Opening session

The speakers were Gregory Marler, Bernelle Verster, Christine Karch. Despite reading all (well, almost) the messages that come through the Osmf-talk mailing list and following the OSM Telegram group, I don’t think I recall ever seeing their names in the discussions. This shows to me that I am not aware of voices of some of the people who clearly contribute a lot of time and effort to OSM and OSMF and are probably among the most productive community members. I wonder if others have similar impressions? Is it perhaps that OSM and OSMF conversations are fragmented through so many channels that I simply don’t realize how many people out there are having important conversations that I just miss?

Winds of change

Very useful and refreshing talk, dense with great points. I’m particularly interested in one of the dichotomies discussed:

free-form tagging <-> need better data consistency

I’m reminded of an article I came across a while ago that I’m sure has a lesson in it, somewhere: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss

As businesses start re-opening, local authorities in Ireland are supporting businesses to adhere to government health advice and specifically social distancing techniques which have been shown to slow the spread of the disease.

One of the most visual supports is the pedestrianisation of streets for specific hours of the day / week so cafés and restaurants can make use of the outdoor space (risk of infection is lower if people are eating outside). Unlike continental Europe and parts of the USA, pavilions and street dining is not common here.

OpenStreetMap contributors are keeping up with the local authority efforts by updating map data as changes are made.

Most of these updates make use of the conditional access key/values outlined in osm.wiki/Conditional_restrictions

Here’s an example change in Cork, Ireland that I did earlier today: https://osmcha.org/changesets/87507009/

Note: the logic is that motor vehicles can’t access the street UNLESS it’s between 17:30 and 11:00 (i.e. the inverse of the pedestrianisation period).

Note: I also posted this on my blog.

For those who have never heard of indoor=, you may want to read the introductory blog post. In short, it is a map that displays the indoor data of OpenStreetmap with a level selector.

I’ve released a new version of indoor= that brings visual, interaction and deployment enhancements.

Visual Enhancements

Display of contiguous areas without walls

Previously, contiguous areas and corridors were rendered with a border, whereas the documentation states that they have no walls. They are now merged to avoid any rendering with a separation. The difference is noticeable in some areas.

… See full entry

Baltimore City, like many cities of its era, was built long before environmental regulations required the preservation of wetlands and streams. Baltimore is built along the banks of a navigable waterway, in a valley that drains a large watershed that extends into the surrounding environs. However, when examining a map of the city, there is a notable lack of streams in the built up areas that usually give some definition to the topography shown on a map. That’s because the streams that used to dot the banks of the Patapsco River and Jones Falls have been placed underground by man in an attempt to tame nature and move surface water out of sight. Public Works engineers of the early 1900s tried to put streams into pipes wherever possible because they were seen as open sewers, rife with disease and industrial filth. These decisions have had dire consequences on the health of the water bodies downstream and have turned the built up city into an area devoid of natural water where there should be plenty.

Recently I’ve started finding and adding these buried streams to OpenStreetMap in an attempt to surface their existence to the world. Referencing public storm drain plans and old news articles I’ve found at the library, I’ve started adding some streams that are now completely underground. The process is interesting in part due to the massive scale of the underground pipes and tunnels that we rely on any time it rains, yet have little knowledge of their existence. There are several tunnels in excess of 4 meters in diameter.

… See full entry

There’s a timestamp on them, but I put 01/07/2020 on my last entry. Also, I don’t see any rules on diaries. Should they just be anything I want or do they have to be OSM-related in some way?

So in JOSM, if I wanna split a way into 3 part, it asks which one of the segment that I want to reuse the history. instead of one, i really need all segment to keep its history so the community still could track the previous mapper edits. I think it’s not fair if the rest of the segment become our data because we only split it not add the new one. Here the illustration which i refer to.

WOW!!

In a recent phone conversation with a relative who lives in Dundee, Scotland, I discovered Dundee has it’s own zoo, Camperdown Wildlife Centre.

This is contained within Camperdown Country Park.

After the phone call I checked the park and the zoo on OSM and I saw that the park needed much improved tracing, and that the zoo was simply a border outline trace on the map and nothing else.

