StreetComplete is an application allowing to contribute to OSM by answering simple question. It makes possible to contribute without learning about tagging schemes and without learning how to handle interface of more general editor like JOSM, iD or Vespucci.

I contributed to StreetComplete in past. Recently I received a grant that will allow me to spend more time on improving it.

Grant is funded by a NLnet as part of NGI Zero grants. StretComplete grant is mentioned by NLnet at https://nlnet.nl/thema/NGIZeroDiscovery.html and https://nlnet.nl/project/StreetComplete/ pages. It will allow me to spend far more time on improving StreetComplete.

I will participate in project as usual, sending pull requests that will be reviewed and accepted (or rejected) by StreetComplete author, Tobias Zwick.

Note that I selected topics of work to be done (based mostly on open issues on the bug tracker) and that Tobias who will review pull requests remains completely independent - I am sole beneficiary of the grant.

Total grant was 5000 euro.

Building the map up

Thinking about how data is contributed to OSM, an interesting problem is how the detail and level of information is increased over time. Some things are quite easy to refine, but others are definitely not.

Adding basic data

This appears to be straight forward. OSM makes it easy to add some data. Things like tracing aerial imagery to add roads, residential land use, parks. It’s rough data quality, but is not a problem, as to put assumed detail in would not be so helpful.. In the UK, it is increasingly rare to have a totally blank canvas to start with. It feels like most of the coarsest data of roads and villages have been mapped.

Improving data

Once new data sets are available, like street level imagery, further granular detail can be added. The ability to refine the coarsely entered data varies a lot, depending on what it is. A building being determined as a place of worship, or simply a detached house is easily done. change the tag, draw the outline or adjust the bounds if needed. Adding an address.

You can do this on one building on a street and it is an improvement, even if you haven’t done the rest of the street.

Some cases where it falls down

A few examples I’ve seen through my own experience or via talk-gb is where useful data could be added, but unless it is entered to a high level of detail throughout the vicinity, and in its entirety, instead of enriching the map, it can hinder its use.

Sidewalks and pavements

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Edit: Responses to forum questions are following my statement

Hello HOT members,

Thanks very much for taking the time to click through, read, and consider my candidate statement for a position on the HOT Board of Directors.

My name is Rob Baker and I’m currently the Director of Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, located at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, USA. Prior to joining the team here, I was located in Washington, DC for seven years where I worked as Lead Technologist for USAID’s Global Development Lab; the World Bank’s Innovation Lab, where I ran a team on open data; a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, where my team and I installed the agency’s first CDO and created open data policy; and was COO of Ushahidi, having started with them as a volunteer in 2010 following the Haiti earthquake.

It was in 2010 when I got involved with OSM and when HOT launched. I contributed to mapping parties in Haiti and in Indonesia, working to help train local communities on not only the practice but the value of being seen on the map. In the years since, I was proud to represent HOT at several public events and continue to champion everything from the old Field Papers to Missing Maps.

I hope that I can use my diverse, humanitarian experience to be an active advocate for HOT. My background as a technologist and coder means I understand and, more importantly, help translate technical processes, especially for non-technical audiences. I understand what it’s like working with larger institutions and bureaucracies, what constraints they have and how to navigate those policies. And my entire career is in non-profits and development work, so how our iNGO, governmental ministries, and CSOs operate in these contexts. While I have not been able to directly contribute to HOT for some time, I know this is a meaningful way I can be more involved.

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I had the idea it would be easy to do a few quick fixes to some regional shortcomings of OpenStreetMap. It turned out that I was totally wrong. Quick is a term anyone new to OSM should erase from his vocabulary, if my experiences are something like typical. It was frustrating from the very start and it did not change the few times I tried to contribute to the project.

I do not think that OSM can reach really many users if it stays like this. It is just not possible to do a few quick additions to the maps without spending a lot of time to find out how to do even the simplest changes. It should be possible, for example, to intuitively mark a road as closed when road works pop up. There would have to be buttons for frequent changes like closing a road due to road works. Would operating the maps, putting in changes, would be an intuitive task, I am sure many more would contribute and there would be much less missing in the maps and the map would be more up to date.

Sorry for the negative comment to a project I think is basically a good project. But I really think there should be changes to make it a lot easier for newbies to contribute. I am not ready to put in that much time just to figure out how to do things.

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.

☑️ 🚶

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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.

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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

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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)).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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