Missing Map project, Leaderboard & OSMfight

Date: 10th April 2020

Moderator: Chukwu, Kingsley Chika

Trainer: Chukwudubem

Organiser : Victor N Sunday

Venue:https://us04web.zoom.us/j/4602723253

Meeting ID: 460 272 3253.

Mapping with HOT Task Manager

On Mon 6th April 2020

Time :3pm

Organiser: Victor N Sunday

Trainer: Chukwu, Kingsley Chika

Moderator: Ezeugwu Victor

Venue :https://us04web.zoom.us/j/4602723253

Meeting ID: 460 272 3253.

After wondering about recent trends in the number of new user accounts being used, I decided to see what the longer term history of new account creation was.

I have spilt the accounts into two groups:

1. Single day accounts (red): accounts that have only been used on one day.
2. Multi day accounts (blue): accounts that have been used on two or more days.

A seven day moving average has been applied because there is a weekly cycle to account creation.

The up tick in single day account use is probably due to the fact that the users haven’t had time yet to come back for their second day.

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, even though Turkmenistan has reported no cases, I spent part of this week checking the tags of hospitals and clinics in that country to make sure anyone using OSM data could find the nearest hospital or clinic, if it is in the OSM database. Overpass Turbo came in very handy for this exercise.

After completing that task, I started tinkering with Overpass Turbo and pulled up the hotels in Turkmenistan. In Mary I discovered four different locations had been entered in the OSM database for the Soviet-era Sanjar Hotel. Only one could be correct. Fortunately I found a ground-level photo of both the hotel and its associated cafe among the Mapillary images I had collected in years past, and so was able to identify the correct buildings for hotel and cafe, and delete incorrect tags from the others (one of them is the Mary province tax office–hardly a good place to spend the night).

While visiting my hometown in June 2019, I made a day trip to nearby Głuchołazy, to register the routes and stops of the local buses.

I got to do the edits first in April 2020, though. Meanwhile, some things changed in Głuchołazy: another company overtook the local transit, some new lines appeared and the existing lines’ numbers changed. When editing, I used the most current timetables from the town’s website.

I only worked out those lines, for which I knew where the bus stops are: either from my own data from last trip, or already entered by other contributors, or from aerial photos and my best guesswork (with a fixme when in doubt). Unfortunately, local transit carriers don’t care much about publishing the coordinates of their bus stops; we can be happy if there’s any form of timetable on the web. Who cares bou’ tourists, duh…? All de village’s dudes already know, where da damn bus stops. We, the OpenStreetMap contributors, can add this information and help some travellers from getting lost.

By comparing the official timetables and my GPS traces, I spotted a mistake. During the trip with line number 6, the bus took a slightly different route than the official timetable would suggest. Therefore, this line’s relation in OpenStreetMap resembles the facts from first hand, not the official info.

Tagging convention

When mapping the bus stops, I assumed the simplified approach to PTv2. Briefly:

• The position at which the passenger boards (flag, platform) gets mapped as public_transport=platform, highway=bus_stop with name and details known. On bus stations with multiple numbered platforms, the number goes in local_ref.
• Not mapping public_transport=stop_position at all.
• Avoiding the mapping of stop_area relation; both in ÖPNVKarte as well as in Transport Map, same-named stops in close proximity are automatically grouped.

… See full entry

Was it only yesterday that I finished NG school updates, then started working through schools within SG postcodes? For some reason I hit a couple of complex multi-site schools straight away, each of which gave mighty problems. The most recent was the fabulous Heath Mount School (incongruously the relation looks like a fish swimming to the left). My grandkids were due to attend that school until parental divorce intervened.

I find that documenting stuff helps to cement the lessons learnt, as well as giving me something to refer to if I forget, and hopefully will help other novices as well. So, here are some small techniques to use with JOSM to help get the job done, drawn from very recent experience.

School Layout: Look for an Architect PDF

Heath Mount School: osm.org/relation/11018342

… See full entry

For developers

Mapping scheme should have types of plastic?

