OpenStreetMap in Ireland has launched a project for National Heritage Week 2020, with some preparatory work now underway by the community. A town was chosen, deliberately large to have a decent number of heritage sites, historic buildings and well documented past celebrities and people of repute, and so we arrived at Clonmel.

There is a bit of a plan in place, set out here on the project wiki. The first step was to set down a base map, with the roads, street layouts, landuses and as many buildings as possible traced off Bing. This got done here with 176 squares mapped and validated in just 3 days by the community! The Power of the crowd……

The next part was to do some mapillary, to harvest as much about missing streetnames, building names and details as possible. This was done on a joint visit with Annekaro a.k.a b-unicycling. Admitedly what was captured is about 20% to 30% of the area of the town. So perhaps more is needed and hopefully Waterford Dave’s tweet will rescue a few more of the missing details ;)

The next phases are probably a more advanced population of building detail, and way more pin mapping. It is hoped that by liaising with locals on the ground we can activate more new users and make the project more visible, especially the benefits #OpenStreetMap offer to community based heritage mapping.

View Larger Map

Finally finished to check the addresses on Westsyde. I added houses and completed all house numbers. I didn’t check all postal codes, but hopefully, that’s not a priority right now.

I also try to fix the notes on OSM. I’ll need help on that. Next project is to take care of Rayleigh, then Barnhartvale.

Today I received OSMcard #B6456 from Zervreilasee in Switzerland. What a nice surprise, thank you Stefan!

this is Zervreilasee in OpenStreetMap: osm.org/way/18828382

Those that follow the Vespucci twitter account @vespucci_editor will already know, on Sunday the main had TLS 1. and 1.1 support OSM API turned off. This is of a bit wider relevance as older Android devices do not support TLS 1.2 out of the box or at all, and obviously this may effect other apps as well and even such simple things as retrieving map tiles may no longer work when tile caches are updated.

What is older in this context? Well there is no support in any form for devices older than 4.1, introduced in 2012 and no out of the box support, before 4.4.something (likely 4.4.3). 4.4 was released just 6 years ago, so is not that old. Vespucci will enable TLS 1.2 on devices in the range 4.1 - 4.4.? and will work just fine with the OSM API, with two caveats:

• it is possible that there is no support for TLS 1.2 even though there should be, sorry nothing we can do about that.
• while everything for which the network connections are directly initiated by the app should work, components that open their own connections may fail.

Off the top of my head there are only two situations in which the later applies, one not so important is opening issues on github, the other more relevant is authorizing the app via OAuth to use the OSM API. If that happens on your device you should follow the instructions on the Vespucci documentation site and switch to using login and password. Yes, the irony of this is not lost on me.

The deployment of upgraded operating system versions without TLS 1.0 and 1.1 can be followed on Dropping TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 support. If you have any questions or issues not covered above please don’t hesitate to ask.

Impetus

I read recently in one of the weekly OSM newsletters of a discussion thread on the OSM-talk mailing list about limiting or adding a warning to editors to let users know if they are editing something that will result in an unusually large bounding box for the changeset. As someone that has made the mistake of accidentally editing nodes in entirely different parts of the country and being horrified that I created a massive bounding box, I was curious as to how often this happens and what a typical bounding box size would be for your average mapper.

Gathering the Data

I set about gathering the data on changesets and bounding boxes and picked the current month (July at the time) to look at. I found that there was a minutely “feed” of changeset data that also included the computed bounding box in the replication/changesets directory on planet.openstreetmap.org site (and luckily mirrored to a single place in the U.S. that I could use). After my internet connection started glowing red after a day of transferring just a week’s worth of July data, I figured that was probably enough to get something useful up. I wrote a few lines of Python to uncompress the by-minute files, convert them into SQL statements, and start loading them into a Postgres/PostGIS database. (With a non-trivial detour to learn just enough on how to actually work with polygons and WKT and how to calculate the area using the right spatial reference system.)

First Look

The first graph I generated was a simple bar chart for the first week in July. I posted the following chart on the OSM US Slack server in a new channel that I created called #data-is-beautiful (after a popular subreddit on the “front page of the internet” website known as reddit.com)

… See full entry

There is an excellent blog post from a very curious and original person that made geographic vonoroni maps in R that I’ve adapted to use with OSM attributes and geometery.

Blog post: https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/97256_125b33cf42414eda8797f53ac632628b.html

Code for doing this in OSM with a boundary shapefile.

… See full entry

This post serves as speculation.

