Here was the idea: 1) Combine Fremont buildings layer (pretty detailed) with MS buildings (poor details, but no substantial biases). Then, for a centroid of each F-building, find the offset to a corresponding centroid of an MS-building. Finally, look at the distribution of such offsets for the nearest 50-100 F-buildings and take the median as an estimate of the offset by which a given F-building should be moved before importing it into OSM

Here is the result (red polygons are the original ones, blue – after the adjustment using the MS building footprint layer): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IeNMu8r6iHjvmt7yOxO06Uggra8sI4os/view?usp=sharing

Looks pretty good to me! :)

Recently I found a printed map of the old town of Nafplio, named “walking map of Nafplio”, and it’s the first printed map of Nafplio I find which references the three districts of the old town, “Psaromahalas”, “Vrahateika” and “Yalos”.

The reason I write this post is mainly personal enthusiasm because I learned about the names of those three districts no more than a month ago, when I added them in OSM. And most elements of that printed map remind me of how OSM tiles present them :p

Just for reference, this printed map can be found outside of the “armiriki” store in the old town of Nafplio, and it’s free. The map is in English and contains info about various points of historical interest.

Also, many of the local people around here (Argolida), seem to know only the district of “Psaromahalas” and not the other two. But nvm, I will spread the word of the other two, xd.

All the countries in the World have their own Track & Field stadiums and tipically each track is represented in different ways in OSM. It can be hard when you download the data (if you have different domains, you cannot get all the tracks in one shot) or when you want to get an harmonized representation.

That’s why I invest my time to update all the Track & Field stadiums in Portugal, using the map provided by the Portuguese Athletics Federation.

In the first approach I just consider the right category and geometry.

Now I done something more detailed for the 7 tracks are being used now for the Portuguese Teams Championships. First I defined an inner line to get the name of the track in the map (using the label) and after I created an overall area with all the track and their tipical center (grass). Around I had defined the stands and the lights. Outside of the stadium I defined the streets, parks, trees, walking paths, etc.

It is my first structured approach in OSM. If anyone knows another experiences about Track & Field stadiums in OSM, please share with me.

… See full entry

I ended up having some API-fun today.

The iD editor has been updated to version 2.18 and now supports touchscreen devices.

https://twitter.com/quincylvania/status/1285613343093424129

The iD editor’s touchscreen support is a huge advantage.

It allows you to edit with both hands, so you can assign your right and left hand to different operations. You can edit with very little movement of your hands.

… See full entry

The iD editor has been updated to version 2.18 and now supports touchscreen devices.

https://twitter.com/quincylvania/status/1285613343093424129

I have tested the support status on several devices I own.

Of all the devices I own, I am most comfortable with the iPad.

Here is an example of stalinist neoclassicism.

The model is not fully complete, I will add some more details :).

I have just started making some contributions. I am already active in a couple of Wikimedia Foundation projects:

• My user page in Wikipedia: Sinucep

• My user page in WikiMedia: Sinucep

• My user page in Wikiversity:Sinucep

I am also an amateur radio operator and my callsign is IZ3VJQ.

I’m wondering if APRS Radioamateur system could be used somehow in this project

I speck English, Italian (native language), Spanish (basic).

Below is a description of two interactions I recently had with CartONG.

Tagging schema

Late last year I noticed that the place=refugee_camp tag that was unknown to me was used on hundreds of OSM elements. Failing to find any documentation for it, I left a comment on one of the changesets that introduced the tag. The changeset author requested that I contact CartONG’s Missing Maps project (which I thought was a HOT initiative, but no matter) by email, which I did. I received a response from the Project Coordinator who kindly explained the thinking behind the tagging and that a tag proposal is in the works. A few months of discussions and two tag proposals later (first of which seemed to raise a concern about rallying last-minute votes from “colleagues and friends”), we all arrived at an approved tag.

I thought that it would have been best to first launch a proposal and have the tag approved, rather than tag features in OSM and then try to push through a proposal that conforms to the de facto tag usage, but that’s just my opinion. We are all working towards the same goal, and in the end I congratulate CartONG and Missing Maps on the result.

Data imports

Fast forward two months, yesterday I came across what looks to me like an import of non-cleaned UNHCR refugee camp data into OSM done by CartONG in two parts (1, 2), both of which had already attracted comments on their quality, and one of which had been reverted. The revert seems to have been preceded by direct communication that ended without satisfactory explanations from CartONG. I have contacted the user who reverted the changeset to see if the second changeset raises similar concerns, and they have promptly reverted that one as well.

… See full entry

Facebook and ESRI announced they were adding additional data-sources into their iD fork called rapiD. They’ve collected data sources, performed schema translation, and created a conflation tool, but after being asked to follow the import process, they’ve insisted it’s not an import and they don’t need to solicit community feedback.