For users

openrecyclemap.ru

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.openrecyclemap

https://tasks.hotosm.org/user/Smart%20D https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?Smart%20D osm.wiki/User:Smart_D https://help.openstreetmap.org/users/17430/smart-d

Following a published article months ago, French OpenStreetMap community reached a step in the beginning of 2020 regarding cartography of highest voltage levels, 400kV and 225kV, power networks.

Contributors had been busy, providing valuable and detailed data for years since 2008 in many places in France. This now enables to assemble this knowledge to provide an elaborated digital twin of French power transmission network including routing capacities to get paths followed by electricity over networks. It is hard to reflect years along people engagement in a single article, but all of this has been a singular human collaboration for which we should be thankful.

… See full entry

8287 - Missing Maps - Malawi- ChitipaNW

The Missing Maps project aims to map the most vulnerable places in the world (affected by humanitarian crises: disease epidemics, conflict, natural disasters, poverty, environmental crises). Building on HOT’s disaster preparedness projects, the Missing Maps tasks facilitate pre-emptive mapping of priority countries to better facilitate disaster response, medical activities and resource allocation when crises occur.

Spent 2 hours mapping buildings.

Background

Shortly after the new year began, the OSM Foundation chair started contacting members of the OSM community writ large to collect information on the state of the community and project, and to assess attitudes toward the Board’s work. Most conversations were confidential in order to ensure that respondents would speak openly, frankly, and honestly (and it is the chair’s sense that virtually all of them did, and in fact some of them were quite brutally frank about the Board’s perceived shortcomings). Thus, this report will not detail “who said what”. It will, rather, tend more to aggregate viewpoints expressed during the conversations, with illustrative but unattributed quotes.

The chair began by polling members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation, and expanded to members of the Advisory Board, including both corporate members and local chapters. The latter tended to be conference calls with multiple members of those chapters. These calls generated recommendations that the chair talk to pillars of the OSM community or representative members of a tribe (e.g., software developers), so the chair reached out to those individuals as well. Another result was outreach to local communities not formally affiliated with the OSMF, and those conversations proved to be among the most fruitful. The chair held one conversation with a local community and two with corporate representatives face to face due to the happy coincidences of parties being in the same geographic location.

This effort is not over. If anything, the conversations revealed a desire for better communication between the Board and the community’s various tribes (including working groups), which can only be satiated by making the effort to reach out, to schedule calls, then just to call. Geographic coverage of the current outreach effort remains a work in progress; to date the chair has made no calls to Latin America, for example.

The Top Lines

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I’m not sure why the OSC plugin for JOSM is really buggy on my machine (Xubuntu 18.04.4 LTS) so I browsed its website instead.

But sometimes the website itself dragged Firefox to crawl and once in a while, freezes the whole system (but I was able to get back to editing without losing data). Mapillary never did something like this.

So I disabled the hardware acceleration on Firefox. Looks like it’s working well so far.

Today was the first public OSMF board meeting with video and i thought i’d share a few observations on it.

As background - i had made some general comments on what things would deserve consideration regarding the form of board meetings as well as some more specific concerns regarding the form of hosting for the communication platform. It seems there were some difficulties in understanding that for the board due to differences in the timeframe we looked at the matter on - my considerations were largely long term (read: several years) while the board members seemed to look at it more short term in terms of the next few months.

Anyway - here i am going to share my practical observations, which is probably more strait away to understand.

The newly introduced platform seems to work fairly well - i have not measured the bandwidth requirements so i can’t really tell about that quantitatively but obviously having videos from seven participants being available to you is going to be quite demanding.

As a website running on the web browser this platform has the advantage of not requiring you to install a specific software. OTOH the usability on devices with small screens, in particular phones, is probably severely limited. I also could not find a way to select the microphone to use from within the app. If anyone knows how this can be done please let me know. But obviously this is a minor issue.

If i compare it in terms of audio quality with Mumble i would say it was somewhat worse - but not bad. This assessment is slightly difficult because the use of a video based system has led all participants to set up in a room with a desktop computer or laptop and most with a headset while on Mumble many participants often used a mobile phone. This has a positive effect on the audio quality but that is independent of the platform of course.

… See full entry

I saw that an user edit these islands to what China call it (Xisha Islands) . But this arena are a disputed sea (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracel_Islands and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands for detail). Please some mark this as disputed area.