Several contributors in OSM make changes in other countries than their own, that makes sense. When it comes to the description of their changesets though, many of them write in neither English nor local language (local for the area they make changes for). The local one is reasonable to not know. But not seeing a changeset for my area/country in either English or local (Greek in this case), makes no sense to me and also makes it difficult sometimes to understand why someone made a specific edit, no matter if it’s right or wrong.

My question though is: in which language should the changeset description be written in? English (as internationally mostly understandable language), the local language (of the area/country the changes are for) or the language of the contributor?

In my opinion, when we contribute somewhere, we want to make the local community understand why we did such changes.

Currently…

1. Getting started with JOSM
2. Building a relation of campus bike share stations
   • Should add all bike share stations first
   • How to add one decommissioned station?
   • Stations should be nodes or areas? (currently doing areas)
3. Adding grass details to Hilton Garden Inn
4. Adding grass details to ERQ

The description of the boundary between Electoral Areas C and D given in BC Orders-in-Council 3211/1973 and 2772/1975 is legally vague. The problematic text, as given in BC OIC 2772/1975, is shown in bold in the following excerpt, with context given for clarification. “Township 2” is found in Range 3, Coast District:

---

“thence northerly along the easterly boundaries of Sections 1 and 12, Township 2, to the point of intersection with the middle line of Bella Coola River;

“thence northwesterly along said middle line to the point of intersection with the northerly boundary of the South Half of Section 12;

“thence westerly along the northerly boundaries of the South Half of Section 12 and the Southeast Quarter of Section 11 to the northwest corner of said Southeast Quarter of Section 11;

“thence west to the point of intersection with the westerly boundary of the watershed of Salloomt River”

---

The problem is that the actual westerly boundary of the Salloomt River drainage basin lies to the east of Township 2, and therefore the intersection described in the problematic text does not exist.

A data source that differs from the Order-in-Council text has therefore had to be used to draw the boundary between Electoral Areas C and D, and this data source, which interprets the boundary in the area to which the above problematic text pertains, has been properly attributed.

I, Sanish Kumar from Haryana

(Guillaume and Allan wrote this together, and will therefore share the verbal abuse it will generate)

In its first seven months, the ‘new’ (well, no longer all that new) OSM Foundation Board of Directors has made progress on issues facing OSM and the OSM community:

… See full entry

Originally, I wrote this post for my blog: http://plepe.at/398

I love mapping for the OpenStreetMap project, it’s a very pleasing thing to do. I especially like to do it as vacation activity, because then I’m exploring new places anyway, but I also like to do it my home town.

Recently I’m concentrating on mapping artwork and memorials. Even in a well-mapped city like Vienna, Austria, there’s still plenty to do. For example, most social housing building complexes (Vienna is famous for it’s social housing) have some kind of artwork, e.g. some murals or statues in the gardens.

Some examples:

… See full entry

I learned the basics of OpenStreetMap and began doing things that were cool.

The error Al Midhnab, Al Qaşīm

Al Midhnab, Saudi Arabia

the correct (Al Mithnab)

Wrong with the translation into Arabic الميدهناب the correct المذنب

Please correct the error and translation

I’ve done a good amount of work to add basic geometry to Anchorage in the past. Now, I would like to store more data inside the polygons for buildings that have been created.

It is a difficult task to do quality control on the wide number of churches, schools, businesses, etc. in Anchorage because it is just too big. 100’s of buildings in each category where there are also points or multipolgons as well. To accomplish a definitive test of which polygons of a certain type have a data tag, I’ll need to use the overpass API. Fortunately, the work has mostly been done to use it as a tool by relying on R and the library osmdata.

For example, I’ve been able to query all of the amenities with “place_of_worship” to see what tags are available, and map the polygons on top of an osm basemap with the following code.

library(osmdata)
library(leaflet)
library(dplyr)
x <- opq(bbox = c(-150.092146, 61.483194, -148.981596, 60.814537)) %>% 
  add_osm_feature(key = 'amenity', value = "place_of_worship", value_exact = FALSE) %>%
  osmdata_sf()
y <- x$osm_polygons %>% filter(is.na(denomination))
leaflet(y) %>% addTiles() %>% addPolygons(popup = ~y$name)
y %>% as.data.frame() %>% select(name, email, website, phone, denomination) 

…This will show me which places of worship still need to have a denomination added. And I reuse this for different tags I want to add.

theguardian:
“Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is a ticket to explore the world again” ( 30 Jul 2020 )

“Most cities are procedurally generated by the AI, based data from OpenStreetMap and an algorithm that provides architectural rulesets for the program to work from.”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/jul/30/microsoft-flight-simulator-game

In the last board meeting the OSMF board has revealed specifics of their plans for paying people for software development work. These plans have apparently been in the making for some time - but so far the board had in public been very quiet about the details - it was first publicly mentioned in the June board meeting but just vaguely and without any specifics. That was the same meeting in which the microgrants selection has been approved.

