So, after I got a couple more field names from yesterday’s farmer, I went and ran an overpass-turbo query for fieldnames by looking for landuse=farmland, landuse=meadow and landuse=orchard plus name=*. It came up with about 700 results and i zoomed into most of them.

Here is what I found how to do better in my opinion:

1. Don’t tag a whole farm as “landuse=farmland”. If Old MacDonald had a farm, line out every field in it and tag them individually as “landuse=farmland” or “landuse=meadow” or whatever they are.
2. Don’t ever use “name=field” for a field. Obviously, it is a field. You can call a spade a spade, but don’t name tag a field as a field. Especially, don’t tag eight fields in a row as “name=field”. Names are used to differentiate between two or more similar items. if you had five dogs in your family, you wouldn’t refer to them all as “dog”.

Anyway, I had to bring the number down to 670 by correcting all this. That is very few field names indeed. And it should actually be lower than that, because some village greens are tagged as “landuse=meadow”, when there should be something like “leisure=green”. In my understanding of the English language, a meadow is the land adjacent to a stream or river, but then again, I’m not a native speaker.

Sorry for getting so angry.

tutorial Youtube https://youtu.be/1VC9W7oi8uY

Chrome Extension url: https://github.com/janosrusiczki/strava-heatmap-to-osm-background

I have befriended this farmer who has given me a lot of field names today. His family has been on the land for five generations, so some of the names are in Irish, but we both had no idea how to spell them. So I spelled them how I would spell them and then looked the townsland up in Owen O’Kelly’s Book “Place-names of County Kilkenny” and tried to match them up, but my Irish is really bad and not sufficient for such a job.

I also found a benchmark on his land which I had overlooked earlier.

I have another list of 80 odd field names I got today from a different townsland (Ruthstown) and it looks like I got all the fields in that townsland. I have my work cut out for me. I hope DeBigC and Sascha are gonna be pleased. I am.

… See full entry

Cross-posted from my blog

I’ve been working on a new project, OpenStreetMap Cartographic. This is a client-side rendering based on OpenStreetMap Carto. This is an ambitious project, as OpenStreetMap Carto is an extremely complex style which shows a large number of features. The technical choices I’m making are designed so the style is capable of handling the load of osm.org with minutely updates.

I’ve put up a world-wide demo at https://pnorman.dev.openstreetmap.org/cartographic/mapbox-gl.html, using data from 2020-03-16, and you can view the code at https://github.com/pnorman/openstreetmap-cartographic.

Incomplete parts

Only zoom 0 to 8 has been implemented so far. I started at zoom 0 and am working my way down.

Admin boundaries are not implemented. OpenStreetMap Carto uses Mapnik-specific tricks to deduplicate the rendering of these. I know how I can do this, but it requires the changes I intend to make with the flex backend.

… See full entry

Phew. ~200 schools.

Hull was my birth-town and where I lived until ~30. I have now lived in Nottingham longer than I did in Hull.

It was fascinating to see the scale of change in the schools that I know. I do not think that a single school that I attended or knew remains in use, let alone is unchanged.

• Infant & Junior schools; completely changed; twice!
• Grammar School; gone from site in entirety; all replacements across next 40 years also gone.
• School at top of 1st marital street replaced by domestic housing
• Son’s secondary school no longer exists

That’s Hull for you.

Now it is hello SA (Carmarthenshire / Sir Gaerfyrddin).

5435 - MINDANAO REGION, MISAMIS ORIENTAL (NORTHERN), PHILIPPINES - MAPPING FOR FOOD SECURITY

Help the Philippines map the Mindanao region to support rural farming, gender, healthcare and artisan communities. The Mindanao region grows almost half the country’s food, yet remains the poorest population, with many communities at 30-70% poverty incidence. War and conflict have increased in the region in recent years, with security and safety concerns for girls and women. Our goal is to help map rural agriculture and understand the gender gap to plan improved infrastructure with long term impacts on health, well-being and livelihood for girls, women, Indigenous Peoples and farm families.

Mapped buildings and roads for 1.5 hours.

Last evening I created for the first time a multilingual (Russian, in this case) version of a wiki page. I pulled up the instructions and drew on some experience editing Wikipedia to create a RU: version, then used DeepL to create a rough draft translation in a word processor. Next I plowed through the machine translation and edited it as best my command of the Russian language could permit. Along the way I discovered I do not know certain terms of art, such as how to say “ground truth” in Russian. At some point I will have to ask a native speaker of Russian to take a look at it and do some cleanup.

