OpenStreetMap
Rachel diaz
Diary Entries in English
Recent diary entries
OpenStreetMap contains more than 7500 issues now. An information about 3000 issues (and 4585 reports) is shown here.
Issues and reports
The OpenStreetMap users send the reports and OSM website creates the issues. One issue may contain several reports. When a user sends a report, OSM website may create a new issue (if so issue does not exist yet) or reopen an old issue (if so issue exists already).
The issue #1 was created on 2018-06-16. The issue #3000 was created on 2019-04-27. So an average speed is 3000/316 = 9.5 (issues/day) and 4585/316 = 14.5 reports/day.
Pretty good easy to use
Came across Osmand GPS tool recently, and I have to say, I’m very impressed with the tools available for contributing to the maps. I’m looking forward to adding a lot of detail that Google Maps just doesn’t let me fix up.
Posted by Akrimullah on 27 February 2020 in English.
Mapping the fitness-related object that common nowadays
I wanna share how I tag an object on the ground and transfer the information to OSM. Look at the picture below.
CREDIT: THE GREAT OUTDOOR GYM COMPANY
link at here
how it mapped? : 1. First: I’ll draw a polygon that represents the outdoor gym area 2. Figuring out the appropriate tag for this area. In my opinion, the polygon I have drawn should contain the tags at least: leisure = fitness_station, sport = gymnastic.
Any other suggestions for additional tags?
Last week I visited Baku for only the second time, and managed to see the new seaport at Alat. The Mapillary images I collected are now on line so perhaps I can update the map at some point.
Mapping these days is taking a back seat to OSM Foundation business, unfortunately. Chairing the OSM Foundation board has turned into at least a half-time job. In the last two months I have held 32 conference calls with various OSM stakeholders: mappers, users of data, corporate members of the Foundation, old-timers, software developers, and local communities in ranging from Ireland to Japan and the Philippines. That effort will continue as I reach out to members of the OSM community and hear what advice they have, what they perceive as OSM’s needs, and their thoughts on what the board should be doing to support OSM. I am boiling down everything and will present some preliminary assessments–my personal take on what it all means, not the board’s–at SOTM Baltics on March 6.
Traveled down to the Willows of Santiago yesterday to do some business and while I was there I took pictures of the park maps. I verified several street signs against the map and it was accurate. There was actually a second park map inside the office building as well. The street signs were not county supplied and more than likely put up by the park. Either way it was a nice little community and the people there were friendly.
In brief: uMap is a webapp that allows you to create a map with OSM layers, add markers/polygons, display OSM objects from Overpass queries, … Then you can embed your map in your site.
Find more info and the differents servers in the wiki.
How do I become a “noob uMap contributor”
Everything began during the OSM-fr administration board of february 15-16 2020 (brief in french here). During this event OSM-fr board members talked about many stuff including uMap and the fact that they were looking for new contributors to its code. In the meantime, I started several months ago to create some maps in uMap: for public bookcases and other stuffs.
tomorrow training
We’re back with some news about OSMCha. In a few days we are moving the OSMCha application to a new domain: osmcha.org.
If you’re only a user of OSMCha, you don’t need to worry about it. osmcha.mapbox.com will redirect your requests to this new domain for the next few months. In case you have one OSMCha RSS feed subscribed on a feed reader, probably you’ll need to change the URL there.
For API users, you need to take action and update the OSMCha URL on applications to avoid errors due to redirection. We are planning to do the change this week. If you need more time to apply the changes in your application, please let us know.
See you on https://osmcha.org in a few days!
Update on February, 28th:
- We just activated https://osmcha.org, check it out!
Each imagery offset is different, and over time a patchwork of different referencing systems emerges… one big disaster, worse than “GCJ-02” (which is at least “smooth and not noticeable”.) Happens even with just one person editing. You’ll notice it when you finally join village A to village B. Editors of village A have been pulling the imagery downwards to match what they have already mapped. And editors of village B have been pulling the imagery upwards…
I hope one day, after offsets are finally no longer present in imagery, Artificial Intelligence (?) will somehow fix the mess.
Maybe
SotM Africa 2019, held in Ivory Coast was my first ever SotM Africa conference attended. The conference lasted for three days from 21st November, 2019 to 23rd November, 2019. My journey started with a road trip that took ten hours by bus from Cape Coast in Ghana through to VITIB in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast. The journey although long, was fun and an exciting adventure.
Arriving there, I was quick to realize the importance of being a bilingual speaker which unfortunately I am not. With my little understanding, I could pick up little words in exchanging pleasantries to make an introduction and the word ‘mange’ when it came to food.
The first day of the conference which was held in conjunction with Understanding Risk Africa in Abidjan was a massive way to kick start the conference with more than 200 participants. This being that it provided a view into Africa’s use of OSM to understand how resilience is being built and the massive contributions being made in OSM in not just Africa but the world as a whole. A highlight of the first day for me would be the showcasing of the contributions of OSM contributors through a simulation video for a number of years. This made me happy because it showed that no matter how little the contributions are into OSM, they are counted significant.
