During the Esri User Conference, Esri and Facebook today announced the availability of ArcGIS datasets in updated versions of two OSM editors, RapiD and JOSM. You can check out the Esri blog post and Facebook blog post for details, but I also wanted to provide a little more context and contact info for the OSM community.

In addition to the local knowledge and field surveys of OSM contributors, another source of OSM data is government data that has been released with appropriate licenses. Many government agencies in the United States and around the world are Esri customers, and they use ArcGIS software to create, publish, and share their GIS data.

Esri would like to help OSM mappers by providing more convenient access to this type of data where it would be useful in OSM and it can be provided with an appropriate license. Esri is encouraging our ArcGIS user community to share their data as open data, preferably with licenses that are compatible with OSM.

In the past few months, Esri has identified some open data (e.g. building footprints and address points) that can be used in OSM and processed that data so that it is more ready-to-use in OSM. To enable access to this data for OSM mappers, Esri has worked with developers at Facebook to expose this data in OSM editors through a new version of RapiD and an updated Map With AI plugin for JOSM.

As described in the Esri blog post, these tools will enable OSM mappers to choose a dataset they’d like to use for mapping, select a feature in the dataset that does not currently exist in OSM, review the geometry and available fields (tags) for the feature (such as below) and make adjustments based on local knowledge or other appropriate sources as needed, and then upload their changes to OSM.

… See full entry

Today I finished fleshing out all the sidewalks and crosswalks (both marked and unmarked) in the Licton Springs neighborhood of Seattle! This includes details on curb ramps and tactile warnings (or lack thereof) at each crosswalk so that pedestrians that need one or the other to get around can more easily plan a walking route using OpenStreetMap.

Although a lot of Seattle’s neighborhoods don’t have very well-defined borders I believe the ones for Licton Springs are fairly consistent across maps that I’ve seen:

• North border: Northgate Way
• East border: I-5
• South border: N 85th St
• West border: Aurora Ave

Now that I’m done, I determined that Licton Springs makes up about 1% of Seattle’s land area, so I consider this a pretty major win in the amount of pedestrian infrastructure mapped!

I took on the project of mapping all of the sidewalks and crosswalks in Licton Springs because I have been walking my dog around this neighborhood quite a bit and noticed that OSM didn’t have any of the sidewalks mapped in the neighborhood (though a few marked crosswalks had been). Particularly surprising was that none of the sidewalks along this section of Aurora Ave had been mapped! This is a pretty busy street that has a lot of foot traffic normally due to the density of businesses and the RapidRide E bus line running along it.

Though I have been mapping for a while now, this was certainly the largest task I had undertaken so far and was able to see it through from start to finish! I hope the Seattle OSM community can continue mapping more of the sidewalks and crosswalks around the city!

Removed Oracle Java (version 8) packages, with intention to replace it with OpenJDK (11).

OpenJDK is installed, now JNLP won’t work. JOSM’s JAR file just works, but I’ll definitely miss any auto-update feature.

Tried and tested several other guides… nope! JNLP would still not work.

Finally, purge everything Java and… attempt to reinstall someday.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about Observe — a new field mapping tool for OpenStreetMap that works offline. There was a lot of interest from the community to use Observe and we got a lot of great feedback. Ever since, we have slowly been working on adding new features and improving the overall performance.

Few weeks ago, we released a new version of Observe. I’m excited to invite you all to test this version and give us feedback. I’ll highlight some of the changes in this release.

You can download the development version of Observe for Android and iOS from here. Note that this uses the OSM Dev API. If you don’t have an account, you can create one. You can read about all Observe features and how to use them in the user manual.

Taking photos and recording traces

Two important features that we wanted to add to improve the field mapping experience of Observe is being able to capture photos and record traces. Photos are critical when it comes to mapping outdoors, as we tend to take pictures of features so we can refer to them later on to create additional tags. For example, I take pictures of the sign boards of businesses so I can enter address and opening hours when I’m back at my computer.

… See full entry

Moving objects is a typical thing to do and because most times the objects are attached to other objects, if you don’t do it carefully you may end up messing up the outlines of the attached objects.

If you are beginner to such thing, it’s ok and understandable. Try and learn from your mistakes.

But if you are somewhat experienced map editor, moving objects, messing up outlines of other objects, and leave them there without correcting them, that is NOT OKAY.

