My November 2020 in OSM

Here’s some of the things I’ve been doing in OpenStreetMap in November 2020. (Yes I know I’m posting this in late January, I’m sorry for being late. Hence some parts of this document will appear out of date)

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I have noticed an issue with the OSM map that it is a little blurry on all tiles, no matter what longtitude or latitude. Please help, I want it to be sharp again 😫

I’m excited about the idea of getting Fortuna’s roads and trails entirely covered with Mapillary. It makes editing OSM much easier for me, being able to look back on any bit of road I’ve driven on. I hope that the machine learning Mapillary does can one day make OSM mapping much, much quicker.

My main frustration with Mapillary (Android app) is that it has a poor sense for where the camera is pointing. I tell it my camera points forward, but 1/5 of the pictures are like, “are you sure you weren’t pointing 150 degrees backward.”

No. Normalize sequence.

The Geoglyph Meeting Circle 18m in diameter within a series of complex geometry of lines, connecting points, and unexpected alignments. The meeting circle shape also becomes repeated in a location 900m to the northeast. Located in an area of relatively low amounts of slope, the vast distances are difficult to fathom when you think of the primitive tools used to make them. The use of meeting circle is unclear as an overview with these maps. It is also difficult to say if the geoglyphs relate to each other or for that matter the layers of geoglyphs covered by time.

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Policy Special Committee of the OpenStreetMap Foundation has been asked by the Board of Directors to assess the degree to which Free and/or Open Source Software or Services are being used within the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF), the board itself, the different working groups, and committees. This analysis focuses on collaborative services to be used over the Internet. The FOSS Policy Special Committee was explicitly excluding the software used by the community at large, local chapters, or systems running on personal computers.

Indicators

The committee has defined two indicators that cover the most important aspects of freedom and openness of software. These are:

1. Programs or Services released under a Free and/or Open Source Software license: Are the programs or services used released under licenses that have been officially approved by either the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative. Only these licenses are following the standards to be considered free and/or open.

2. Control over data stored at hosted services: The key aspect of hosted services is the ability of the OSMF and the community to fully control the data hosted and to prevent this data from being used for other purposes by a third party. Some of such services are based on open-source software and can be self-hosted by the OSMF, then offering full control and ownership of the data. Non-open services usually do not offer this ability and the full control of the data is at least questionable if not completely impossible.

Inventory

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If you use the iD editor you are possibly familiar with the MapBox locator layer which appears as one zooms out. There’s a fairly recent post from MapBox about this layer (on Medium).

This transparent layer is also used in other MapBox products and therein lies a problem.

I noticed a tweet complaining about the position of a motorway (or planned motorway) on a local active travel portal for Newport, South Wales. Someone pointed out that the map is credited to OpenStreetMap & MapBox, which caused someone else to say:

“Well now I know why I don’t rely on open source maps …. it’s frustrating as ‘that’ m4 has been the source of plenty of political debate and has been widely regarded as the only way to solve Newport’s congestion”

It took me a while to work out what had happened (with help from russss & trigpoint). There have long been highly controversial proposals for a new route for the M4 motorway around Newport because the current route is prone to congestion. At some stage in Summer 2018 someone mapped one of the proposed routes on OSM (as highway=construction). This incorrect tag was not changed to proposed for several months, but the ways were then removed from OSM when the proposals were dropped in 2019.

Incidentally, it’s not the first tweet complaining about OSM from a cycle campaigner this week.

The one who solved the mystery of Taiwan Power Company grid, Dan Jacobson noticed that the dataset of Taiwan Power Company’s power pole is added with an additional field of coordinates. He announced his findings in OpenStreetMap Taiwan Facebook Group and Talk-TW mailing list.

But the data is released with TWD67 coordinates with special parameters, could not transform directly into WGS84. Thanks typebook for the help to transform the dataset into WGS84. It will make further works much easier.

Jacobson asked Taiwan Power company about the coordinates. He said that Taiwan Power Company will add the dataset with TWD96 coordinates. But we don’t know the exactly update date.

There are many dataset with coordinates released on Taiwan governments’ open data portals. These dataset includes police station, freeway ETC toll gates location, YouBike station is imported into OpenStreetMap. But for foundational dataset like address, there are only Tainan and Taichung address available. We Taiwanese Mappers want the whole country’s address dataset is released in the future.

Dear all,

Today, v5.3.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website) has been released. Once changes are deployed on the openstreetmap.org it will take a few days before all tiles show the new rendering. It may take longer than normal because there are significant deployment-related changes.