You can find the interim result of this work here. I surely do hope I followed the instructions correctly!

I have just now deleted my accounts on Foursquare and Swarm after being an active (super) user for 10 years with more than 40000 active check-ins, 1000+ photos, 100s tipps for other users and a innumerable amount of added location data which has been used by Twitter and other services.

I don’t want to check-in and contribute my data anymore. I don’t want to actively feed their system with my data, if possible not even passively.

Since Foursquare doesn’t care about the time their super users have been spending to keep the Foursquare-data fresh whilst bots are wasting our time with nonsense data, and since they are also pretty much abandoning their normal users too, I have decided to leave the platform and join OpenStreetMap to contribute to a real crowdsourced and open platform.

Thanks to Foursquare I know pretty much about random POI and I’m going to use that knowledge to edit the OSM. Right now I’m reading a lot of the FAQs and Wikis because OSM isn’t easy, but I’m pretty sure I’ll contribute for many years.

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(The original diary entry was a copy of my tweets, starting with this once: https://twitter.com/pzumk/status/1263504225222492160 But I have edited the entry to make it more readable as I didn’t realise this is public, haha)

Berwick, Georges Valley P A , Manchester

For those who want to use the Strava layer in the iD editor, it’s very easy. First go to https://strava.com and login, then go to osm.org/edit, click the layers button -> custom -> paste the link: https://heatmap-external-{switch:a,b,c}.strava.com/tiles-auth/all/bluered/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png?px=256. It appears only at the maximum zoom of 16 (disappears at very large zoom). This layer makes it much easier to find drawings of new roads that are not yet in the images.

Video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUABldSmPk4

I saw a local twitter post last night from someone lamenting the lack of road surface indication on Google Maps when a planned bike route suddenly went from asphalt to gravel and sand. I replied with the inelegant suggestion of an Overpass query to highlight just the paved roads. Though a route planning map that visually indicates road surface would be really nice (I’m looking at you RideWithGPS!)

I quickly noticed in the query results unpaved roads without a surface tag, which provided me with my next editing task. With a relatively small percentage of local roads without surface tags I was able to pull fairly large areas into JOSM using an Overpass Turbo query for just those roads.

highway=* and highway!=service and surface!=*

I’m excluding service roads to exclude a multitude of rural driveways and other short terminal roads. By adding a filter (surface=*) the roads I update disappear from view once I provide a surface for them making for an easy workflow.

The CANVEC imports I did for Saskatchewan roads back in 2014 included road surface, so it was mostly the hand drawn pre-2014 roads I need to add surfaces to.

One thing to watch out for. Since you aren’t downloading everything, deleting a road may delete nodes shared by roads that haven’t been downloaded. This will generate conflicts that need to be resolved when doing an upload. Resolve the conflict by selecting that the state of the affected node should be “not deleted”. Unfortunate it only detects conflicts one at a time instead of detecting all of them, so you may need to restart the upload / resolve conflicts multiple times.

OSM Smart Menu is a browser extension to ease access between different maps and tools from the community

It adds a button in your browser’s toolbar to generate a list of links based on the main OSM attributes you are seeing on the current page. This is specially helpful for users reviewing OSM data. But it also can be a delight for users that simply want to see different maps.

4 years ago, I abandoned this project due to personal reasons. However I’m happy to announce it is being actively developed right now! It’s oficially supported for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Firefox for Android (yes! you can use it in your smartphone).

Please give it a try!

There is a progressive growth of the UniqueMappers Network Nigeria with the creation of new state chapters in various regions in Nigeria. The last state chapter that was created is the UniqueMappers Kogi in the North Central Region of Nigeria.

I am the State coordinator of UniqueMappers Kogi and by the instruction of Victor N. Sunday @ Viksun the National Coordinator of UniqueMappers Network Nigeria I created UniqueMappers Ibadan comprising of students and lecturers from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology and The Polytechnic Ibadan yesterday been 19th May 2020.

I created a WhatsApp group for training and coordination of UniqueMappers Ibadan. The members of the UniqueMappers Ibadan are enthusiastic with openstreet mapping/open data acquisition, ready to sign up with Openstreetmap (@ osm.org) and to receive trainings as OSMites.

We look forward to mobilizing more volunteers (youths, men and woman) who are enthusiastic of volunteering to add buildings and roads on Openstreetmap in Ibadan to join the UniqueMappers Ibadan in other to strengthen the State Chapter and enhance the activities of the openstreet community in the city of Ibadan. For each of the institution we will also train and affiliate them to YouthMappers as we grow and mentor them.

