Diary Entries in English

Recent diary entries

I set out to use the rapid.ai interface to quickly bring in building data into openstreetmap and I’ve achieved the goal I sent out for. The greater majority of Anchorage buildings have been added.

Along the way I’ve added trails, schools, HOAs and apartment complexes and more features.

I’ll still add things here and there but I’m going to relax the speed and vigilance I’ve done to add features since I’ve accomplished the goal I set out for.

Posted by krahulreddy on 5 May 2020 in English.

Who am I?

I am Rahul, a Computer Science undergraduate student from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India. I am interested in writing code and solving problems.

My preferred type of vacation is a trek. My college is on the western coast of India. We have a splendid view of the beaches, that’s why I go cycling once a month😅 (sometimes more than that).

Interesting fact: Most of my projects in 2019 included music in some or the other form. In 2020, my ventures have been towards Maps.

How did I come across OSM?

In February, I was at a 36-hour hackathon with a team of 3. Our idea involved maps. It was our first time working with Maps, and we decided to use Google Maps API and started with the app.

We implemented with most of the functionality without facing significant hurdles. When we decided to improve the app and involve a few more features, billing struck us hard. We did not have enough time to set up APIs that required billing. I was searching for alternatives. That’s when I first came across OSM. It was too late at that point to switch, so we ended up not using it.

GSoC’20 Project: Add search suggestions on openstreetmap.org.

The complete project proposal can be found here.

OSM’s main search engine Nominatim can not directly support search suggestions for partially written words. Thus, we aim to set up a database to handle suggestions. Moreover, this database needs to meet the following functional requirements:

  1. It should be derivable from the Nominatim DB.

  2. It should handle various input languages.

  3. It should be regularly updatable.

The following are a few non-functional requirements:

  1. Accurate suggestions.

  2. The Database should be as small as possible.

  3. The service should not be overwhelmed by the requests.

See full entry

Posted by alexkemp on 5 May 2020 in English. Last updated on 12 May 2020.

I’m astonished at the quality of Herts. schools and, so far, all in close proximity to Ware.

St Edmund’s College

This is a 400 acre site for a co-educational, Catholic college originally established in 1568. It was founded on that date in Douai, France, as a seminary to train priests and (later) also a Catholic school for boys. It transferred to the current site in England in 1793 to escape the depredations of the French Revolution. Girls from the adjacent Poles Convent were first admitted into the Sixth Form in 1975, and the College became fully co-educational in 1986.

St Edmund’s uses the founding date to claim their school as “the oldest Catholic School in England”.

I’m hoping to be able to construct a relation of all the site features, as with Haileybury and Imperial Service College, and have left a message on their answerphone. I’ll bring this little missive up to date if they respond.

Ermine Street

I seem to keep mentioning in these diaries schools that are close to Ermine Street.

See full entry

Location: Standon, East Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Posted by alexkemp on 4 May 2020 in English. Last updated on 5 May 2020.

This is now the 5th month since I began mapping schools as something useful to do during this wretched Covid-19 Lockdown period. 1,000s of schools updated with both Address & Contacts tags, and still I’m having problems with the Operator tag (the second item in the Preset).

Shortly after starting the mapping I got (rightly) slapped around the face by someone butt-hurt because I had wrongly mapped a school Operator that he had previously mapped, but he could not tell me the correct operator for that school anymore than I could tell it. Clearly, I should have left it blank rather than guessing. I thought in my innocence that, after some more experience, I would learn to know where to find the school operator. That hasn’t really happened. Hence this Diary entry.

These are the types of schools that I’ve currently come across (below), plus my best estimate of the operator to use. Do not hesitate to pitch in if you believe me to be wrong or know the operator:–

See full entry

I’ve added a new page to the switch2osm guide: “Manually building a tile server (20.04 LTS)”. At the same time, the old “with packages” instructions has been retired from the list as that depended on Ubuntu 14.04, which has now dropped into Extended Maintenance.

