Whilst doing my current routine of validating mapped areas, I came across what is potentially a significant time save. The mapper(s) had drawn an area around a large group of houses and labelled it as a “residential area”, instead of what I and I imagine many others currently do of mapping individual buildings.

This seems like a humongous time save in areas where the details of buildings (e.g. their name) are unknown. But I do have a feeling that ultimately one would want to map each building, as it would be helpful to know where the nearest hospital is, for example, rather than having to scour the area in an emergency.

A compromise could be to map unknown areas with these all-encompassing residential area squares, whilst filling in individual details for known buildings. I know that busy areas such as London and New York are already mapped out in great detail, so I can only assume that the time save I am proposing would just be the first step in mapping an area. If the idea is acceptable, I would then assume the idea would be used in the initial mapping stage, and that validators would fill in the details. That is, unless there is another step after the validation stage that I am unaware of (I am currently only an intermediate mapper and cannot validate all maps). I could also see the details being filled in during further iterations of the mapping process, such as when extra data on an area is gathered.

Thanks to Engin Gem, OpenStreetBrowser has a new translation (it was started today, so it’s still very basic): Turkish! Thanks a lot :-)

If you want to create or improve a translation, you can do so on OpenStreetBrowser Weblate.

Check the translation statistics.

I created 3 bookmarklets to load relations from WT and to load a relation from osm.org in WT

See osm.wiki/Waymarked_trails

I created these when I got tired of copy pasting the numbers over and over. I hope they will be of use to you.

Happy mapping of relations!

PS: I just updated this bookmarklet to support jumping from Google Maps: osm.wiki/Bookmarklet_JumpToOsm

Hi! 😃

Yesterday I worked on hiking routes in Sweden. I wonder how many there are? (“type:relation and route=hiking in sweden” gave me 70 mb of data which is a lot, but actually it would be more useful to measure how many kms of routes there are in comparison to say the area of the country)

I use JOSM and would like to praise and recommend the plugin relationtoolbox. It makes working with relations so much easier.

I probably should make a video about it if nobody beats me to it.

If you want to help you are very welcome, see osm.wiki/WikiProject_Sweden/Hiking_trails

I estimate that it will take me years to map, update and split up in parts as I keep finding missing routes, routes with no source, etc. 😅

My review of “The Red Atlas” has been posted online by Cartographic Perspectives. You may find it here: https://cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1589/1815

STATE OF THE MAP AFRICA CONFERENCE 2019 IVORY COAST MY EXPERIENCE The revolution of open data in Africa has come at the right time when most of the counties are at the pick of development and data is one of the tools that is helping in decision making and influencing the government and other organizations that use data in their activities. Data is been used in many ways in Africa some of the most prominent areas were data is been is in the area of health environment such as climate change, urban planning, etc.

If Africa has to develop there is a need to make sure that the ordinary people take a keen interest in Making extraordinary things. One of the extraordinary communities of people that are making a change in Africa is the OSM community. The data science in Africa has come at the right time because Africa is rapidly growing which means there must be people to understand what is happing and plan for the future and try by all means to overcome the challenges that are coming with the rapid growth of the African content.

… See full entry

On 21/12/2019 we had meeting with UniqueMappersTeam Uyo and other leaders of UniqueMappers across Nigeria.

Meeting time :9:30pm Meeting ID 755 993 243 Zoom

MEETING TOPICS

1.Introduction of attendees 2.Introduction of Leader of UniqueMappersTeam Uyo Mr Victor 3.OSM Community Structure 4.UniqueMappers-Uyo 5.Annuual OSMites Diary Record/Reports 6.Mappy Chrismas and UniqueMappers 2020 7.AOB

ATTENDANCE

*Victor N Sunday- Convener- leader UniqueMappers Nigeria *Knigsely Chukwu-LMTEnugu *Victor Ezeugwu- UniqueMappers Kogi *Victor -UniqueMappers Uyo *etc

The End with more passion to reach the un-reached across the country from 2020

For the last 4 days of mapping:

Day 9: I did some photo mapping based on Imagery I captured in December

Day 10: Went out surveying and checking out some notes.

