Objective

My objective is to represent Dominion Land Survey (DLS) land descriptions in OSM to aid with agricultural accounting and navigation in areas of Western Canada where civic addressing is either not fully implemented or not known. To that end, this entry serves as a draft proposal.

Background

Approximately 800,000 square kilometres of Western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and parts of BC) were subdivided according to the DLS. While many regions have implemented civic addressing (e.g. 12345 Road 321 W) for yard sites, DLS land descriptions (also known as legal descriptions) are still prevalent. Agriculture in particular relies on them to identify fields for crop insurance and on-farm food safety programs.

It it not uncommon for a field to span four land descriptions; I have personally worked with fields that spanned six due to their shape and placement. In the other direction, it is not uncommon for one land description to have multiple properties on it.

My initial focus is on Manitoba but I believe the process I’ve outlined below can be applied to the other Western provinces with minimal changes.

Steps to Implement in Manitoba

1. Import municipal boundaries from MLI (admin_level = 6). The datasource in question is named “Municipalities/Local Govt. Districts”. Cities and towns also show up in this dataset and will need to be filtered out.
2. Clean up shapefiles representing quarter sections, river lots and wood lots so each one is its own entity. They are currently a collection of lines with a centroid label.
3. Import land descriptions into OSM, ensuring a relationship marks them as part of their municipality. I suggest admin_level = 10 to put them on par with neighborhoods in urban areas since these, too, can contain more than one property.

Steps to Implement in Alberta

TBD

Steps to Implement in BC

N.B. admin_level = 8 for municipalities

TBD

Steps to Implement in Saskatchewan

TBD

Closing Thoughts

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Yet another big issue with a user mapping with Maps.Me In Bamako (Mali) this user https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/seydoukone mapped 3000 POIs, all with the office=government tag. You can left comment to his/her changeset, but Maps.Me doesn’t implement any messaging system. So, what can we do? Erase all the POI is not a good idea, because the user add pharmacies, fuel, etc. The only way is make pressure on the Maps.Me developers I think

test

I used 10 foot long 0.5 inch diameter electrical conduit for mapping outside. I connected pieces with some screw fastener thing.

1 pole works and is short.

2 poles kind of bend.

3 poles result in a tube bending and the far tip never leaving the ground.

The OSMF Board is asking the membership to approve an amendment to the Articles of Association that will allow Board committees (specified in the AoA as only consisting of Board members) to include any Foundation member, associate or full, to serve on a Board committee. The reason for this is that some of the Board’s administrative work, such as handling our finances, has proven very time consuming, more than one person can handle. Another sphere is the budget preparation, and yet another is fundraising. Since the Board is also hiring fulltime staff and engaging contractors, it needs help with oversight.

Some board members have been asked if this is intended to supplant the Working Groups. At least one diary entry has been posted by a community member asserting that this is the case, and urging Foundation members to vote against the amendment.

The proposed AoA amendment is NOT intended to supplant Working Groups. The Working Groups handle the substantive and administrative issues of the community, which is separate from the Foundation and the Board. The Working Groups would therefore not be affected. As I envision it, the Board committees would deal with personnel, budget, and fundraising, none of which fall in the remit of any Working Group.

I urge Foundation members to vote in favor of the AoA amendment, and then to volunteer to serve on one of the Board committees (and on Working Groups, too, but separately!)

I pointed out some of my concerns with the change to the OSMF articles of association and changes to who is to become eligible to a member on the the OSMF mailing list a couple of weeks back, see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-October/007231.html

Those comments were just on the general concepts that were being proposed not the actual text, which we have now received as part of the formal general meeting announcement.

Unluckily my concerns not only persist, they have increased with respect to the proposed change to the OSMFs articles that will allow the board to create committees that include non-board members.

Currently a large part of OSMFs business is carried out by working groups, in particular the OWG running the infrastructure, the CWG communicating on behalf of the OSMF and the LWG handling licence and other intellectual property matters.

The working groups go back to a OSMF board meeting in November 2008, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OcoOqas1NnOLyhiyFZk12K_BpjhWeXvVU7Nl4MDSGeU/edit?usp=sharing and it is clear that these were established to have topic specific groups in which the board could work on OSMF business with additional participants without having to have the full board present. With other words, working groups have always been board committees with additional members, that this practice wasn’t quite inline with the foundations articles was and has been just a bit of fuzziness among a lot of other issues that the OSMF has had.

… See full entry

I live in Fort Worth, TX, and have recently geolocated 367 emergency location signs that appear in parks and trails in Tarrant County, of which Fort Worth is the county seat. I would like to contribute them to OSM, but so far have not figured out the best/correct way to tag them. Any ideas or help out there? Thanks in advance!

I’ve made OpenStreetMap a major part of my life and work since 2005. It’s not just an audacious, community-built, complete, freely-licensed, street-scale map of the world. OSM is also a big tent that collects the skills and support of a huge range of individual and organizational contributors.

In 2021, OSM’s community has two opportunities to grow stronger together: we should make the OSM organization support a wider diversity of participants and we must succeed at starting to manage our technical operations professionally.

