Point symbols need generalisation as much as any other type of object, because in small scales they also start competing for the space on the map. Usually (in popular internet maps) the most primitive way of point generalisation is chosen: points are classified, priorities are assigned to classes and then lower priority point is simply not rendered if a point with the higher priority is already rendered in the same space. If there is more than one point with the same piority in the same spot - result is even worse - decision is random.

Such solution is of course not ideal. There are a number of ways to generalise points: displacement, aggregation, symbol combination etc. Only one option, which was chosen for Lithuanian river map, will be described in this entry.

Initial situation is that sometimes rivermap points are so close one to another, that one of them is removed or they overlap:

… See full entry

I haven’t had much experience in performing an import and the Orange County, California buildings and addresses is the first (and at this rate only) import I’ve instigated.

Other Imports

I assisted with a building import for Cupertino when I lived in Silicon Valley. And I added a couple of buildings in support of the Los Angeles County import a few of years ago. But in both cases my contributions were very small.

Most of my experience with imports has been in attempting to clean them up.

TIGER and NHD

Anyone who has edited in the United States will have run into “TIGER deserts” and I’ve spent my time in purgatory in those deserts. And if you‘ve edited in the rural areas of California may have run into some imports from the national hydrological dataset (NHD) which doesn‘t seem to be much better for water than the old TIGER was for roads. The two can interact in annoying ways. At least annoying to someone who has a desire to keep the number of suspect issues reported by Osmose down. For example:

… See full entry

I need to collect and fix the memories Trying to be more positive

“The last remnants of the Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso”

Amazon, the world’s largest forest, is spread over Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador, among other countrie.

The northern part of the state of Mato Grosso has been under more intense pressure in recent years from cattle ranches, soy plantations and gold mining on indigeneous lands. Indigenous reserves are the fragments of forest that can be observed by aerial imaging.

The state of Mato Grosso is one of the largest in Brazil, and has much to be mapped yet, not only of the Amazon rainforest but also of the Cerrado and the Pantanal.

osm.org/#map=8/-10.436/-59.063

“Os ultimos remanescentes da floresta Amazonica no Mato Grosso” A Amazonia é a maior floresta do mundo, espalhando-se pelo Brasil, Peru, Venezuela e Equador entre outros países.

A parte norte do estado do Mato Grosso vem sofrendo nos ultimos anos uma pressão mais intensa por parte das fazendas de criação de gado de corte, soja e o garimpo nas terras indigenas

As reservas indigenas são os fragmentos de floresta que se pode observar pela imagem aérea.

O estado do Mato Grosso é um dos maiores do Brasil, e tem muito a ser mapeado ainda, não só da Floresta Amazonica mas também do Cerrado e o Pantanal.

I have been working recently in the mapping of the following sites:

1. Bahía Kino
2. Nuevo Kino
3. Isla de Tiburon
4. Punta Chueca and Seris communities
5. Surrounding highways
6. Mountain range

If you are a local or have information on the area please contact me.

this isn’t really about OSM, it’s about how to protect our privacy while on a OSM-centered Telegram group. I manage the Comunidad OSM Panamá Telegram group, and since the Covid-19 struck worldwide, also our group started to be targeted by several types of scammers and spammers, so I looked for options to contrast the events and shield the users of the group from the nuisance.

Initially, I participated in the osmallgroups Rose federation, but I came in disagreement with the most active admins in the federation, as to how aggressively ban potential scammers. My point of view was that, at the first hint of suspicion the person has nothing to do with OSM, with the area, with geography, and is only looking for sources of Telegram user contact details, the correct action is to ban immediately, possibly contacting them with the invitation to tell me that they are legitimate OSM mappers. This was not the shared opinion in that Rose federation, so I left and developed the following protocol.

Each new member gets a message inviting them to mention their OSM user name, and are warned this is an anti-spam measure. Failure to comply results in ban within the first few hours. I then privately write to check the intentions of the user. Up to now I have not had a single false positive. In at least two occasions I saw the person joining and immediately leaving the group.

To reduce the impact of my instructions to Rose in the group, I use a “federation” and a parallel group, where I issue the /fban command to Rose. Rose reacts to that and removes the user from all other federated groups, that includes the Comunidad OSM Panamá. All that people in the real group will see is “Rose removed user Xxx”, something that happens without the Rose avatar. Soon after, this becomes “Rose removed DELETED”.

The other detail that needs to be mentioned, that’s Rose’s ability to log events to a channel. I need that in order to have the necessary user details to invoke the /fban command.

… See full entry

Cycling highways are a ‘thing’ in Belgium and The Netherlands, or rather, they will be.

Some stretches already exist, others are still in the planning phase.

The intent is to have them as bidirectional ways for cyclists, ideally 4m wide, without car traffic. Often alongside railroads or canals, sometimes instead of disused railways. Where they cross motorways bridges are planned.

Usually they are also open to pedestrians, horseback riders, skeelers, etc. Some were not open to speed_pedelecs, but that is getting resolved.

In practice there will be certain parts that will always be ‘shared’ with car traffic though and where they cross busy national roads the cyclists won’t have priority for obvious reasons. Building bridges and tunnels everywhere is not possible either.