Last few days I see someone moving buildings and roads while messing up the outlines of other attached objects, and in the end it looks bad. And they move in such way that they don’t resemble the actual appearance at all. For example, moving a building with an attached parking space, but separating them + messing up parking space’s outline.

the http://sotm-eu.org/en/pages/posters website is down … ( 404 Not Found )

on the other hand .. there is a backup ! https://web.archive.org/web/20180911013747/http://sotm-eu.org/en/pages/posters

my favorite:

You can check the latest posters here: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/posters/

OSMF no longer uses transferwise

I finally got in contact with the person responsible for the Westmeath Field Names Recording Project (Aengus Finnegan) last week. I asked him whether it would be possible to use the data collected by them and to add them to OSM and he saw no problem saying they were published on logainm under Creative Commons license. So I have started transfering the data, but it is slow going, because I don’t have a list of townlands covered by the project, they don’t have one on the website. Also, they didn’t mark the fields as areas, but just with markers, so it is tricky to know where one field ends and the next one starts.

I believe they used the Ordnance Survey 25’’ map which was finished/ published in 1913. Of course, field boundaries have changed since then, i.e. fields have been merged into bigger ones.

But with all the complaining, it is great to have them available for OSM!

My June 2020 in OSM

• OSMF Board
  • Continued work on version 2 of the OSMF Local Chapters Agreement, posted to osmf-talk@ & engaged with the discussion & in person discussions
  • Drafted reply to complaints about the recent trademark grant to Cesium. Did an internal board poll.
  • New Attribution Guidelines are being worked on, so we had a call with some corporate members of the OSMF.
  • The OSMF & HOT wants to work better together
    • We had a board to board chat to catch up. Nothing to report, just a catch up
    • HOT’s name uses the OSMF’s trademark and they suggested a contract to cover that, they proposed something, we edited it, and send it back. The beurocracy continues.
• LGBTQ mapping
  • Watched the mapbeks webinar. It was aimed at a lower level of knowledge than I have, so I didn’t learn much. Since they switched in & out of English, I was only able to follow half of it 😆
  • Discovered Qiekub, a map display LGBTQ places in OSM.
• Communications WG
  • OSM Promotional Material Programme: posted 2 small packets of stickers to Germany
• Mapping
  • The OSM Ireland building mapping continues
  • Data Gardening & clean up (e.g. Cleaned up some wrong layer=1 and unneeded source tags
  • A toot on mastodon from Baloo Uriza reminded me that Osmose can fix things online, so I did some of that locally and in my home town
  • Weekend away means, time to do some surveying with Vespucci of picnic tables around me, PoIs in a town, and using StreetComplete to add more details
• Programming
  • Continued to work on my side project to help with vandalism

Previously: May 2020 April 2020 Mar 2020 Feb 2020 Jan 2020

Since OSM Smart Menu v0.12.0, users can rename any link from their list! This is specially helpful for new options!

For example, you can rename a long title such as “CheckAutopista2 - Quality assurance tool for motorways in OpenStreetMap” to simply “CheckAutoPista”.

Or you can rename a short title such as “QA” to “QA no-name no-address” (to make it easier to remember what it does).

PS: Also, some adjustments were made to the zoom parameter and Google domain recognition

I understand that this text is interpreted and formatted using the Kramdown markup language, and that to insert an image I need only add

”! [my interesting image] (http://location_of_my_image_x_y_z.org)”

So I put my image on my Google drive and shared it publically and it did not display.

What do I have to do to display images, and is there a space I can upload images to which will display them when I link.

I am overtly an OSM advocate. For many reasons. But I’d like to focus on just one reason why I believe Open Street Map (OSM) will surpass GM (Google maps), even though today, GM is in much broader use because of its transport navigation capability.

Below is one area in which OSM is already better, and you can help make it better in many more small (or large) areas.

West Cammachmore, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, is a small village or hamlet, consisting of 50 - 100 or so houses, and you can see all the house names on the OSM map, which are searchable, in the www.osm.org map page search box.

osm.org/#map=17/57.04474/-2.15279

GM does not show this level of detail on its maps, and often does not contain addressing information which is accurate enough, after a search, for routing in the last 300m or so of the radius.

This can lead to problems for delivery drivers, and others, searching for an exact address using GMs.

In towns, or cities, with streets that are numbered sequentially, with odd numbers on the left, and even numbers on the right, this is not a problem. Because a delivery driver can easily locate such a numbered house, but in a hamlet, often, there are only house names, and no sequential numbers to aid locating the exact address.

For small communities knowing the name of each house, when directing this lost traffic, is very handy, and saves return to sender delivery problems.

Once a small community is accurately mapped, the local community will, over time, learn where to go for accurate, detailed, mapping information.

Detailed mapping creates better community connectivity.

