Last night I sat and armchair-mapped a load of hospital buildings for Northwick Park Hospital here in North West London

I tend to follow a rule of no armchair mapping in the UK these days, but I have a few extenuating considerations where I allow myself to break that rule. This is a big hospital. It’s the kind of thing we should certainly have mapped properly across London and the whole UK. I’ve armchair-mapped quite a few hospital buildings like this in Africa after all! I wonder how many other UK hospitals are missing building detail.

Actually the omission seemed wierd to me, as if maybe the buildings had been mapped but recently deleted. I thought it looked as though somebody had swept in and hit delete but missed just one or two little buildings (that little dentist), but how to prove it? I spent some time trying to figure out if I could find deleted nodes in a very constrained bbox e.g. using Overpass date features, but I gave up. Finding deleted data is difficult.

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So, while adding houses to my town, I decided to spruce up the local amusement park, though I have been waiting for it to fully render to be able to show the work.

It has bugged me for quite a long to how sparse and barren it is, also including only 2 of the 4 toilet blocks! It is also a shame that car parks that are marked as grass display as grey!

Would be nice for the roller_coaster=track to render, as it seems they have been moving to that quite a bit

A big mystery though was that my larger screenshots i have for before and after show a mysterious community centre appearing, and some bridges over a river, which i didn’t add myself! relief knowing there is at leat 1 other person out there editing this town!

As part of my internship with OpenStreetMap I decided to do a report for all the research I have gathered since January. At the beginning of the internship I was learning about administrative boundaries between counties, how the are established and issues that may arise from them. As I am from Carlow, I became very interested in the boundary between Carlow and Laois. The town Graiguecullen is bisected by a between the two counties.

As you can see from the picture, this boundary bisects residential areas and buildings which can lead to problems for the locals of Graiguecullen. In 2016 there was a Laois/ Carlow boundary review held by local government and the result of the review was that the boundary should remain the same.

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Taginfo is a way of finding out what tags and values are used within OpenStreetMap. There’s a worldwide instance here, and other instances exist, including various Geofabrik ones such as Antarctica here.

As well as describing keys and values used within OpenStreetMap, the worldwide instance of Taginfo also holds details of what other projects use particular OSM tags. The Taginfo/Projects page explains the update process.

Each project submits a .json file containing details of key and value usage, such as this one for an OSM Mug.

The one for the map style that I look after is here. Currently I’ve just submitted a list of keys, not values, but I have included a description for each one, as can be seen here for “designation”.

The first challenge was to create the initial list. There are references to tags in three main places in my map style - the lua style file, the carto .mml file and the individual carto .mss files such as this one. A bit of investigation (creating a unique sorted list of strings within style.lua on one hand and .mml and .mss files on the other found that although some keys do pass through style.lua unchanged, almost no keys that are later used in carto files aren’t mentioned in style.lua at all. That means that I only needed to worry about keys in style.lua. I created an initial .json in the correct format and then wrote a shell script to generate the “tags:” section of the .json file. I then filled in the descriptions where the shell script had just created placeholders, and checked it in.

Next, I wanted to be able to easily update the taginfo.json file after changes to the map style. Because I’ve also checked the previous generated file into github I can easily create a new one and compare the two:

sh -x ./taginfo_lua_genkeylist.sh > q.txt
diff taginfo_lua_nodesc.txt q.txt

for the most recent change the output of that is:

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Let’s say you have a georeferenced POIs list, and you want to put that information into OSM.

The (theoretical) below example suppose you’ve registered the caves in an area, and you’ve a spreadsheet with the following infos:

• lat / lng of the cave entrance
• elevation of the cave entrance
• name of the cave
• length

Question : if it’s on our own work (direct knowledge), we’ve to document the job following the wiki import rules? Maybe depending how huge are the data?

However, this is the workflow I suggest (hoping this could be enough also as documentation of an import project), it can be used with any kind of POIs.

Tools used:

• Overpass Turbo
• Josm, with the following plugins: utilsplugin2, opendata, ToDo

Steps:

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why this page

I’ve found myself presenting my schema for scan/spam containment on Telegram to different people, writing more or less each time the same stuff. this page summarizes the policy I developed.

why a Telegram group?

it was the path of least resistance, I started simultaneously exploring the official Wiki pages, and the official forum for Panamá, and we missed a mailing list. after a fruitless attempt at creating one, I made a “temporary” Telegram group, which is still there while I don’t think a mailing list would be of any extra value, in particular considering the activity on the talk-latam mailing list, kept alive by the weekly link to the newsletter.

where do I use this?

the Comunidad OSM Panamá and the OpenStreetMapOffTopic are the two groups I manage thanks to a @MissRose_bot administrator, with similar settings.

what is the user experience?

a new user is offered a text telling them what is the group, where they need to click on a button within a short period of time, and inviting them to provide a short message for the people already in the group. in my experience, scammers tend to join several groups at the same time, and will not care to read this invitation, so they can be kicked from the group before they come back to it.

welcome text will disappear after they have been acknowledged by the new user, or when the new user is kicked from the group. the idea is not to clutter the group with technical messages. the bot will also delete all joining and leaving notifications, which I also consider cluttering.

join and leave notifications will be logged to a parallel channel, meant for administrators or for anybody wondering about how much work it is, to administer a Telegram group.

any administrative action like banning users will be taken in a parallel group, only meant to receive commands to the bot, again reducing clutter in the group.

what tasks for the administrator?

