For example, when I go to tag the surface of a way, “paved” and “unpaved” should not be suggested tags (despite their frequent use), since they’re inherently less informative than more granular tags such as “asphalt,” “concrete,” “gravel,” or “compacted.” I think this is a critical improvement that would greatly improve map quality in the future with at basically no cost. I have no involvement in the development and maintained of iD, but in my opinion, removing poor tag suggestions should be a priority.

Another thought is to help mappers distinguish objects that are similar but not identical, such as bleachers vs. grandstands.

Finally, the wiki should be updated in certain places to better accommodate language translation differences. An example of this is a “give box,” which I’ve only heard referred to as a donation “collection site” or “dropoff location” in the United States.

Recent features and adjustments from version 0.13.0 to 0.15.0:

• Users can delete added links;
• URL Templates can recognize parameters from exact matches;
• URL Templates added support for {osm_tag_key} and {osm_tag_value};
• Parameter recognition became more resilient for some default links ;
• Extension configuration can be synced between different browser instances.

Note: if you are using OSM Smart Menu in different browser instances right now, you might lose some configuration data. The configuration from one of the browser instances can be overwritten by the other during an automatic migration after version 0.15.0. This will be transparent for most users and should not happen again.

I’ve recently decided to survey the payphone/phone boxes/amenity=telephone in OSM. To my surprise, they don’t exist any more, well 12 out of the 17 surveyed don’t.

It seems BT is in wave of removing them, publicly they are just “restructuring to save costs”, but in reality it seems they are just removing all phone boxes.

They don’t publish locations of payphones but if you contact them they have to give you a list of any in consultation to be removed, or any recent consultations. They’ll give you a PDF with a postcode and a vague-ish location description. You’ll then need to go out and survey them, if they’re gone, delete them, if they still exist add some metadata tags, ensure its operator tag is correct, add it’s incoming phone number.

I’m going to try and survey the 65 remaining payphones in OSM in my county, based on my last survey, it might only be 20 that actually exist! (75%)

StreetComplete may be helping in this area soon, Tobias Zwick is working on map maintenance through the app so I’ll defiantly be recommending this and bus stops to the list of verification quests.

Hi there-

On the map I’m noticing that the Broad Channel neighborhood is not included within the Queens administrative boundary (interestingly enough, it is labeled as part of Queens within its own description). My Open Map editing skills are not strong enough to edit the Queens Administrative Boundary to include Broad Channel. could someone show me how to do it?

osm.org/way/220798925#map=15/40.6062/-73.8199

I’m new could use help figuring this out please

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