• External shapefiles for coastline and other data are now loaded into the database with a provided script.

• The recommended indexes are now required. Attempting to render without them will result in abysmal performance.

• amenity=embassy is no longer rendered, and office=diplomatic with diplomatic=embassy or diplomatic=consulate is instead.

• Mini-roundabouts are rendered like a turning circle.

• There is a new partial index for waterways

Anyone running their own install must run scripts/get-external-data.py and create the new indexes. People who are running with minutely diffs may be interested in https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/issues/386.

Thanks to all the contributors for this release, including hiddewie, crimsondusk, pitdicker, and terminaldweller, new contributors.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v5.2.0…v5.3.0

As always, we welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues

This geoglyph appears to be a 50m wide x 75m long shrimp with a rounded tail. with a stinger. It is sideview orientation has its head northerly and its tail southerly with its feet’s orientation facing east. It has a set of dark round eyes on its head.. The object is etched on a moderately sloped terrain and nearby, to its south is a geoglyph of a puffer fish.

The look of this object is difficult to decipher and still in progress.

As you will no doubt have heard, browser support for flash went away at the end of last year. As you can read here, Potlatch 3 has been released and downloads for Windows and Mac are available. Linux users are asked to “Use Wine to run the Windows installer”. You may be wondering “why?” - there’s a section at the end of this diary entry that covers that. First, the “how”:

What do I need to do?

There are lots of different Linux distributions out there. Most have some sort of package manager and in most of those “wine” will be available as a package. Here is what I needed to do on a couple of desktop Ubuntu systems (both using KDE) - one running 18.04 LTS, the other 20.04 LTS.

Firstly, install Wine itself:

sudo apt install wine64

Next, you’ll probably need to install some fonts that software that normally runs on Windows needs. You can do this via a helpful script Winetricks. First, install cabextract, which is needed by the script:

sudo apt install cabextract

Next, decide where to install the “winetricks” script. I’ll put it in an existing user “bin” directory, so:

cd ~/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks

Next, install the fonts:

winetricks corefonts

Finally download Potlatch 3 (choose the “Windows application” option, which is a zip file) from the download page, unzip it, and run it:

wine64 Potlatch.exe

Follow the instructions that are presented and accept the defaults to “just install” it.

Running Potlatch 3

When Potlatch runs, you’ll initially see the whole world zoomed out. Rather than zooming in manually you can then “edit with remote control” from the openstreetmap.org site to go to wherever you are currently looking at there, and you can also search for any sort of OpenStreetMap URL to jump straight to it. “GPS / My tracks / load” loads GPS traces.

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The geoglyph of a shark is a 75m long x 35m wide and is an oriented to head southwest (head) and northeast (tail) on relatively flat grade. It seems to be pointed towards a series of multiple geoglyphs just 200m to the southwest. To the northeast, a very interesting Mandela Square (also, not a perfect square) is located just around 700m away.
it is a side view of the shark and there is no other indications of other nearby geoglyphs immediately associated to this graphic.

The geoglyph of a coiled snake 100m wide x 125m long (including the coil) and oriented in a northeast (head) to southwest (coil including tail) direction is adjacent (approx. 5m) to some Nazca lines and similar geometrical shapes. The coil followed by a straight body, eye, wide open mouth and forked tongue makes the snake look like its hissing as a warning. The snake appears to sit on a trapezoid shaped feature. It is possible that the snake is inside a box or container. It is difficult to tell more about what this snake is doing.

The 30m wide x 50m long geoglyph of a flying feather crane drawn on a relatively flat surface appears to be oriented northeast (head) and southwest (tail) Its smallish head with eye, Long beak, long neck, body and two wings seems to be carrying some kind of food or nesting material. There also. seems to be a long geoglyph line behind it, possibly showing the birds curving flight path?

TL;DR I wrote new console app that takes GTFS as an input and tells you exact changes you need to do in OSM to make it as close to GTFS as possible. Head to source to start using it.

Try it out on your GTFS and let me know how it went! I am open to suggestions, new ideas and new checks!

Description

Purpose of this tool is to help find errors and differences between GTFS and OSM data. It will also help point to errors in PTv2 routes in OSM. It covers wide range of errors, tag checks, geometry checks… (when I say “wide”, I really mean it! - check README.md to keep me honest, I am really proud what you can check today).

