Luckily, I’m well connected with the right people (at least in this case), and people know my obsessions about benchmarks and field names. I had been surveying Cramersgrove in Co. Kilkenny and a friend said that “we” (in this case Kilkenny Archaeological Society) had a c 1815 Coghill Estate map in our archives with field names on it. Again luckily during lockdown, I have a key to the archives, because I was doing some work there at the beginning of lockdown, so I had a root around. The problem with those maps is that they are all rolled up and you don’t know what’s on them until they’re unrolled and not all of them are labelled. But I found the right one! And it does have field names on it and some match the ones I got from the farmer who lives there now. His great-grandfather must have been purchasing that land about the time that map was made. That should be well out of copyright and I should be allowed to add the historical names. If there is a tag…

The field with the pin is Bonnahilla on the 1816 map. A bit of a different spelling to Bawn na haille.

ema Secondary School, Ghana TEMA SECONDARY SCHOOL Jamasi, Ashanti, Ghana

It occured to me today that when “we” are out inquiring about field names from farmers, we usually only get the names on the farm we are on or maybe neighbouring farms. I think what is very important to consider is asking the wife in the house (if she’s not already the informant) about her homestead. It’s likely that she grew up on a farm as well. And she could be from some remote area that the surveyor (“we”) is not likely to get to any time soon.

Of course you have to be prepared for that eventuality. Going out to the farm with FieldPapers of that farm won’t be any use for the wife from further afield (pun not intended). Taking a laptop, praying for good broadband and using OSM there and then might be the better strategy. If she doesn’t remember, she might still have a brother or nephew on the home farm. Once the contact is established, a FieldPaper atlas could be sent to him. She will be able to explain it to him in their own words rather than in our mappers’ lingo.

This is all academic so far; I haven’t had a chance to try it. Yet.

I’ve added a couple of short but interesting scripts to github. They fetch and sort posts from an OSM mailing list from some time in the past. For example, here are the topics on the talk list at the height of the licence change furore:

listtopics.sh talk 2012 May

 35  OSM : It's a shame !!!
 24  Edit review: ele=0
 22  Worst of OSM
 21  TomTom is thumping us
 17  Import of buildings in Chicago
 17  Edit review: intermittent waters
 16  OSM cycle map - ?excessive focus on long-distance routes
 15  Edit review: "building"="levels=N"
 14  Cycleways and Access tags: Left, Right, Forward, Backward?
 10  OpenSeaMap
 10  Cycle lanes & cycle tracks - my findings and a proposal
  7  Changing capitalization (Lima)
  6  OWL down
  6  OSM data density - top regions
  6  Old versions of OSM?
  6  Copy-and-paste remapping
  5  TTTracklog and TomTom core 9.4
  4  OSMCoastline / OpenStreetMapData.com
  4  Mapnik rendering issue with *_link roads
  4  (dis)Honesty and Copyright

and here’s the tagging list today:

… See full entry

Hi everyone,

There have been conversations in the OSM community about creating a more formalised group to coordinate OSM activities in the region. This would be important step to getting recognition as a local chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation which would in turn allow us to collaborate more closely and potentially be eligible for grants and support going forward.

By formalised group, we were thinking of a working group that would be part of OSGeo Oceania. An initial discussion was initiated here. Please note that this application relates to the application we made to the OSMF to have OSGeo recognised as a local chapter.

FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2019 in Wellington, New Zealand

Some of the objectives of a working group we discussed include:

… See full entry

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.

---

(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.