I’d like to start a discussion to arrive at a consensus of standardising placenames in Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Please comment on this entry if you would like to participate, as well as your initial thoughts and ideas.

If we have enough people who are interested in this, I will set up a more permanent place and channel for discussion (a wiki page or a mailing list).

I spend hours studying news reports and carefully tracing building outlines in Malden, noting which ones did or didn’t survive the Babb fire.

And then a bunch of wanna-be do-gooders come by and crap out HOT-quality mapping, complete with duplicate buildings, vehicles mapped as buildings, scribbled outlines, and nothing but self-congratulatory hashtags for edit summaries. I think I’m going to just revert the whole batch.

The US 2020 Election is just 41 days away. Like some states my home state of Washington is all mail in ballots. But you don’t actually have to mail in your ballot for it to be counted. You can also drop your ballot off at any one of the counties ballot drop box locations.

The county has a map of all their locations but it’s not always clear exactly where the drop box is located. So what’s a OSM mapper to do? Go out and map them. The last two locations, Concrete and at the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe were added this afternoon. The Sauk-Suiattle is located in the Southeast portion of the county near Darrington, WA. While much of the county lies to the east, hardly anyone lives there.

I encourage everyone to get out and map polling stations and drop boxes where appropriate.

Tagging is simple amenity=polling_station plus polling_station=ballot_box for drop box locations. Additional tags can include operator and opening_hours.

… See full entry

So I figured I’d add it to cycle.travel’s elevation graphs. It was already in the turn-by-turn instructions, but this is still more fun.

mountain_pass=yes or natural=saddle as a node on the highway, with a name= tag too (obviously).

One does not simply stop mapping 𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒕 / 𝒕𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒂𝒄𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕

I recently wrote about using the JOSM Conflation plugin to identify traffic lights in OSM missing from the TfNSW’s open data.

Now TfNSW have released some data on enforcement cameras, so I’ll try again using JOSM.

1. Download the CSV data
2. Rename the Lat (1) and Long (1) headers to Latitude and Longitude. 3 Open the CSVs in JOSM.
3. Select all the imported nodes from the Fixed Speed Cameras and replace all the tags with highway=speed_camera
4. In JOSM, download existing speed cameras as a new layer from overpass with ((type:node and highway=speed_camera) or (type:relation and enforcement=maxspeed)) in "NSW, AU"

5. Conflate

6. Select all the nodes from Red Light Speed Cameras, and replace all the tags with highway=speed_camera
7. Conflate again.

سيسموني سه ني ني

I have created 3 or 4 blogs over the last 15 years. Unfortunately I lost interest after the first entry and never made a second.

Maybe this will be different?

Recently, I came across an OpenStreetMap changeset with “Review requested” tag. The change was addition of a bus route relation in Istanbul, by Alikam.

I navigated to IETT’s (the governing body of Istanbul’s transport network) website to cross reference the route maps. I noticed that there were some minor differences between the route on IETT’s website and Alikam’s version on OSM. The route wasn’t following the exact roads. This wasn’t a major issue but I still commented on the changeset, mentioning discrepancies between the two versions. Alikam, who’s an urban planning student and OSM contributor with a priority on transport network, wrote back a few hours later to tell that the major junction at that point had been rebuilt as part of the construction of a new underground line. Apparently due to that major change in the highway infrastructure, the bus route have been changed as well. But as of this writing, IETT haven’t updated their website to reflect the relevant changes. Meanwhile, thanks to Alikam and all the contributors like them, OpenStreetMap is more up to date than the official source for Istanbul’s transport network.

This wasn’t a major issue, but it makes one think if there are other cases where people rely on the official/private/closed data and left stranded or were late to a very important meeting (I’ll give you a clue, answer is yes).

So kudos to Alikam and all those great contributors of this wonderful open community.

Mark Nilphamari as a city & hometown.

Nilphamari (Bengali: নীলফামারী জেলা, Nilphamari is one of the major cities in Bangladesh and Rangpur Division. Nilphamari Zila is a district in Northern Bangladesh. It is a part of the Rangpur Division. It is about 400 kilometres to the northwest of the capital Dhaka. It has an area of 1,547 square kilometres (597 sq mi). Nilphamari is bounded by Rangpur and Lalmonirhat in east, Rangpur and Dinajpur in south, Dinajpur and Panchagarh in west, Cooch Behar of India in north. There are many rivers in Nilphamari such as the Tista, Buritista, Isamoti, Jamuneshwari, Dhum, Kumlai, Charalkata, Sorbomongola, Salki, Chikli, Deonai and many more.