• Camperdown Country Park osm.org/way/26601574#map=14/56.4881/-3.0328
• Camperdown Wildlife Centre / Zoo osm.org/way/767357922

So I set out to improve this. Firstly I improved the accuracy of the tracing for the country park and added some missing traces. This was a general tidy up and much still needs to be done to improve the mapping for the Country Park. Apparently there are many interesting trees growing in the park that could be individually tagged.

I spent what must have been 5 or 6 hours getting information on the park from the Camperdown Wildlife centre site (zoo) and putting it into the map (OSM).

I doubt I will have time to keep the animal enclosure information up to date as this changes with time.

I’d be interested in any comments about mapping zoo’s and / or parks.

Because of covid and the particular need for parents to be in touch with schools, I’ve joined with Robert Whittaker’s efforts to map school information. https://osm.mathmos.net/schools/progress

Robert has produced some very good analytics maps, which show the percentage of schools that have a complete mapped data set in each part of Scotland.

This can be used to add information where existing tag sets are lacking, or tag correction is necessary.

Mostly this information can be found on local schools web sites.

A typical school mapping

• A typical school mapping in Scotland might look like this osm.org/way/112682827

How to tag contact information

Typically this will look like

• “contact:website=http://www…..”

• “contact:phone=+44 ….”

• “contact:email=abc@xyz…..”

• .. see the typical mapping link above to get an idea for how tags at other schools might look

Isced levels

• This page explans isced levels rather well osm.wiki/Key:isced:level

• Isced levels sould be mapped “isced:level=1” for a primary school, and “isced:level=3” for a secondary school. Have a look at the isced levels link above to be sure, but this seems it will fit most cases.

Scottish Government Seed codes

• Scottish Government Seed codes, and other useful school mapping information may be found here https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/Datasets/contactdetails

• Seed codes should be mapped, eg “ref:seedcode=123456”

dear diry today i am discover the open street map diary feature why do this exist? is this published to the whole world? what is the point of this? am i supposed to like write down how i feel about life in general

Starting with the www.openstreetmap.org option. 🆎 Alan B 1 July 2020 —————–

The code for these POCs can be found here. This code will still be modified as we test and tweak various options available. This phase is important to establish that our project is going to work as expected, and there are no missing/misbehaving components.

As a part of this, the following components are designed and tested:

Getting input:

• Psycopg2 Python library is used to connect to postgresql and fetch data.

• DictCursors used to fetch data in a dictionary format. (This is necessary to ensure that the hstore data structure used to store name, address fields are fetched correctly.)

  Important note: These cursors are not thread-safe. So, going ahead, if multithreading is used, this must be kept in mind.

Formatting:

• Created a Doc class with necessary fields. (Fields discussed in the last article)
• Forming addresses using the place_addressline table. These will be finally indexed in elasticsearch along with other necessary fields.

Indexing:

• Setting up an elasticsearch server and running it.
• Creating an index, Deleting an index.
• Inserting documents into the index. Indexing with looping and using bulk indexing.
• Try indexing with varying numbers of records.

Hug API:

• Create a hug API client to add an extra layer of security by avoiding exposure of elasticsearch endpoints.

Searching:

• Setting up the front end on Nominatim. Available here
• Fetching results from the hug API endpoint to Nominatim.
• Displaying the results as an option list.
• Selection of results by the user.

Outcomes/Observations:

… See full entry

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kgt8

Writer Jerry Brotton navigates the transformation from paper to digital mapping, from print to pixels, and asks what is being gained and lost.

I am revisiting Adelaide Bus Routes.

There was going to be a huge restructure of the existing routes, but it has since been called off, so I am looking at adding more of the existing routes, as there is not a lot that has been put in.

I would love to hear from anyone who may be interested in helping getting this data as complete as we can.

I have been registering surveyed points from the RTK gps units that I used at work. Usually, I updated those references to JOSM’s image offset database, used to be both for Bing and Maxar. Lately however, I just uploaded data for Bing only.