So here’s some feedback which they might have gotten from the community, if they had asked.

MapWithAI Data Source License

• The Services Data is made available to you under the terms of the MIT license. I’m not a lawyer, but the MIT license isn’t compatible with ODbL and OSM. This could lead to all edits from rapiD needing to be reverted. Each data source license should be documented inside OSM’s wiki, with your import proposal.
• You may not ... reverse-engineer any of the software you forbid critical analysis of your import. Nice.
• you accept any changes to the Terms by continuing to use the Services after We post the changes Truly evil!

MapWithAI Data Source Quality

• The AI generated way geometry looks good, but the highway tag values seem consistently wrong. The acceptable error rate for an import is debatable, I aim for > 95% accuracy in my work. It is irresponsible to even suggest low quality data. You should prompt the user to supply the highway tag’s value instead.

Esri Data Translation

… See full entry

1) Combine Fremont buildings layer (pretty detailed, nicely aligned) with MS buildings (poor details, but no substantial biases) … for a centroid of each F-building, find the offset to a corresponding centroid of an MS-building … look at the distribution of such offsets for the nearest 50-100 F-buildings and take the median as an estimate of the offset by which a given F-building should be moved before importing it into OSM

2) For each building compute distribution of angles at nodes, split all buildings into two groups: (a) building with all angles ~90 degrees – these building can be orthogonalized with “Q” in JOSM (or in QGIS) before uploading to OSM (b) buildings that have any angle that is significantly different from 90 degrees (define via hypothesis testing?) – these should be imported without othrogonalization

GitHub is great, but note, if you block somebody on GitHub, they won’t get (your) notifications:

@holmes: any final opinions?

Alas, holmes won’t have any, because he didn’t get notified. And, you, assuming blocking works the same on GitHub as it does on other platforms, will assume holmes is ignoring / blocking you, and get even more angry at him, when in fact it is you blocking him.

Same when you resolve holmes’ bug reports, pull requests, etc. He won’t know until one day some third party comments on one, if ever.

OpenStreetMap’s many teams using GitHub should be aware of this potential for software-exasperated discord.

See also: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/31.46#subj35 , https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/31.47#subj13

(Yes, you will probably also hear less noise from (example user) holmes, but did you know that you caused him to not see the notifications he normally would of your actions?)

Update!

As of July 25 – joto did the manual override! So the problem is resolved, at least for now. We still need to deal with the “but MY bay isn’t really a coastline” recurring problems, but now we can deal with them individually, rather than trying to address a six month backlog.

---

So, I accidentally wrote a wall of text yesterday in the IRC channel, and rory asked me to copy it here.

It was prompted by this question:

15:28 what is the rio plata thing about?

I responded:

johan_: So, the coastline rendering process used for openstreetmap.org is complex. and involves multiple semi-independent groups.

One group produces the planet.osm file, containing all the OSM data.

A different group (well, it seems to mainly just be joto), runs an independent server at https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de that processes the planet.osm data into a set of shapefiles defining the world coastlines.

Then a third group (back within osm.org) uses that data to render the map displayed by default on openstreetmap.org, known as Carto.

The osmdata script that does the processing includes an automatic cut-off that marks the produced shapefiles as invalid if the maganitude of changes since the last valid results is beyond a certain amount specifically, 0.0000015 (I’m not sure in what units, exactly). https://github.com/fossgis/osmdata/blob/master/scripts/coastline/compare-coastline-polygons.sh#L13

And the third group independently choses to obey this marking, and only apply shapefiles that have been blessed by this script.

There is an option to manually override the cutoff (by simply deleting the data it is comparing to), but joto, reasonably enough, will only do that with a clear, well-documented demonstration of a consensus among mappers that such a larger change is needed.

This mostly works.

Recently, specifically on January 10, 2020 – it didn’t.

… See full entry

I have the following overpass query

[bbox:{{bbox}}][diff:”2015-05-10T09:55:00Z”,”2015-05-15T10:00:00Z”];
(
way(user:”ABZ_OSM”);
);
out geom;

which you can also see here http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/Wk7 and shows any changes I have made in the bbox in the given date range.

I would like to enhance this query by showing every user change, except for changes made by me, in other words a boolean ‘not me’, or ‘not ABZ_OSM’?

I have tried lots of variants of !ABZ_OSM, and I think I have tried all the possibilities, though I may have by chance missed a working option.

Does anyone know how to do !ABZ_OSM (not ABZ_OSM)?

ps I know I can do this with www.OSMcha.org but I think being able to do this with a quick overpass query is easiear.

Use few words, avoid being tracked. No GPS tracks, em sets you apart. No Mapillary since your edits are easy to tie together. No use good grammar, obfuscation. Eloquent soliloquies of your inner voice set you slightly apart.