Nilphamari (নীলফামারী) Location of Nilphamari District in Bangladesh Location of Nilphamari District in Bangladesh

Wikimedia | © OpenStreetMap Expandable map of Nilphamari District Coordinates: 25.95°N 88.95°E

Country: Bangladesh Division: Rangpur Division City: Nilphamari

Area • Total 1,643.70 km2 (634.64 sq mi) Population (2011 census) • Total 1,907,497 • Density 1,200/km2 (3,000/sq mi) Time zone: UTC+06:00 (BST) Postal code: 5300 HDI (2018) 0.614 medium · 7th of 21 Website: www.nilphamari.gov.bd

SiS555

At 10:30 am 9/18/2020 I joined OpenStreet, looking for a volunteer opportunity as I approach retirement.

At OpenStreetMap related conferences, I always look forward to the technical talks so that I can learn and improve my mapping skills. Equally important are the community building talks, this gives me great perspective on how mapping communities are nurtured around the world especially for countries whom I share the local context and culture.

For a crowdsourcing online community like us, however, community stories are often relegated as side tracks or lightning talks in a smaller room. If we truly believe that the strength of OSM is the community, these stories should be front and center in our interactions especially during conferences.

This is what we tried to do within our own community events. Here are two events I helped co-organized that is aimed at increasing the audience listening to our community stories.

State of the [country] talks are plenary sessions in the State of the Map Asia in 2016.

We decided that all country status reports at SoTM-Asia in 2016 will be reported to the plenary. This ensures that everyone hear and learn how each country are building their own community.

… See full entry

Tried to upload edits in newest JOSM but validation crashed the program with out of memory. Allocated 4GB, but JOSM said gib more clay, so added 2GB more. Still failed. All six cores of my (uber powerful FX) were pegged at 100%, eventually I had to kill java. Tried with the previous version with the same result. Finally, after a few restarts, I uploaded my edits without any validation checking. That’s a first for me.

It’s kinda strange. I only got about 800 objects to upload and it failed. I regularly uploaded more than that, almost double, successfully while also fixing all the validation flags that I can fix. The only thing different that I can think of is that I used the remote control feature for fixing a couple of notes from main openstreetmap website.

Anyways… happy mapping!

Hi! Thanks for your recent fixes!

I have a question to you as a pilot: I touched up many airports in OSM, and I was always wondering: how do real pilots use OSM if at all, what is helpful to pilots and people working airports, are there certain details that should not be posted due to security considerations, any details that are available on commercial maps that are just confusing when they present in osm?..

Would you be willing to write about this, maybe in an OSM diary entry?

Thanks!

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When considering airports, you must put into account security awareness. All mappers should make sure when mapping an airport to not change any fencing prior to your edits unless it is because of new satellite imagery. Also, DO NOT publish info about codes or key locations. This can cause serious problems. Pilots do not use OSM because of the lack of measurements as pilots need them.

Kingfishers in Ypsonas - September 2020

Noor City 2 - Kirkuk - Turkish Visa

oh my god there are so many garages in my town. its packed enough that most houses dont have attached garages but most have space in the back of the property to put one along a side road. twice the zone work as any other suburban area. god.

edit: just realized these diaries get put into a public feed. a lot are more organized than stupid ramblings like this, or serve as announcements. think ‘journals’ or ‘notes’ would be a more fitting term if that’s the intended use for this. I read ‘diary’ and assumed it was just for writing whatever

Mapping

For a good part of a year I have been marking street level imagery instead of Aerial Imagery.

I though Aerial Imagery was zoomed out a lot and Street Level imagery was close to the ground. Sorry.

If you are a user of OsmAnd Maps for iOS, you might have to refrain from using the current version (3.14) to edit OSM POIs. I just figured out that, after editing a bunch of POI opening hours in my suburb, the changeset also affected the locations of the POIs, even though I did not touch that.

It looks like the editor rounds the coordinates of the POIs to 6 significant figures, which might look like a move of only a few meters on the map, but the changes get more drastic as you move away from the equator and the meridian. I suspect people editing in Oceania and East Asia will see more obvious changes.

In this picture, from data in eastern so-called Australia, the arrowheads roughly show where the POIs should be, and the green line shows the longitude where they were moved:

… See full entry