Part of the reason is that I found that Maxar has quite a lot skewy images despite their recentness. Their images are also at a different zoom level than Bing, so providing offsets for both Maxar and Bing seems to be pointless. Older Bings were nicer, but newer ones seems to be the same image used by Esri and Maxar, so they are equally good (or bad).

To overcome the different zoom scale of the imageries, I always defaulted to the ‘corrected’ Bing. In areas where new roads/developments can be seen only in Maxar, I will offset Maxar to Bing. I’d find a house closeby, trace it in Bing, and then move Maxar imagery to match. Hopefully, everything will remain consistent. Well, at least until new (paid/unpaid) mappers started tracing and aligning everything to Maxar that is..

I am still undecided regarding gps tracks. Quite a few issues: bad signal (resulting bad accuracy), kalmann filter, not enough traces covering x-y axis. Better than nothing though. I’d rather prefer a 10 minute averaging (or median value) gps position.

Anyways….

Why is there no OSM Sandbox for map editing? People should practice map editing on a empty map with satellite images so they can actually build the world, learn how to actually edit, etc.

Why has this not been implemented yet? Are you people crazy? What if editors make some nonsensical edits on the map so they can learn how to edit? This has to be added to OSM for both guests and users.

Since version 0.9.4, OSM Smart Menu allows users to add new maps (if they are automatically recognized). Not sure where to start? Give it a try with OsmHydrant.

PS: A handy link to the configuration page was added in version 0.10.0

Some time back, I wrote about my hopes and wishes for last year’s Board election. The reality has far surpassed my expectations. I’m impressed with how much has changed with the new set-up.

Even though ideologically, we remain just as diverse, this board is getting into much less conflict. Of course, we don’t agree on everything. But we seem to be much more capable to reach a common ground on things. This has made this Board, in my experience, much more productive than the previous one. What used to be an insurmountable hurdle, something small like switching from audio to video conferencing, was now quick, easy and straightforward.

Big part of that increased productivity, is that we have a new Chair (Allan Mustard), who takes the role much more as an active leadership role than the previous one. That is only possible because he happens to be recently retired, and willing and able to invest much more time in the role than any of the other Board members can.

We also have a new Treasurer - Guillaume was the only one to offer himself for the role, though he probably didn’t expect there to be no one else to volunteer. As he was starting the role, there was a crisis straight away: our bank kicked us out. The amount of time he has needed to invest in resolving this (and all the technical consequences of that) has been enormous, and beyond what can be expected of a volunteer. Thankfully, his free lancing was a little slow because of the corona crisis.

… See full entry

D by

I try to capture Mapillary imagery where I can, mostly from my bike, sometimes 360 imagery sometimes forward facing only.

I started in 2017 basically just to give it a go, I bought a 360 camera, the LG 360 CAM. Even that was a struggle, they didn’t sell them locally here so I needed to buy from random sellers on ebay. LG don’t make these anymore, but I’ve stockpiled 3 which is good if one breaks or for swapping them when the battery runs out. Overall I’m happy with the camera, it’s not top of the line, but for the price I paid about $100USD each they have satisfactory image quality, battery life and capture rate.

While I can’t usually use my 360 imagery to read off the smaller road signs (only larger destination signs) I find the it’s much easier to do mapping later from 360 images.

After a capture, I’ll usually go through and use it to add in as much detail to OSM as I can from my imagery, and then upload it to Mapillary.

While I’d get value even without uploading to Mapillary I feel this is important to be able to provide some kind of verification to my edits. It also proves very useful later on when reviewing others edits, I can take a quick look of what was on the ground before from Mapillary and just check that new edits look right.

I’ve been very supprised how much I’ve ended up re-checking my captures in Mapillary. Many times reviewing edits in OSMCha I’d be surprised that I actually had coverage for that area.

At the start, mapping out a whole city might seem like too big a task, but just like OSM, chipping away one bit at a time, progress slowly is revealed year after year.

Anyway, back to the point of this diary entry. I recently upgraded to a new phone and found that the LG360 app no longer worked. It would connect to the camera (to see the camera stats) but wouldn’t let me start the capture.

… See full entry