Ubuntu 20.04 (“Focal Fossa”) has now been released. There are actually very few changes from the 18.04 version - mostly just updated versions of software (including postgres 12). Following these instructions shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours for small areas - the longest period of the setup is waiting for the shapefiles used by the style to download.

As before, the page is designed to be “the least you need to do” to get a rendering server working to create tiles like the ones that you see at openstreetmap.org. If it still sounds a bit complicated, don’t forget that you can try things out with Docker very quickly - and that should work anywhere that Docker is supported.

Posted by Wylbur on 3 May 2020 in English.

I’m working on mapping our Minneapolis neighborhoods. My approach is to map one neighborhood at a time. I initially started with random edits around my house, but have decided to intensely cover a a specific neighborhood until it is finished.

Here’s my definition of finished:

  • confirm all roads and alleys
  • add all sidewalks
  • add all houses, apartments, garages, and buildings
  • add addresses to all houses, apartments, buildings
  • add businesses, churches and schools

Here’s my editing approach:

  1. Add or adjust all buildings and label them as houses, apartments, garages, etc as best as I can tell
  2. Print out a survey sheet
  3. Walk the survey sheet and collect addresses, business church and school names and a take photos of signs with hours or other details
  4. Add address numbers and other details to the entities

I’m finding that adjusting everything BEFORE taking the survey and entering details really speeds up my process. Changing from data entry to making building adjustments takes more time.

What do you think?

Location: Regina, Nokomis, Minneapolis, Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States

8452 - COVID-19 - Sangarara, Cusco, Peru

HOT is mapping Cusco region in Peru at the request of regional government to support their COVID-19 response efforts. The maps will be used to provide cash transfers to families who are prevented from working by the quarantine and State of Emergency in Peru, and to provide nutrition and sanitation assistance.

Additionally, in parts of Cusco, over 75% of children under 3 years old suffer from anaemia. This means that their brains will not develop as quickly as other children, and once they start going to preschool and later school, they will often be tired, unable to concentrate or to learn effectively. The regions which suffer most from anaemia are usually the most remote, hardest to reach areas, where data available to local authorities and NGOs is minimal and access to health services for women and their children are limited. The Regional Government in Cusco wants to combat this by geo-locating where children under 3 live in order to improve the medical attention that they receive.

Spent 1 hour mapping buildings and roads.

From: 內政部地政司全球資訊網 ll2@land.moi.gov.tw
Subject: 意見信箱-回覆通知
Date: Fri, 01 May 2020 09:43:35 +0800

積丹尼 先生(小姐) 您好:

  您於 109年04月23日 寄給本司的電子郵件,提及 北屯路過界疑點為例, 追查怎麼有差異1事 一事,茲,答覆如下:

  早年為配合國土資訊系統基礎環境建置需求,本司前於88年至92年間將行政區域界線展繪於膠片圖上分送各直轄市、縣(市)政府及鄉(鎮、市、區)公所查對確認,並作為93年至96年間編印各級行政區域圖之基礎圖資。其後為解決部分行政區界不一致問題,本司復於102年起委託國土測繪中心協助辦理行政區域界線清查及釐整更新工作,並完成圖資向量成果產製。

  經查本司95年所出版臺中市北區、北屯區之行政區域圖界線,係當時2區公所查對確認,迄今亦無變動,且與國土測繪圖資服務雲109年3月之鄉鎮市區界線圖層之界線一致。至於您所提門牌為臺中市北區北屯路28-1號之建物,其實際位置卻坐落於臺中市北屯區 行政區域圖內之疑義,宜由臺中市政府查明情況後,並依據相關規定辦理門牌號變更或行政區域調整作業。

以上答復,供您參考,(希望能有助於解決您的問題),您若仍有其他疑問或不明瞭之處,歡迎隨時來電洽詢,感謝您的來信。

案件編號:1090479384181
本案聯絡人員:呂建興
聯絡電話:02-23565279
敬祝 身體健康 萬事如意
內政部地政司 敬啟

Location: Beijing Village, Beitun District, Taichung, 406, Taiwan
Posted by Field Enterprise on 1 May 2020 in English.