Why am doing this? Because if I am not, @SomeoneElse_Revert will keep revert this area.

I’m embarking on a significant local neighborhood, to combat my condition of being quarantined to home during the Covid-19 epidemic. My goal is to map my local neighborhood in significant detail.

My approach is to trace all buildings onto a given block, then creat a field paper for said block, then walk and collect all address, then input all those addresses. Blocks will be finished when all houses have addresses, and all exterior sidewalks are added.

If you would like to join me in mapping adventures, reach out! It’s an amazing time to work on the map!

Lately I’ve been on this kick with bicycle riding through neighborhoods, getting GPX traces and documenting the footpaths through neighborhoods.

I also have been messing with Mappillary and OpenStreetCams on my bicycle rides to see how I might use them in a larger way.

Of course I as I virtually wander through neighborhoods documenting their footpaths, I stumble on playground and other amenities and document those along the way.

It’s really nice when I have an area complete and I’m riding through on my bicycle using OSMAND+ application on my phone and get to see and navigate some of my work.

Independent country

Journey and Beyond

OpenStreetMap

What Wikipedia is for open knowleadge is OpenStreetMap (OSM) for open map (spatial) data. Through the hands of thousand and billions the project aims to create a detailled map of the world. Every single person can help to make sustainable improvements to his or her favourite navigation system or map provider if they use OSM as a source. OSM enables person just like you and me to make a difference, without relaying on government and companies. OSM lives the Community Spirit. Your changes are visible to our database thousand and billions relay on in just some seconds. This allows you to see your changes alive directly after upload.

Problems

The project OpenStreetMap has serious problems like

• some mappers not listening to data customers or ignoring their opinion directly,

• missing proper communication/exchange between stakeholders (mappers, developers, organisations, companies, initiatives, (governments) ),

• negative energy against companies working on the OSM project,

• non-orthogonal tagging,

• use of two or more tags for the same purpose,

• lack of proper tagging documentation (some really good experienced mappers and good writers at the same time do it right),

• mappers actually do not consult others before creating a new key/tag and not documenting it properly (e.g. Key:diaper . We still suffer from the damage the key diaper imposed)

• lack of appearance in various Mainstream presses

Strengths

The project OpenStreetMap has also serious strengths like

… See full entry

After a long period of work, i’ve concluded the mapping of Pecetto Torinese, a small village in the Turin hills. Before my work, the village it almost didn’t exist: there were only the streets, the plazas, the church and some building near it.

I mapped:

• The urban area
• All the buildings
• The sidewalks and pedestrian routes
• The schools and the sports center
• The parking lots and a lot other details

Now, this is the results, i’m pretty proud of it:

March 24: School Work starts
April 2: School Work update

Across the last 23 days of this Covid-19 Lockdown I’ve made 526 changesets, almost all updating schools & colleges in the NG UK-postcode area. I’ve been working my way down the osm.mathmos.net website page for NG from top to bottom, and am about ⅔ of the way down. The last entries added were 11 campuses for Nottingham College. This diary entry is an attempt to synthesise the intelligence gathered so far.

The definitive list of schools, etc is maintained by the UK government & published at School Information Service. Each school is given a unique URN. The OSM reference to relate to this is ref:edubase=URN-Number.

Where you see the word “School” below it also refers inter-changeably to “Colleges” or “Universities”.

1. Use a Roundabout to Align the Imagery

We have a number of different imagery available to use, but all of them both need to be aligned to the ground truth & every time the map location is changed each may need to be re-aligned. The simplest & best way that I have found to do this is to zoom in on a mini-roundabout, and to align the Offset to that roundabout.

The overview is like this:
Satellite view & GPS coordinates need to be aligned to each other based on a vast array of factors: eg angle of view, ground height above sea-level, GPS coordinate system, etc.. It is made more difficult because individual tiles may come from a large range of dates and/or satellites. It would also be wonderful if all of that had been pre-processed between the native image & production of tile-to-view, but we are beggars & not the paymasters & are lucky to have any imagery to use at all. Fortunately, we Brits are obsessed with roundabouts and there is always one close to where we are mapping. Further, OS street-mapping from the government has been imported for all Britain.

Here is the process step-by-step:-

… See full entry