Plenty more, but this is good.

Surveillance #MappingPower

One of the most common mistakes I find from new mappers is using Bing Imagery and not accounting for the offset. Admittedly, I was making this mistake for a long time before I realized that I had been messing up roads, houses, etc. that were already perfectly in place. Since learning about that, my preferred imagery sets have been ESRI Clarity (old sometimes, but very clear) and NAIP (blurry sometimes, but pretty new).

What puzzles me is why Bing is the default imagery choice when using iD. It’s not a big deal if it’s being used to clean up what would otherwise be a TIGER desert, but when trying to use it in an area dense with features (e.g. a university), it becomes practically useless. Even if new mappers go through the tutorial, they’re probably going to stick to whatever the default is until they get their feet wet, or like me, assume that Bing was made the default because it’s the best choice!

This is problem is well known and acknowledged on the Bing Wiki, so why hasn’t iD already set ESRI or something else as the default?

I’ve updated Fengtinghe Reservoir (凤亭河水库) today with the help of josm’s scanaerial plugin using ESRI imagery and additionally added parts manually where scanaerial wasn’t detailed enough.

I had created the reservoir relation about 10 years ago using Lakewalker plugin (now deprecated) with Landsat imagery.

Looks much more realistic now ;)

Recently I have been editing trunk roads in the southern states, my edits have been mostly thanked by users. Recently, however, zsneese has been reverting my edits, threatening:

 Please do not make changes to an area that you are not familiar with. There are much bigger issues on OSM that need to be corrected in other areas than nitpicking a trunked road (which you are incorrect about)... the roads that I am editing are accurate and consistent with our government mapping provided with us by the State of Georgia Department of Transportation. I will be correcting this and I will correct it every single time it is changed.

GDOT standards don’t mean much on OSM though! The Eastern States definition is:

...in the east, the tag is only used for roads which are a "Surface expressway": A relatively high-speed divided road (at least 40 MPH with a barrier or median separating each direction of traffic), with a limited amount of intersections and driveways.

Who is correct?

–floridaeditor

P.S. if you agree, will you help revert the edits using the JOSM reverter plugin for added authority?

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and none of this is intended to be legal advice. I do, nevertheless, consider myself to be an informed layman - and offer this analysis as a starting point for research into the legal status of GIS data in New York, with citations to relevant law, court cases, and commentaries from both sides of some of the controversies. I do not purport it to be an unbiased analysis; as and OSM contributor and otherwise as an ‘open sourcerer’, I have strong personal opinions regarding the purported ownership of factual information. I nevertheless attempt to present the law as it stands, even if I sometimes make the Dickensian observation that “the law is an ass.”)

What’s up with GIS data in New York?

GIS data originating from government agencies have, for about twenty years, been subject to considerably uncertainty and risk. This largely stems from the fact that in many jurisdictions, the mantra that “government should be run like a business” has led to expectations that state and local GIS departments should support themselves on user fees, rather than from the general fund. The most lucrative source of these fees has been the “multiple listing services” used by real estate agents to exchange data about houses on the market. These services often pay handsomely, far in excess of the cost of reproduction, for the maps of tax parcels. These provide the agents with the boundaries of properties listed for sale.

It is worth noting that in this discussion, I refer to State and local data. It has always been held that works prepared for the US Government by a government employee engaged in the performance of official duties are in the public domain. Works produced by contractors, depending on the terms of the contract, may be protected by copyright. Ordinarily, in this case, the copyright holder will be identified prominently. Those who use public data promulgated by a Federal agency have little to fear.

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Update: I was not elected in the previous election. HOT is doing another round this year, to fill-in for the remainder of the term of one borad member who resigned. I’m putting myself forward again. This diary will again serve as my statement.

👋🏾 This is Maning from the Philippines and I’m running for the HOT board election this year. I am a long time OpenStreetMap contributor focusing mostly in building the open mapping community in my country and in Asia.

Over the years, I have been working and living with marginalized sectors such as indigenous peoples, fishefolks, upland farmers and, urban poor communities. In most of these communities, the common struggle is always tied to a place or resource. The understanding of place is a powerful platform that enables conversation between those in the margins and those in power to negotiate and work together. This is the reason I focused my work to using geospatial technology for social justice and conservation. I believe OpenStreetMap and to an extent, HOT as an intermediary is powerful and can effect social change.

I believe my experience with working with marginalized sectors, open data/technology and building online communities in the Philippines can provide a unique perspective to the new challenges of HOT as an organization. However, I recognize that I lack the depth and experience, because I’ve never been a board member of an international organization.

To understand how HOT board operates, I talked to a number of people directly involved in HOT in the last few days. The conversations were insightful and gave me a good perspective on what I should care as a board member. Below is a distillation of these conversations and my personal opinion of what the organization should care about.

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