I’m a good candidate to help with both of these existing 2020 OSMF board goals. As a product and engineering leader in several organizations, I can help the Foundation succeed at finding and keeping great engineering talent. With my history on the community and business sides of OSM, I am experienced in making open data attractive to new community members and soliciting support from large organizations.

I’d like to make myself available for conversations with anyone who has questions about my candidacy, manifesto, priorities, or really anything else. I’m blocking these four times over the next two weeks prior to the close of voting and AGM on Dec 12; get in touch here or via my personal email if you’d like to chat by text, voice, or video!

• Dec 1, 16:00 PST
• Dec 3, 8:00 PST
• Dec 4, 16:00 PST
• Dec 9, 8:00 PST

Read my complete manifesto on the Wiki for more about why I think I’d make a good OSMF board member.

While working with the high-resolution data of the German census 2011, I noticed that there are still surprisingly many residential areas that are neither recorded as landuse=residential nor as building=*. This concerns mainly linear settlements or farms in the northwest of Germany.

There is now a MapRoulette-Challenge to map at least the landuse for these areas:

Unmapped residential areas in Germany

Please jump in and help if you are interested!

As a source for the challenge I compare the 100m×100m grid cells with the landuse and building polygons, which indicate residential areas: landuse=residential, but also landuse=farmyard, landuse=allotments and some more. For the buildings the residential types building=detached, building=house, etc. are used, but also building=yes.

In the process all census raster cells are deleted, which are at least touched or covered by these polygons. Then all clusters of connected grid cells are combined into one polygon. Of these, again only those are used, in which there are at least 12 persons living according to the census and which contain at least 2 raster cells. The priority of the tasks is set according to the number of inhabitants, so that “worse” cases are presented first in MapRoulette.

With this rigorous filtering I hope that really only the legitimate cases will be left. After all, there are still 2760 cases, so enough to do. The 2011 census is already quite old. Where several people lived 10 years ago, hopefully some of them will still live today.

A map of the mainly affected areas in northwest Germany:

… See full entry

How to we know that a node is snapped or not to a building for making its entrance , I mean is there any script or java script which we have to write for checking a node is snapped or not with a building which we want to make its main entrance of that building , plz share me some context to this and how to write and check different things by writing scripts.

Buildings in cities are often aligned along the streets, so, when squaring them, it also makes sense to align them along corresponding streets. To do: add a step to the data-preparing script that finds clusters of buildings based on their locations and azimuth to the north of buildings’ walls.

On 17 May 2020, I apparently had an invitation from fellow contributor GOwin for an interview in connection with a WeMap session featuring local mappers who, in GOwin’s words, “have been quietly contributing to OSM all these years”. Since I was busy juggling schoolwork and work-related stuff during this stretch of the year, I missed seeing the invite on time, ergo, missed the opportunity to share my story. Also, I just came back to mapping at OSM in November this year when I found out that our internet speeds here in Bontoc have improved a bit (not ideal, but far better than the last five years) to handle in-browser OSM mapping. Moreover, I finally installed JOSM successfully after many failed attempts in the past due to hardware issues. Now, I am adding my changesets using JOSM (still buggy with the most stable version, but working to my mapping needs at the moment nevertheless).

In this blog entry, I’ll share my would-have-been / could-have-been responses to the audio-visual interview that GOwin requested that we do. Of the eight (8) questions, I only managed to answer five (5) of them. The other three (3) were deliberately left unanswered because it felt I lack the experience to answer them substantially. My long absence from OSM also kept me away from updates within the OSM/FOSS4G community. For transparency, I’ll share the unanswered questions.

Here it goes:

… See full entry

Sumatra is currently underwater. I haven’t been here in a while and I don’t know where the opening is.

I’ve always being irked by OSM giving the wrong Postcode for some roads near my home area. Some roads give postcode 42000 but for some nearby it gives 41200.

Reading what Ionvia says enlightens …

• Nominatim has to go a different way to determine the most likely postcode for a place where no addr:postcode tag exists.
  • First - search address from specific up to country, use postcode for first found addr:postcode tag.
  • Second - area search, the closest postcode centroid is used

It turns out the roads in my area are almost exactly in between 42000 centroid and 41200 centroid as overlayed screenshot below shows …

Looks like long term solution to wrong postcode for my local area would be to tag Bandar Bukit Tinggi 2 with addr:postcode=41200 …

Since October, I started adding municipal units and communities (admin_level 8 and 9 respectively) in Greece, wherever it’s easy/sorta easy to do, because half of Greece lacks boundaries for anything lower than municipalities (admin_level 7).

I add them whenever I’m in the mood of dealing with it, just like today, when I tried to find an “easy” in boundaries perspective area to do so. The metropolitan area of Thessaloniki had most of those boundaries ready, and it already had few municipal units (from those which exist there) but with partially wrong info.