I had my presentation on the first day, under the gender and local empowerment session. It provided me with the opportunity to share how through YouthMappers, perspective was being added to mapping in OSM as well as learn about the various ways people were using OSM for local empowerment across Africa. The session ended with a much needed discussion on how to address the issue of inclusion of diversity, what worked and what did not work.
A quick but useful tip I found hidden in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwJnZQFi_C8
At around 24:00, the speaker notes the use of opacity: using multiple layers, and lowering the opacity of the front/uppermost layer to verify map alterations across different data sets (“data sets” being the layers themselves i.e. Bing, Esri, Maxar etc.). A tip I’ve already had good success with. I find lowering the opacity to around 70% works nicely.
8012 - Missing Maps: Nizi region, Democratic Republic of Congo (2)
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MSF is assisting in an Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) campaign in the Nizi region in Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During this campaign insecticides will be applied on the inside of dwellings where malaria infected mosquitos rest. As a result the number of mosquitos will go down, which prevents the transition of Malaria.
Spent 2 hours editing sectors and mapping buildings.
Reminding you that there is a big conference coming up: the State of the Map Baltics 2020 in Riga, Latvia. How big? Well, half a thousand attendees have already registered. It’s time for you to buy a flight and meet us and other GIS enthusiasts and professionals on 6th of March:
https://2020.sotm-baltics.org/
Why so big? Well, it’s just a part of a bigger conference: Baltic GIT is not related to version control systems, but to geospatial technologies. Think of it as a partly local FOSS4G, only with less focus on open source. And it’s free!
We’ve got Allan Mustard of OSMF, Stefan Gustafsson of ESA, Tomas Straupis, Kirill Bondarenko, Danil Kirsanov, Evgen Bodunov, Rihards Olups and dozens of other speakers and OSM members. Do visit, and let’s enjoy Riga together!
Every object in the OSM database has coordinates (in degrees in the WGS84 projection/EPSG:4326), creation date, author and a description.
The imagery usually has offset issues. The problem is that imagery usually isn’t correctly placed with respect to the coord system. The iD editor has a tool for temporarily aligning the imagery with polygons and whatnot. It’s found at the bottom of the imagery dialog.
Posted by John O'Hanley on 22 February 2020 in English.
Last updated on 24 February 2020.
The Province has excellent resources online.
PEI National Road Network PEINRN Up to date, includes all the data you’d ever need.
Place names in Canada No type info, or population info! No indication of the precision of the lat/long. English and French.
Feature names in Canada. Not bad. 1869 items for PEI. Water and towns. Dowside: no population number, BUT it has categories that can do the same thing: locality, community, town, city.
Lakes and rivers- National Hydro Network - NHN - GeoBase Series
Natural Earth - motherlode of global mapping data. Seems to be of high quality. 1:10000 is their most-detailed recommended scale.
Global place names with pop. About 7300 places. Small towns missing.
Global elevation data - the free versions of this data are usually based on data from NASA called SRTM. You can download it here. That original data set has holes, that can be filled by interpolating. The CGIAR data set interpolates. More info here. The resolution comes in 2 flavours, 90m and 30m. Here’s an example of it being used for shading. It’s certainly fine for indicating general elevation - example. Reference for mapnik.
It’s likely best to use transparency, and the alpha-channel, to render the hillshading.
Global elevation shading, $1000US
Also see OpenDEM.
Global Bathymetry - GEBCO may be low res, hard to say. Also see OpenDEM.
Bathymetry of the Gulf of St. Lawrence?
Note that large municipalities (including Charlottetown) handle their own civic addressing.There’s location data for each address. The exact point seems to line up with the driveway of a house, not the centroid of the house. This makes sense, for access by emergency services. The nominal precision is about 1 metre. Example:
91 PRINCE CHARLES DR CHARLOTTETOWN QUN 46.23739 -63.14737
Finally submitted a first edit to OSM - a nordic skiing track that is groomed by scooter. (Uværsløypa (775423923)). The track is drawn based on GPS output from in field survey.
Interesting point is that neither Uværsløypa, nor the longer loop around it shows up in OSM when zooming to this area, unless I go in edit mode - then they both show up.
Question: part of the larger loop around Uværsløypa is a a path in summer. Can additional attributes be added to a section of the nordic track to show summer use?
After I validate a square in HOTOSM Tasking Manager, I label what imagery I validated the square against (e.g. Bing, Esri, Maxar). I got this idea after seeing mappers comment with which imagery they mapped their buildings, roads etc.
The problem arises when the imagery is validated against a different imagery that was used to map the area. For example, I regularly validate against Bing Aerial Imagery, but sometimes users have noted that they used Maxar Premium Imagery. It would make sense for me to instead validate using the same imagery - in this case Maxar - but when loading the imagery in JOSM I get the following message:
Error downloading tiles: INVALID CONNECT ID: apiKey
There are also other problems. Bing has the highest resolution imagery, the main reason it is my preferred imagery to validate against. Esri has lower resolution, and is also inconsistent with Bing, in large part due to them having taken the pictures at different times/dates in history. Which poses another question: which imagery is the most up-to-date? I’ve assumed Bing, but that assumption is without reason.