We look forward that this new team of UniqueMappers would be engaged with mapping task to tackle #COVID19 in Nigeria while the lockdown last.

UniqueMappers Ibadan

#UniqueMappers Network Nigeria

Don’t worry, I am not trying to increase my edit count. I am trying to add things to the map based upon ground surveys, when I have the time, whenever it is convenient.

Its being quite a while on OSM diary and lots have been taking place in Nigeria OSM Community as Unique Mappers,the NGO community for OpenSTreetMap in Nigeria continues to grow and expand the OSM project in Nigeria even in the lock down of #COVID19.

We have had series of COVID19 Community empowerment and Mappers Wanted Training from March though April-the global Citizen Science Month and then into May. The moments include the MapWithAI Webinar traninng ,Mappilary training and the GODAN-Unique Mappers Webinar “Empowering Women in Agriculture with Open Data Mapping :Implications for Land Rights and SDGS. https://landportal.org/blog-post/2020/05/empowering-women-open-data-mapping-agriculture-implications-land-rights-and-sdgs

However,today ,I am so excited having my mentor and one of the corporate supporter of OSM in Nigeria sign up to OSM to add name a road in his village..We made use of google meet for the training and it was fun!! .Prof.Eze who is the managing Consultant of Transparent Earth Nigeria Ltd,-Corporate partner of Unique Mappers Nigeria sponsored as a community service the #Ogrute Ugwue Eru Mapathon for SDG-2 Food Security Project in Nigeria carried out by Unique Mappers . He also sponsors the Unique mappers best Mappers Annual Prize award.

Meanwhile,Victor Ezugwu(Victor1234)one of the state coordinator of Unique mappers Nigeria and HOT Voting member also closed up today succeeding in starting a new Chapter of Unique Mappers by mobilizing 12 newbies using social media . Surprisingly,with his passion ,Unique Mappers Ibadan has just begun…with the creation of a whatsaap group for the coordination and mentoring of these OSM newbies. Amidst,the #COVID19, locakdown,the youths and veveryone staying at home wants to do something new and get off the boring moments and here comes Unique Mappers Ibadan for newbies of OSM in Oyo state,Nigeria. We look forward to providing virtual community engagement for this new chapter as we map COVID19 in Nigeria

We are still in Covid-19 Lockdown, I’m still diligently mapping schools in the HU (Hull & East Riding of Yorkshire) Postcode, and I’ve reached an interesting school near Anlaby that incorporates my family’s Alma Mater of Hull Grammar School (I wondered where it had gone).

• Hull Collegiate School (wikipedia) (edubase=118126)
• Tranby Croft (HE listing) (wikipedia)
• Hull Grammar School (wikipedia) (Hull History Centre)

HE tags for Tranby Croft (these are specific for the UK):–

• heritage:operator=Historic England
• heritage=2
• listed_status=Grade II
• HE_ref=1103387

Hull Grammar School

… See full entry

7620 | Tanzania Development Trust

TANZANIA MISSING ROADS RAPID

Tanzania has a very high incidence of Female Genital Mutilation, extreme poverty, early marriage and Gender Based Violence. NGOs on the ground need better maps to facilitate their outreach work and protect girls at risk of FGM.

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 1 hour mapping roads and buildings.

After not much time-roughly a month and a half-I have finished editing Fort Lee for now. In the last diary entry, I predicted that Fort Lee would take longer than North Arlington, but it seems like I was incorrect then. As a result of the current situation, I’ve been able to pick up the pace I used to have with areas such as Paramus when it comes to editing.

Fort Lee is on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. With all buildings in Fort Lee having been added to OpenStreetMap, this means that there is now an expanse of land stretching from New York all the way to around Paramus where all buildings have been mapped.

Next up is Cliffside Park. It’s the most densely populated area in Bergen County, the fifth-most densely populated area in New Jersey, and seventh-most densely populated incorporated place nationwide.

Click below to see Fort Lee!

JOSM HowTo: map buildings

After the glorious success of mapping Schools with JOSM it was obvious to produce a series of shorts showing how-to-map elements of the schools, and let’s start with howto map school buildings.

Less than 8 minutes long, it does what it says on the can; it shows how to map a school building.

• The school (Rise Academy, Hull):–
  osm.org/way/803492600
• mathmos.net (choose a UK postcode)
• EduBase (England) (register of schools and colleges in England)
• my YT channel