So more than half of them are still in the planning stage. On OpenStreetMap I like the ability to show where they are planned.

… See full entry

Ahead of the State of the Map 2020 conference, which was supposed to take in place in Africa for the first time, but was held online due to COVID-19, OSM Africa surveyed OpenStreetMap community leaders in different countries in Africa, to assess the state of OpenStreetMap in their countries. We heard back from 52 out of the 55 countries in Africa and the results were presented at the conference.

OSM Africa is a network of OpenStreetMap communities from all over Africa working together to grow OpenStreetMap on the continent.

The brightest spots on the map below illustrate substantial amounts of OpenStreetMap node density in different places in Africa.

This visualization shows the total number of mapped buildings per year in each country from 2007 to 2020. Which also shows the history and journey of OpenStreetMap editing in Africa.

… See full entry

looking at making this do my bidding and give me the nautical chart info. not sure if it will work but worth a try.

I believe I cleared most of east coasts’ osmose warnings a while ago. However, new warnings/errors keep popping up. Either osmose revised their rules, or new (non-local) mappers keep adding stuff that trigger osmose’s detection algorithm.

Also these mappers keep re-aligning existing ways to Maxar, despite there’s no indication that the new imagery is any more accurate than Bing. When 90% of the area was traced to Bing, why shift a portion to Maxar? If that’s the intention, why not shift everything to Maxar while you are at it and make them standardized. It’ll surely do wonders to your KPI, in addition to your ‘smoothing’ of highways.

That and reclassifying highways in a country you never step foot on.

Kratom mixed with Coke sounds good now…

-peace out-

We’ve been keeping busy this summer! Here are the highlights for the July releases.

Easier Challenge Creation

We completely redesigned the Challenge Creation Wizard, with a focus on gathering the essentials first, and de-emphasizing less-used settings and options. If you have used the Challenge Creation wizard before, we hope you will appreciate the improvements! And if you have never tried to create a MapRoulette Challenge before, give it a try and see how easy it is to create Tasks for fellow mappers to solve!

Leaderboard Improvements

You can now select a custom date range for the Leaderboard. Existing options like ‘Past Year’, ‘Past 3 Months’, etcetera, will still be available. We also show some more detail about the Challenges most worked on by the top MapRoulette mappers.

Global Live Activity View

Have you ever wanted to see where mappers are solving Tasks in MapRoulette right now? You can now, with the new Global Activity view! You can see new Tasks being solved on a world Map, and a live stream of the activity as well. It’s still experimental and we would love to hear what you think about it!

New Translations

The MapRoulette community has been hard at work translating the MapRoulette UI into more languages. It is great to see MapRoulette become available in more mappers’ native languages! It’s easy to participate in the localization effort at Transifex.

See Nearby Next Tasks

When you confirm and finish a MapRoulette Task, you will now see a map showing more nearby Tasks to solve. You can select whether you would like to work on a Nearby Task next, or a Random Task. This new interactive map view can help you choose!

Set Preferred MapRoulette Tags

… See full entry

Dirt Road CR 950

After a large number of delays, mainly to due to late breaking issues with undocumented behaviour changes and other issues due to the androidx migration, I’ve tagged the 15.0.0 release. Installable APKs should be available from google play and the Vespucci github repository in the next couple of days (not from f-droid which is lagging a quarter of a year currently and is unlikely to fix its build problems any time soon).

More information on the future of the app will be announced later.

End of support for pre Android 4.0 devices

Version 15 no longer supports devices with Android versions older than 4.0 / API 14. We’ve now migrated the Vespucci code base to use the “androidx” libraries to provide backwards compatibility over multiple Android versions and there is no feasible way to continue to use the old support libraries that would be necessary for older Android versions.

Import note: even though the app will work on Android 4.0 devices, devices with Android version prior to 4.1 do not have TLS 1.2 support that is required for accessing the OpenStreetMap API since August 2nd 2020. If you are experiencing authorization issues on Android versions between 4.1 and 4.4 see Can’t (re-)authenticate - TLS 1.0 / 1.1 issues.

Support for array like semantics for multi-selects

In some circumstances, tags with multiple objects have array-like semantics (that is a fixed number of elements) contrary to being variable length lists. A typical example are lane related tags, which contain the number of elements in the lanes (or lanes:forward and lanes:backward) tag. There is no practical difference for tags that need to have a value for every element, but in the case of tags that have free form, potentially empty values, for example destination:lanes, there was previously no way of indicating this in the preset.

… See full entry

GaiaGPS.com seems to rely heavily on OpenStreetMap so I am hoping that by contributing to OpenStreetMap that I can improve the usability of GaiaGPS.com.

With the Local Chapters & Communities Working group (part of the OSMF), we did a quick review of the websites of all the official Local Chapters. This is quite interesting, as these sites all have basically the same mission - and still are hugely diverse.

All of these website focus on helping mappers find the community and/or to help outsiders understand what OSM is all about. Maybe surprisingly, none of these websites are map-centered. On some of them, it’s hard or even impossible to find an interactive map. There’s several creative attempts to build the content around a map - especially the Czech website is quite succesful at that.

… See full entry

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