has unique challenges.

Please make sure you read the OSM import guidelines [2], [7] before you start working on an import. Then document as much of the process as possible for your own and other reference, as it is likely to take more time to finish than you originally estimated.

General lessons learned

… See full entry

In China, names should almost always be in Chinese. There are some exceptions like with certain shop names but things like road names should certainly always be in Chinese. I kept seeing the following problems cropping up:

Abbreviated road names like “name:en=W. Shuncheng Str.”.

Mixed Chinese and English/pinyin like “name=文艺路 Wenyi Road”.

English road names using ‘Lu’ instead of ‘Road’ (Lu is the diacritic-less pinyin for ‘road’ in Chinese, often used by English speakers when naming Chinese roads even in English).

English names in the name= tag rather than the name:en= tag.

Finding 2 and 4 could be done together. I initially tried to figure out how to use Overpass Turbo to find a mix of hanzi and Latin alphabet, but then I realised it was much simpler than that because no valid Chinese road name would contain Latin letters, so I just had to search name= for Latin letters. The query is as follows:

[out:json][timeout:25]; way["highway"]["name"~"[A-Za-z]"]({{bbox}}); out center;

Actually, as it turns out there might be some valid road names with Latin letters in them. Namely alphanumeric codes like ‘G203’ or whatever. Whether these should be tagged as name= or ref= I’ll leave someone else to figure out. If the name was mixed English/Chinese and name:en= already existed, I just deleted the English from name=. If there was no existing name:en=, I created that tag and moved the English name into it.

Number 3 is also fairly easy to spot.

[out:json][timeout:25]; way["highway"]["name:en"~"Lu$"]({{bbox}}); out center;

Number 1 required a combination of queries (there’s probably a way to search for them all in one go but I just did it one by one this time). For example:

[out:json][timeout:25]; way["highway"]["name:en"~"W\\."]({{bbox}}); out center;

This finds all roads like “W. Shuncheng Road” (full stops have to be escaped with two backslashes (and also turns out the markdown for OSM diary entries requires you to escape backslashes)).

… See full entry

Today learned about https://geoportal.dgu.hr/ the Geoportal by the University of Zagreb (Thx to morlautrer for pointing me to this!).

This is a valuable source to check the street names when mapping in Croatia.

This is a minor release mainly containing UI improvements. You can install the beta from the google play store (after enabling the “beta” releases setting), or obtain it from the Vespucci repository.

Updated opening hours editor

The opening hours editor (a separate project found here) has received a number of updates, including

• tapping the time bars will start a large time picker, this was previously only available via the menu.
• ability to load and save templates to on device files.
• support for region and object type specific templates.

Use of SAF file picker for Android KitKat and later

Previously, to give a consistent look and feel over as many different Android version as possible, we were using a third party file picker/selector for those operations that require a file to be selected for input or output. Unluckily in recent Android versions removable “SD card” storage has become unavailable to the third party library which is rather annoying as this is the location where you typically want to save larger files.

To work around this we are now using the system SAF (Storage Access Framework) file picker for Android KitKat (19) and later, in older Android version the third party file picker should work fine. Using the SAF file picker does have the additional advantage that cloud-based storage location are usable for operations that don’t need direct file access, so you can save and load files from your favourite cloud storage provider if you want to.

Download offline data directly with automatic configuration

… See full entry

I’m hoping this will be a good project for me. I have loved maps since I was a small child and my father and I used to spend hours pouring over his atlas and maps of everywhere. I feel closer to him doing this sort of activity.

The Philippines is known for our thousands of colorful, loud, and fun fiestas (festivals) we celebrate yearly. Our Fiestas can be religious, cultural, or both and are marked by religious activities, parades, cultural rituals, trade fairs, exhibits, concerts, pageants and various games and contests. There’s always one thing, or another, reason to celebrate.

The reality of that of the Philippine open mapping community is that many (if not most) of the community activities happen in the capital region, Metro Manila. It is not that we don’t have contributors but outside of our metropolis, they are less organized and thinly spread out across our 7,641 islands.

In 2016, when advocates from the local OpenStreetMap and FOSS4G community organized the State of the Map Asia conference in Manila, many of us were inspired in organizing a similar, major event but with a more local flavor, targeting local enthusiasts and participants.

… See full entry

Today I got a bottle of Fanta, 330ml from Burge-r-s and a very nice Cappucino from Expresso Perfetto. I even made pictures of it. Thank you both again!

I’m excited to be here. I’ve been longing to join the UniqueMappersTeam for some time. After my first meeting with the team at the International Women Day 2019 event with the theme “Balance for Better” i’ve always longed to belong here.

Finally, i met them today at the World Environment Day programme organised by INRES titled “Beat Air Pollution” and its just amazing. The treat by Mr. Victor Sunday (the team coordinator), the lessons etc was just beyond my expectation.

I am now a mapper and there’s got to be more!!

As of June 2019, I began importing buildings for Oconto County from the State Cartographer’s office.