That is why I mapped West Cammachmore, even though I don’t live there.

I simply walked round the hamlet and surveyed the house names and asked the few people I know who live locally if they knew the names of houses that were not displayed outside houses.

… See full entry

Nothing epically

A week past wednesday, or so, I had a look at St Cyrus, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Europe on OSM and noticed that a map tidy up was needed.

Over the next week or so I did various tidying chores and additions, as time allowed;

• The village route traces were not very accurate at all, so I improved these first.
• Then added the information boards and benches along the top of the cliff, as well as the path
• Added and improved the salmon fishing buildings at the bottom of the cliff along the foreshore
• Added various buildings and houses in the village, including the convenience store, post office and cafe at the main road end of beach road
• Added the village notice board and phone box opposite the convenience store
• Added detail to the historic Ecclesgreig church yard, with the tag historic. The “historic” tag allows us to build up a history layer for tourism which is important. Custom OSM maps can then show tourism spots that are of interest by sector, eg Scotland’s ancient golf courses, Scotland’s ancient churches, etc.

There is no doubt that St Cyrus’ long shallow beach, was, and is easy, to spot from sea, and was an easy landing point for early Christians, Viking’s, and others landing with long boats or other boats with shallow hulls.

The remains of the Old Church within the Old Churchyard, on the foreshore, can no longer be seen. The village church is now on top of the cliff and within the current village.

The main contribution here, I feel, was to tidy the village route traces, making further additions that will complete the village, easiear, for future mappers.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on mapping sensitive sites.

What do we do when we visit a location and unbeknown to us, a large site we are welcome at houses within it a large sensitive site that locals don’t want to talk about.

On such an occasion a fairly innocent question is “Hi, what is that right in front of us?”

It turned out to be, as far as I could gather, a chemicals plant, regarded as strategic, in a fairly unstable region.

I’m fairly sure some of my OSM edits, on that occasion, outlining that chemical plant, with polygon sattelite image traces, were deleted, though how locals would connect “Hi, what is that over there” to OSM I do not know. Perhaps I innocently mentioned OSM at the time.

The Den Burn stream flows, mostly overground, until it reaches Aberdeen’s West End.

It then dissappears underground before rising up again, momentarily, at Aberdeen Grammar School, before dissappearing underground again and finally entering Aberdeen’s upper harbour.

Many missing sections, underground, and through culverts have still to be mapped.

This query shows work that has been done so far, and sections that still have to be completed https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/VVU .. and a much better, cleaner, query, with decent MapCSS https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/VXi

Town planners, local knowledge, man hole covers, local news papers, and listening for flowing water can all be used to trace streams where access is difficult of the stream is hidden underground.

Where the Den Burn flows

After OSM Smart Menu v0.11.0, you can access your favorite links even when you are not already seeing a map.

… See full entry

.I give you:

Accurate footprints of buildings. Addresses of buildings. Identities of commercial structures. Landuse as per county records. Exact boundaries as per county records. Wetlands as per National Wetlands Inventory. Precice delineation of roadways as per ESRI, public/private status as per county records, and correct road names as per USPS. Garages, sheds, swimming pools, fences. Anything else of general interest I can find.

You give me:

Complaints. Threats of banishment.

Seems like a fair deal.

Note: I try not to read OSM messages, as they send my anxiety and depression level into dangerous territory.

There might have been a misunderstanding…

A very useful talk, interesting especially to see how OSM is seen from the perspective of people who perhaps have the most authority on what actually goes in the map - the DWG. However, I am wondering about the format and channel of delivering this message. I’m not sure how many people have seen the talk, but I expect the sample to be self-selected from those who are already relatively deeply engaged with the OSM, and, consequently, they already know a lot of what was said here. A lot of this content is available through the wiki, but I’m wondering if it shouldn’t be made more prominent on OSM landing page. Or perhaps the ID editor could be augmented so that the walkthrough that is offered to the new mappers does not only focus on how to edit, but also what to edit?

An Incomplete History of Companies and Professionals in OpenStreetMap

A solid opening, and a lot of informative background. This talk makes me think it would indeed be useful to write up - perhaps as someone in the Q&A suggested, in a collaborative way (or at least with more than one perspective represented). Worth to watch together with the “Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap 🎓” talk from Day 2.

What to do when local citizens do not consent?

An interesting talk, with humanitarian principles such as do no harm and informed consent at the centre. For me personally, it highlights the tension that is created when a company or an organisation is contracted to do some OSM work, and then, for reasons beyond their control, this proves to be challenging.

… See full entry