I’ve been an editor for many years but I’m not too prolific. I’ve done schools, churchs, streams, and corrections to directionals on roads when they’ve led me astray. Two of my favorite additions are two high schools in the Ceres Unified School district: Ceres High School and Central Valley High School. Another entry that I enjoyed was the significantly revised interchange at SR99 and Pelandale Avenue in Modesto, CA.

Posted by imagico on 1 May 2020 in English.

Discussion on insufficient attribution of OpenStreetMap, in particular by large data users, has been a hot topic in the OSM community for quite some time and the OSMF has not only been fairly slow in taking substantial actions on this (to some extent understandable because of other urgent matters but overall this has been dragging on way too long) - most of their work on that has so far been centered around policy drafts largely influenced and even written by corporate lobbyists of exactly those data users that often fail to provide appropriate attribution.

As an attempt to provide a counterweight to that i have tried to summarize what seem to be the basic expectations of the hobby craft mapper community regarding attribution as they have manifested in discussions over the past few years. It is my hope that this will either help bringing the OSMF back on the ground of the interests and expectations of the hobby craft mapper community that forms the backbone of OpenStreetMap or - in case that fails - provides a starting point for alternative guidance on attribution that is not dominated by short term corporate interests.

The document is also available on the wiki.

Community attribution advice

This document is an attempt to summarize the expectations the OpenStreetMap hobby craft mapper community has for OSM data users regarding the attribution required by the OpenStreetMap license.

In line with the general culture of OpenStreetMap it does not try to provide firm and inflexible corset of step by step instructions how to attribute but instead gives advise on how the community views attribution and allows data users to meet these expectation under their own responsibility.

See full entry

Posted by SimonPoole on 30 April 2020 in English.

Seems as if I never wrote a diary entry on 14.1 that has been available for a couple of months now. The release notes can be found as always on the Vespucci documentation site.

Obviously version 15 is quite far along at this point and major parts of the work have already been completed. In particular the migration to the AndroidX libraries and re-targeting for Android API 29 have been finished and, as a consequence, support for Android versions before 4.0 has now been completely dropped.

I’m not planning on adding major new functionality in this release, after major internal changes a shake-down period tends to be required due to device specific issues that are only exposed when the app gets actual use. Changing too much just compounds that. There are however a number of small changes (for example indicating the number of pending changes for upload on the main menu bar) and performance improvements, that will make the user experience more pleasant.

Work on the release can be followed in the Vespucci github repository.

See full entry

Posted by CjMalone on 29 April 2020 in English.

As some people have noticed last week I edit lots of Asda stores across the UK. I have been adding branch specific contact:website as well as brand data (brand=Asda brand:wikidata=Q297410 brand:wikipedia=en:Asda). The stores that didn’t already have address data, now should have data provided by FHRS Open Data.

Across the way I’ve made some mistakes, when I started I was also adding brand social media (contact:facebook=https://www.facebook.com/asda/ contact:twitter=@asda). trigpoint pointed out this is wrong because some (most?) Asda branches have there own social media accounts that would be more accurate, and user agents can still get the brand accounts via wikidata.

Throughout this project I have been prioritising adding the the specific webpage rather than a generic homepage. This has multiple benefits.

  • The most obvious being users get precise data when they click the link.
  • Another benefit is that the Asda website supports microdata, to publish metadata.
    • User agents can use this data to get more up to date or missing data than OSM provides, even though relatively few Asda stores have contact:phone that data is now available and can be used. The same goes for opening_hours, addresses and even the GeoCoordinates.
    • Mappers can use it similarly to improve OSM.
    • Data scientists can now easily compare OSM data to Asda data.

While doing this I was careful not to use data from the Asda website, due to copyright concerns. So I ignored opening_hours and contact:phone, this data is valuable and I would love for it to be in OSM but I didn’t want to compromise OSM. For addresses I used another source, FHRS Open Data, it is an amazing data set and in my opinion every OSM mapper in the UK should know about it. Using it in OSM has some awesome benefits.