Day 11: Used updated ESRI layer to add some buidlings and roads that’s just been build

Day 12: Continued from Day 11, added solar, gardens, parking, green spaces and trees

I finally figured out how to filter for thingies within, say, the province of Groningen, and to load everything into JOSM:
(this example extracts everything with operator starting in Biblionet; turns out that’s the public libraries operated by Biblionet Groningen)

[out:xml][timeout:90]; 
//{{geocodeArea:Netherlands}}->.searchArea;  // search within entity called Groningen (city) 
area[admin_level=4]["name"="Groningen"][boundary=administrative]->.searchArea; // specify: within province (admin_level=4) 
( 
  node[operator ~ '^Biblionet'](area.searchArea); 
); 
out meta;

Unclassified and residential highways within a place, say Ezinge, plus recursions up and down (partly from this link ):
(One lesson I learned the hard way: it’s dangerous to merge and/or split ways in that type of sparse editing. Do make sure to “download parent ways / relations” in JOSM, and still be careful! It’s very easy to break relations such as bus lines / routes)

[out:xml][timeout:90];
{{geocodeArea:Ezinge}}->.searchArea;  
(
  way[highway~"unclassified||residential"](area.searchArea);
  >;
);
(._;rel(bn););
(._;rel(bw););
(._;rel(br););
out meta;

Equivalently, but specifying that Ezinge is a ‘woonplaats’ rather than any random entity:

[out:xml][timeout:90];
area[admin_level=10]["name"="Ezinge"][boundary=administrative]->.searchArea; 
(
  way[highway~"unclassified||residential"](area.searchArea);
  >;
);
(._;rel(bn););
(._;rel(bw););
(._;rel(br););
out meta;

Useful (for me) admin levels within (ref):

… See full entry

I recently have been mapping the Chàm islands in Quảng Nam province, Việt Nam. The main island and some other ones (Hòn Lá; Hòn Cô; Hòn Cụ) - are now completely detailed, as there should now be no area left unmapped on them.

I also have been mapping in various places on the mainland, many roads are still missing. I would like to use data emitted by MapWithAi but their Fork of the iD editor is heavyweight (I prefer Josm) and I cannot easily use it, also because wiyh it every changeset has a limit of 50 ways. I am looking to find a way around this problem somehow.

For a while i have been working in hotosm ,project #4908 in Japan.Last July, 2018 heavy rain,floods and landslides happened in South West area of Japan.The people of the affected area had to face huge destruction. Now Japan Red Cross is working in this affected area Kurashiki/Sojya,Okayama.They ask support from others.They demand only building data. So if you have time,you can support them and can take part in humanitarian activities.

[hotosm(https://tasks.hotosm.org/project/4908#bottom)]

I am especially not good at dealing with image offsets.

My challenge is finding a close-enough to truth for certain locations. In absence of proper markers, what I will be using for reference consists now of the following:

1. The roundabout.
2. The lanes of the Trans-Canada highway as they meet Roberts.

For Bing imagery, this gives me an offset of 1.61, 1.53

Los Angeles

I’m documenting some seasonal 12 days of mapping on twitter

Alternatively, the thread can be viewed here on Thread Reader App

Another 4 days to go, probably on a new thread.

Sveiki,

Kāds var ieteikt kā labāk pievienot uzņēmumu kartē? Vēlos pievienot datu centru

Looking back to 2019,I have the following bits of contributions and moments for my diary record in favour of OpenStreetMap Community and sustainability.

1 . Initiated and hosted series of planing meetings to activate community participation ,growth and expansion of OpenStreetMap Community in Nigeria ,especially,in January 2019.

2 . Contributed and also advocated for HOT Microgrant 2019 donations

3 . Applied for HOT Microgrant 2019 to drive Local community projects in Nigeria but luck was not on our side

4 . Participated in Regional Meetings for OSM Africa Coordination ,especially,when,time permits

5 . In April ,I made sure my local community hosted International Women Day (IWD)2019 to drive gender equality in mapping community and geospatial women empowerment.This also was used to campaign for LetGirlsMap program. For me ,this event has come to stay after succesully hosting it same period in 2018. For 2019 IWD ,the event was tagged :Geospatial Technology the Solution for Women Transformation:Balance for better.