Once you import data in OSM (or when new version of GTFS data is released), you can use this tool to check if all data from GTFS is imported in OSM correctly and what are differences.

Tool is heavily relying on PTv2 spec and do not try to deviate from it. One would might say it is “opinionated”:)

This tool is not general-purpose PTv2 quality assurance tool, even though it points to a lot of PTv2 errors in OSM. It is handy if you are OK with console output and quick iterations as you can grep it, cron it, sed it as you like. Check this wiki for other great tools.

Why new tool

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The British Cartographic society has published a short free book about Cartography. It gives and overview of the purpose of cartography and it’s main principles. Quick but very worth read for all mappers.

You can find it here:

https://f0155d17-53eb-490a-9dcc-52cbf565c50d.filesusr.com/ugd/583f72_3075f98310fb4b159a6bfad636b97643.pdf

[In continuation of „Sidewalks by length“ blog post.] As requested there, below chart for all of the world. Also chart for the US East coast, where, by their length, a whopping quarter of all of the worlds footway=sidewalk are located. 60% of the whole earth set is in the US alone (excluding Hawaii and Alaska.) As clearly can be seen, in the US this method trumps the other one, of mapping sidewalks as a property of the streets, they are part of.

For the the world outside of the US, the ratio is not as decisive, but rather more on par. Mapping sidewalks as footways seems, to use a highbrow term in the sense it is sanctioned by the Oxford English Dictionary, prevalent in US mapping.

For a popularity contest, the total alone is sufficient to declare a winner. To determine popularity in this contest though, where every voter has an unlimited number of votes, the number of voters is of interest too, and also the distribution in the number of votes spent per voter.

This requires a bit of hand-waving, errm, a little overpass-turbo experiment, first zoom out to all of the world, sorry, that probably will timeout the query, so settle in on the area from Richmond to Boston - https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/12M7

OHSOME counts 20,000 km in cumulated length, overpass returns 160,000 objects by 2,460 users, which might not be too far off (average length 125m). Paste the data in a spreadsheet and do a bit of more hand-waving - 50% of the data was last modified by 1.6% of the users. Not quite a few have spent quite a lot of votes, so to say. Sidewalk mapping seems to be popular with a select few, most prolific individuals. In statistics speak: The mean being ten times the median being six times the mode, it’s a heavily skewed distribution, where practically all of the contributions come from the outliers.

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I am mapping because I want to map the world better. For a better experience.

better map - better experience

I want to add veryfied information and help every user using OSM or a connected application.

I’m running for reelection to the OpenStreetMap U.S. board of directors.

For those who don’t know me, I’ve been contributing to the OpenStreetMap project as a volunteer since April 2008, mostly as a mapper and an advocate for the project. I love pondering tagging dilemmas and seeding the map with a level of detail that pleasantly surprises users and gets them off the sidelines. (As for my day job, I’m proud that the iOS software I write at Mapbox is powered by OSM data, but I’m my own board member and mapper.)

In my position statement last year, I wrote about the need to build bridges. Since then, OSMUS and the OSMF achieved normalized relations via a local chapter agreement. Without the distraction of local chapter negotiations, we can look forward to partnering with OSMF in forging less obvious relationships that bring more participants into the OSM project.

I had looked forward to meeting many of you at this year’s State of the Map U.S. conference in Tucson. Instead, we responded to the upheaval of 2020 by organizing the Connect conference and continuing a series of Virtual Mappy Hours that ranged from imports to issues of social justice – all at a safe distance online. I hope you found these events to be as worthwhile (and as much of an escape) as I did.

As a board member, I arguably had the least hands-on role in each of these team efforts. My job has been to connect them to the bigger long-term picture. It’s important for me to give our executive director, Maggie, the room to get the implementation details right but also be available for a gut check or proofread as needed.

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The pandemic changed the OSM-PH community plans for the year in 2020. In person meetups became online and we had to adjust our big plans for this new approach. I collected the publication materials we posted in our social media account to get a broad sense of what we did last year.

The montage above is a small collection of them. Some highlights.

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A geoglyph 50m wide x 100m long, oriented northwest (head) and southeast (feet) on flat land shows a woman sauntering quickly in a long robe, and head scarf in a westerly direction while carrying some kind of moderately sized object at waist side. The image is created as a side view thus allows the viewer to see her face in profile, one hand, two feet, and her body in motion. She is drawn on some relatively flat land, and there are other geoglyphs nearby.