See full entry

Posted by DeBigC on 29 April 2020 in English.

This is a about what I have learned most recently by being involved as a contributor to, and organiser of the “mapping sprint” or “mapathon” called #StayHomeAndMapIRL.This is written in my own voice as an individual mapper.

The mapping sprint was a week long, and really grew out of a spontaneous confluence of two things:

  • The mapping campaign #osmIRL_buildings for which we use a task manager

  • The necessity of everyone in Ireland to stay home, as part of the Covid-19 emergency

By combining these two we were creating an immediacy and dot-joining exercise between something people were all experiencing, and something useful to do with the time at home.

Our community agreed at the 2019 AGM to have a mapping task, one where participation was voluntary like always, but it would be the “common ground” for mappers. Some deep thought went into choosing buildings as the focus, not least being that openstreetmap for Ireland seems to lag behind in the completeness of the buildings. Typically, a large Irish town or city could have a small number of buildings mapped, even in the town centres, almost as if buildings were not a significant human feature and not a major part of the detail of any map at the end-user scale. Of course the wider point is that working at this scale adding a feature like buildings allows our community to scale up and down, and by that I mean add useful end user things like details about the buildings, or scale up and create better de facto landuses - ultimately to increase the completeness and usefulness of the map.

The week through insights taught me the following things:

See full entry

At the beginning of the year, I released Divide and map. Now. – the damn project. I present it as the proof of concept that HOT Tasking Manager can be done better.

The damn project consists of multiple repositories – server, client, manager, plugin, and deploy. Damn deploy repository contains setup used for running instance of server, client, and manager. The only changes to master branch of the damn deploy repository are secrets in .env file and email address in traefik.yml.

Why is there a separate repository for deployment? It complies with the philosophy of do one thing and do it well. The team of administrators deploying the project shouldn’t care about the development of the server or any client.

Why am I writing this? I already wrote about the improvements to the client since the damn project release. And the development continues! I like to improve things. I think that deployment is essential. Finally, there is Ray Kiddy’s comment on gitter:

Thinking more about it, I am interested in seeing something that is easy to provision and get running. So I used “flexibility” as a code word for the ability to bring up new damn instances, at will, and without much hassle.

So I was thinking about how to deploy easier.

How to deploy

I believe that if I want to describe something, the best is start from scratch. So, here we go.

Setting up virtual private server

At do.co, I created new Debian 10 droplet, just $5/mo. In the time of publication, this droplet is already down, and testing instances do not work. See https://www.damn-project.org/ for running available instances I am not willing to shut down.

Then I added test-server.damn-project.org, test-client.damn-project.org, and test-manager.damn-project.org DNS A records pointing to the IP address of the droplet. Now, I can ssh root@test-server.damn-project.org.

Prerequisites

All the deployment is in damn deploy repository. The howto is in readme file. So, I will just follow the readme.

See full entry

I maintain each day an ODS (LibreOffice) Spreadsheet of Covid-19 infections for Nottingham (my home town) as reported by ONS (Office of National Statistics) via a BBC webpage.

BBC Confirmed cases

That page currently (08:45 29 April 2020) reports the same number for Nottingham (488 confirmed cases, from a population of 331,069 people) as it did the previous day (28 April), with a report date of 27 April. So, I went hunting for the source & found it on a .gov.uk site:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK (Open Government Licence v3.0)

…and lo! That page is using leaflet + OSM data (good attribution) to display the data.

See full entry

Location: Hockley, St Ann's, Nottingham, East Midlands, England, NG1 1LG, United Kingdom
Posted by Tomas Straupis on 29 April 2020 in English.

Videos of BalticGIT, SOTM Baltic 2020 are on-line:
http://straume.lmt.lv/lv/video-saraksts/Baltijas-GIT
SOTM Baltic was held in auditorium DELTA

Allan Mustard’s presentation „I’m Tired of Getting Lost!“ can be seen in auditorium ALFA (part 1) or you can watch the same presentation in last years NACIS2019:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpHLulm-Wq4