6 . From July to August ,facilitated Mapathon training for Local UniqueMappers Communities at Abia State,Imo State ,Enugu State and Anambra State respectively in Nigeria

7 . Started up UniqueMappers Awka at Nmandi Azikiwe University Awka with the help of Prof.Ifeanyi Enete who mobilzed compus community members comprising of students and staff

8 . Started up UniqueMappers Yola credits to Nnadozie Onyeukwu (State Coordinator) and Saliha who worked very hard to kick-start activities for this local team of UniqueMappers without me travelling to Adamawa state to coordinate.And todate their whatsaap group is quite lively and with active osmites.

9 . Finally succeeded in getting UniqueMappers registered with the Federal Government of Nigeria as the NGO for OpenStreetMap Nigeria Community.This would help to re-position our OSM community efforts for effective project and stake-holders driven community engagement

… See full entry

What?

There is a place to be mapped. The area is usually too large for one guy. Involving a team of mappers is, therefore, evident. And there is an excellent approach to solving big problems called divide and conquer. Therefore Divide and map. Now. – the damn project.

The goal is to split a large area to squares a human can map. Then, lock a square, work on it, and mark ready for review. Lock again, review the square, and mark as done. The project is here to avoid overwriting work between mappers.

If this sounds familiar, you probably know the HOT’s Tasking Manager. (HOT stands for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.)

Why?

There are issues with the HOT Tasking Manager. Mainly performance issues. Then, slowly forgetting about essential functionality. Unwanted updates as the necessity of email address (I really hate this!). And only one repository for the whole project.

These are technical issues, however. What about community issues? Why Google disk when there is OpenStreetMap wiki? Why Slack where you must be invited and logged to (just!) see the history? Why all these sign-up Google forms to contribute? I will try to guess an answer – because HOT is a company (even non-profit) and does not know how to be an open community.

Before you ask “If you are so smart, why you do not contribute to Tasking Manager?”, I tried 1, 2, 3, 4. However, there is no real discussion about the future of the Tasking Manager. The future is already decided; openness means that you can see the source code and fix bugs. Nothing more.

Who?

Let’s talk about the potential damn community. It starts with mappers. I will split mappers to novices, experts, reviewers (or validators), and mentors. Mappers are the most critical and the largest group, so the tool they use should be efficient, stable, and comfortable.

… See full entry

On the night of October 23, 2019, just close to 10 pm when I was about to go to bed, I received an email notification so I opened it and it read:

Congratulations!

Thank you for submitting your application for the State of the Map Africa2019 in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast. It is our pleasure to inform you that based on the results of the reviews by our scholarship committee team, you have been selected to receive a full scholarship that will…..

I was beaming while I read the mail, I was so happy. I wonder how I managed to sleep that night. It was going to be the first time I left Ghana in so many years, to a place I had fond memories of as a kid and a chance to meet people who share the same interest and are passionate about what they do. You could not blame me for being that happy, could you?

A few days to the conference I booked a bus ticket ahead of my travel from Intercity STC Coaches. Yup! I travelled by road from Accra to Grand Bassam. I was joined by Victor Ezwugu who was coming from Nigeria and we both travelled from Accra to Grand Bassam. I enjoy long journeys but this one got tiring and long for me, maybe I just couldn’t wait to arrive. After about 10 hours we arrived at VITIB (venue for the conference).

… See full entry

Hello All and Happy New Year,

I’d like to present my latest pet project: #NorthernBeachesSolar

Inspired by an UK based project I wanted to do something similar in front of my doorstep.

The wiki page gives some details about tags I’m using as well as three changesets that are part of this project.

I wanted to share this and collect some feedback or comments.

Cheers, Seb

I’ve been scanning Soviet military maps for information relevant to the OSM map of Turkmenistan, coupled with data collected between 2015 and 2019, and among other things have identified yet another numbered highway, the P-28. It connects the A-388 highway south of Yoloten to Tagtabazar and a few villages to the east and southeast, all the way to the Afghanistan border. Bit by bit, the OSM map of Turkmenistan is becoming ever richer.

At some point I intend to do a fulsome correction of Turkmenistan’s borders. The existing ones were largely drawn from CIA maps to get something in place but are not as accurate as the lines on the Soviet military maps. Bear with me, this will be a time-consuming project! But as winter sets in, when it is cold outside and the rain is coming down, doing this will be more attractive than chopping firewood or pruning dead limbs, and I will get to it.