Introduction

This is the very first entry regarding the official work on this year’s Google Summer of Code! As seen in the subject line, the first task was about implementing the ability to render traffic signs that “require” custom text in their definition upon mapping them. This is preferred compared to the alternative of having a different texture stored in the textures folder for every traffic signs available, for obvious reasons (e.g. huge number of textures) as well as for scalability purposes. As the available time for each task is limited and a number of existing traffic signs are rarely mapped (tested with overpass), this first implementation showcases 2 widely used sign types, those of DE:274 (speed limit) and DE:1001-31 . So, let’s take a look on the changes of the past 2 weeks:

Restructuring

Material objects use a list of TextureData objects to define the data necessary in case a texture was going to be applied to a material. Each TextureData entry in this list represents a texture layer to be applied. Up until now, these layers always referred to an already stored image. So if we were going to implement the ability to render an image with text “on the go”, this had to be changed. Therefore the first step was to introduce a TextTextureData class and define the following hierarchy:

Abstract class	First implementation	Second implementation
TextureData	TextTextureData	ImageTextureData

A getFile() method was added to each of these classes with the purpose of

• Generating and saving an appropriate temporary image with text rendered, when it comes to TextTextureData
• Returning this.file when it comes to ImageTextureData

With that, the lists that previously accepted the “default” ImageTextureData are now able to accept layers of TextTextureData type as well.
That pretty much sums up the restructuring part so let’s move on to additions/changes on existing parts of the codebase.

… See full entry

Last Friday, Intel Folsom hosted a mapathon with the Missing Maps Project. Estimated attendance was 56 mappers, plus 2 volunteers from the Gold Country Red Cross and 1 volunteer from Intel to answer their questions. The work was done on HOT project 5378 from roughly 2-4pm Pacific time (21:00-23:00 UTC). This was the second such event, and it is anticipated that we will have another one, though the date is not yet known.

The changesets generated can be found here (starting after #71039093).

Edit: it was brought to my attention that one participant did not sign the photo release. I will post an edited version when I have permission to do so.

Just a quick note to pass on some words of thanks that we’ve received at the DWG:

It’s from someone who says that they’ve been using OpenStreetMap for a few years, and they have noticed who it has improved. It goes on to say that before “I was often using google maps just after trying on openstreetmap because I didn’t know the exact address of the location. Thank you so much for this good work.”

So everyone who’s been adding address location and other data, please consider yourself thanked!

Best Regards,

Andy (SomeoneElse) on behalf of the Data Working Group.

KHMER LIMITED ADVISORY

I’m a newbie in mapping.

Very interesting experience and looking forward to making a difference in the world. As I am still learning if you feel to give me some hints I will appreciate. I’m saving my tasks, but I don’t see it on my profile, is it normal?

Micro mapping brings a lot of fun. After hours and hours tracing roads and analysing surveys for shops and services, one can relax about by micro-mapping. How can we do it? - micro Mapping can be done by beautifying the maps. This includes adding more “colours” into the maps, by enriching it with nature. - add more parks, nature reserves, rivers and trees into it. - Be creative: add more types of items (as many of possible), and arrange them in the same way as they look like in reality. For example, when drawing a park, make sure lawns and trees are visible. For footpaths, instead of drawing a red-dotted line (highway=footway), draw each of them as highway=pedestrian with area=yes. - Use relations to show items that lie within other items.

In the sample below, I have mapped the park areas surrounding the statue of President Ho Chi Minh in Nguyen Hue Boulevard, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. This park has been re-designed in 2015 after the establishment of the Nguyen Hue Square.

Link: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/10.77590/106.70192

… See full entry

Servus, Bayern! After releasing robosat v1.2 I trained it on 80cm aerial imagery to predict all buildings in Bavaria. tl;dr - here you can find the checkpoint ready to use.

Robosat is an open source end-to-end pipeline for feature extraction from aerial and satellite imagery seamlessly integrating with OpenStreetMap for automated dataset creation.

I downloaded the CC-BY-3.0 80cm aerial imagery from 2018 for Bavaria the Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung provides. I then used the open source robosat v1.2 release to automatically create a training and validation dataset and trained it on my gpu rig. Within days we already get reasonable results without manual work involved.

For detailed instructions on how to create a dataset and run the robosat pipeline see my previous diary where I explain the process on drone imagery.

Here is a heatmap of all the z17 tiles in Bavaria where there are buildings

And here are two examples for the segmentation probabilities I get

… See full entry

A rare thing happened with some shop mapping I was doing just now. I was adding “HOM Concept” from my Mapillary view out of a bus window. I looked up the website of the shop …and look! OpenStreetMap!

Actually it might be the first time I’ve ever come across a contact page for a small London shop (just a few branches) as I was mapping, and found an OpenStreetMap map.

I have noticed OSM maps popping up around the web more and more lately. That’s something I’ve always pondered ways of encouraging, dreaming up quite a few different angles on the challenge of attracting web developers to use OpenStreetMap, but I guess it’s predictable that the thing which really shifts them off google maps is google maps themselves, as they start getting more strict with charging for high traffic.

… See full entry