The details were now made available just minutes before the meeting started (deja vue) - the plans amount to about half the volume of the microgrants program - but there are apparently further plans to also get financially involved in iD development - this has been hinted at in the meeting but details of this have not been revealed.

I want to share a few thoughts on the plans that came to light now - both on the procedural/policy side of them based on the perspective of for many years having critically followed OSMF work and also on the practical side and the likely implications this has on volunteer work and volunteer projects in the OpenStreetMap world based on more than five years of volunteer work on one of OpenStreetMap’s core projects - the OSM-Carto map style - and on more than 10 years experience as an entrepeneur in the cartography and geodata world.

On the procedural aspects

My critical view of the OSMF board moving more and more to making and deliberating decisions outside public scrutiny is well known and obviously applies here as well. But even if i accept this as a given and as how the OSMF works these days no matter how sharply this contrasts with OSM community values there is still significant peculiarity in the whole thing. This centers on how the three projects the board has selected now were chosen. There is no substantial communication about this but from context and from what has been communicated i see mainly the following options:

… See full entry

As part of phase two of the GSoC project, following work has been done.

Server is Online

At the end of phase one, we had a server up and running with nominatim-ui and elasticsearch server. This is from the machine provided to me as part of this project. It currently has the entire planet DB set up. Suggesstions were setup for few smaller DBs, but not for the planet DB as of now. There is constant debugging and changes going on, so the suggestions might not be available at all times. I will post another dairy update once the suggestions are completely available.

The server is hosted at http://95.217.117.45/nominatim/ui. This will be available only during the course of this GSoC project (till 31 August 2020). The suggestions are provided from a hug API call. This can be accessed at http://95.217.117.45:8000/pref?q=. This internally queries elasticsearch on the server and returns the results.

Elasticsearch configurations

Elasticsearch provides a lot of configurations, which can be tweaked to obtain optimal performance. For our setup, the requirements include: * Require less space. * Fast indexing

The following are few of the options in elasticsearch that were explored during this phase.

• For Indexing speed
• Setting refresh inteval
• setting number_of_replicas to 0
• Use auto-generated ids

These will be tested out with the planed DB indexing, which will be done soon!

Address formation

The address is being formed in all the languages entered in the Nominatim DB. You can look at all the languages by looking at the tags at http://95.217.117.45:8000/pref. For example: http://gsoc2020.nominatim.org:8000/pref/?q=bangalore%20north has the result: "addr": "Bangalore North, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka", "addr:kn": "ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಉತ್ತರ, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ನಗರ, ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ", "country_code": "in"

Indexing rate:

… See full entry

Today I learned that there’s a diary function in OSM. Huh. I would hardly refer to my region as “undermapped”, given that streets and addresses are all where they should be, but the wiki says that diary entries help in such regions, and my changes seem to be the most common ‘round these parts.

Since I’m new to this, I’ll explain my rationale for some changes so that the poor innocents that come after me have a reason behind the madness.

Several of the places I’ve been making changes to are just random additions to existing things, such as adding pavement types to roads and footpaths, adding the number of levels and roof types to buildings, and other small stuff like that. That all started months ago when I first learned about the Street Complete app. I liked adding detail to my neighborhood, but I wondered why my options for making changes were so limited.

Months pass, and one of the achievements in Street Complete pointed me towards a browser-based editor that I could use to make changes when I wasn’t walking around. One glance at my changesets as of a few weeks ago shows how well I took to the new editing tools.

Lacking any sort of guidance other than the brief tutorial, I started by adding “house” areas to houses in the area, but didn’t remove the existing address pins for fear of stepping on toes. Aerial images, my frequent walks, and plenty of COVID-19-induced alone time have led me to making more changes in the city, however.

Side note: read the documentation. It’s good for the soul.

More editing has taught me more about how the different parts of the map work together, and seeing those edits being uploaded to the other projects that take advantage of the OSM database is a very nice feeling.

I’ve recently added a new feature to https://map.atownsend.org.uk , prompted by the dreaded lurgi that is affecting everyone at the moment - the ability to show pubs with either outdoor seating or a beer garden.

Outside seating is shown like this:

with a black line at the bottom right of the icon.

Here’s a beer garden:

… See full entry