I even found two wrongfully drawn boundaries of two municipal units. Couldn’t find if this occurred since the first version of those boundaries or later, but for some reason both of them looked like the boundaries of the respected residential area rather than the administrative one. But I confirmed with geodata.gov.gr (Greek open geospatial data) and other online maps the proper positions of the boundaries and re-draw wherever needed. These two municipal units where Agios Pavlos of Neapoli-Sykies municipality and Triandia of Thessaloniki municipality.

In general, I added the missing municipal units and communities (or communes) of the municipalities: Ampelokipi - Menemeni, Kordelio - Evosmos, Neapoli-Sykies, Thessaloniki, Pavlos Melas and Pylaia - Chortiatis.

Reason for this post? Not any specific, I just liked that I added those missing in the metropolitan area of Thessaloniki, unlike the metropolitan area of Athens and Piraeus which is mostly complete in such boundaries.

Now the area in overpass-turbo looks more complete by admin-level :P

I’ve taken on the task of mapping allotments throughout Great Britain. I think there is a similarity between allotment users and OSM contributors, even if it’s not immediately obvious. Allotments are quite often community owned or some form of cooperative, but even the commercially owned ones have roots back to the Diggers when private land was reclaimed for public good and food production.

I’ve been thinking more about the overlap between Open Data, Free Software and the common land lately. I’m starting to think it’s all the same thing, a rebellion against private property and ownership. It’s about common good, and helping your neighbour. It’s about the future and your legacy. It’s about leaving the world slightly better than you found it.

I’ve created a MapRoulette Challange based on a subset of OS Open Greenspace. For some I can add little more than a rectangle with landuse=allotments, some I can see a few more details like paths and tracks. 1 2 3

For those who are not familiar with indoor=, I recommend consulting the introductory post. In short, it’s a map that displays the interior spaces of OpenStreetmap with a level selector.

A new version is available with improvements such as the heat map and a new styling.

Heat map

To rapidly visualize locations that are indoor mapped, indoor= can now display a low zoom heat map.

It will therefore be much easier to locate indoor mapped locations. Here are a few places that I discovered:

• Chicago Airport, IL, USA
• Singapore Airport, Singapor
• House of Commons, London, UK
• The White House, Washington D.C., USA

This work was carried out by Adrien Pavie.

New styling

In order to clearly distinguish the different interior spaces, the styling has been largely revised.

… See full entry

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in the Local Chapters and Communities Congress, where we celebrated and Joost Schouppe ceremoniously countersigned new local chapter agreements. At the beginning of 2020, the OSMF had 8 local chapters, all in Europe. Today we have 14 local chapters, on five continents: Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and as of the last OSMF Board meeting, Africa. Joost as Board secretary has done the lion’s share of the work in processing six applications so far this year and deserves kudos for his efforts.

Among other things we discussed what the role of local chapters should be in OSM governance. Nothing has been set in stone, and indeed the conversation in a breakout session on the topic was free-flowing. Rob Nickerson of OSM UK suggested that the local chapters might be asked to help decide on admission of new corporate members, and also to help the Board prioritize paid work (e.g., to help decide when volunteer contributions of labor are not keeping up and OSM needs to pay somebody to fix broken software). I think these are ideas worth considering.

The conversation yielded a suggestion that the OSMF Board assist local chapters and communities with fundraising and perhaps help coordinate fundraising.

I have my own thoughts on this–I don’t think the Board itself should be a source of funds for local chapters and communities, because that could lead to dependency relationships that would undermine the decentralized nature of the OSM community, one of its strengths. That said, there is perhaps a role for the Board in cooperating with the LCCWG to assist local chapters in raising their own funds and to ensure that we don’t interfere with each other in the process.

I’ve added a new page to the switch2osm guide: “Updating your database as people edit OpenStreetMap”.

It’s a bit overdue (it’s based on something I wrote about 4 years ago, and the software it uses predates that by a long way), but I think it is worth making available on the main site.

I’ve tested it both on Debian 11 and on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and have tried to make clear what you need to do differently in each case.

For completeness see also Ircama’s excellent guide which is well worth reading as it actually provides a lot more detail about the process, and also suggests how “osmium” may be used instead of “osmosis” to process OSM files.

Pumps cartography is useful in many ways in OSM and currently practiced around water wells. It’s possible to use the pump=* key to state for a pump availability on a given well only. The key actually refers to the pump drivers, a motor or a lever to manually move the pump.
It’s an important information as to know if you’ll be able to get water with or without physical effort.
For instance, it’s not yet possible to make a significant distinction between pumps running on electricity or gasoline engines among other possibilities.

Pumps are obvious but complex devices. Wikipedia already provides a comprehensive classification with up to 15 different kinds.

Each design have different capabilities and can be driven by numerous different drivers. OSM could get benefits from encouraging mappers to complete such detailed information with appropriate tags if they are knowledgeable to do so.
It’s clear that such information will help crisis management or emergency rescue teams to restore water supply if and only if they have appropriate generators or engines. Coming around a gasoline powered pump with a solar panel won’t help.
People themselves could be interested in case they have to bring their own material to get water.

… See full entry