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osm.org/way/85502172/history

A random discussion on the OSM World Discord server yesterday led me to do two things I don’t do often:

1. Edit the OSM Wiki
2. Map outside my area

The question was posed, how to tag a coal heap, the kind used for storage, typically next to a coal-fired plant of some kind? There were several ideas, and you can find examples of them out in OSM.

• landuse=landfill + resource=*

This, to me, feels like tagging for the renderer, but I can understand it. A lot of these heaps have a similar form to open-air landfills: bulldozers pushing and piling mounds of incoming material. But the function is quite different, and the landfill page is clear in that it stores waste.

In the case of coal heaps (and, as I thought about it, sand, salt, and gravel, too), there’s more or less a permanent “heap” site that grows and shrinks as the resource is used and replenished. Not all are permanent enough to warrant mapping, but the heaps near coal-fired power plants have their own infrastructure, so it feels mappable.

Interestingly, there are some examples in France of former coal mines that were filled in, and in those cases, the combination of those tags makes total sense. Otherwise, no.

• landuse=landfill + material=*

Seems to have more use, existing usage appears to be coal heaps and similar. Again, landuse is not the right tag for what these are. And while the use of the material key isn’t quite as wrong, I think it could use some refining. If it’s like a coal heap, i.e., something being stored for later use, that feels like a resource, and for true landfills, there’s already landfill:waste.

• man_made=spoil_heap + resource=*

To be clear, I didn’t actually see any uses of this that were the kinds of storage heaps I’m interested in. Most were legitimate former mines, the resource key referring to what the former mine was extracting, as opposed to the contents of the pile left over.

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Hi all! I frequented this shopping centre for a long time, so I decided to map it better, working on the structure, land use and commercial activities. And this is the result:

Before

After

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So, Dear Diary, 2021-05-11

I have decided to take on the task of tracing every building in the town where I live, population about 60,000. Currently the coverage of traced buildings are large retail, large industrial, or the hospital. Almost no houses are mapped, and most of the roads are bare minimum information with no cycleway or footway information.

This comes after my previous task, as I have just finished basic tracing and labelling of the local amusement park, which was almost barren (and due to the “roller coaster track” tag not rendering, it still look barren!).

I do plan on trying to get out a bit and visit some of the places, however the area is very sketchy. Since living here there have been a few drive by shootings, and many places are know as “The Stablands” with how much knife crime goes on…. I feel I will get chased out of some areas for wearing a surveying Hi-Vis, and arrested by the police if I don’t wear one!

I am massively impressed so far with the depth of the Wiki, the ease of use of the ID editor, the wide toolset JOSM has to offer, and the incredibly smooth function of StreetComplete (Quite how it hasn’t had 1mil+ downloads is beyond me!)

For now, the Armchair awaits, though mapping some of the clearly inaccurate foot “trails” around the area could be a nice break, and lower the risk of a shankin’

Re.: (osm.org/edit#map=16/34.9460/-111.6368)

I feel that the area in and around Munds Park, AZ has been very terribly rendered, most especially on the roads (for example, instead of showing smooth curves where they exist on the ground, they appear as jagged angles, or they do not follow the actually road path), and this is most obvious when zooming in

It is things like this that very greatly annoy me about OpenStreetMap, as it seems like someone did not wish to take the time to do the job right the first time, and now another user will have to make the adjustments and corrections to clean up the mess left behind.

I don’t know if anyone else feels the way that I do, but I just wanted to express my opinion on what could have otherwise been done properly I apologize if I am stepping on feet on this one… just trying to make OpenStreetMap a beautiful project for all to use.

Kira:

Dear testooools (Mapper), Regarding the Open-Street-Map Request, Congratulations! we have approved the usage on your behalf using our APIs only for open source usage, Can’t be used for commercial use or any kind of using else open-source projects Specifically Open-Street-Map.

Kira Team have the right to revoke your key at any time, But what have been used still valid and approved by us forever and ever, Thank you for contacting us! have a great day

Best Regards. Kira Team.

Me:

Hello, I have contacted open street map members and they said the license can’t be used because the osm data is used by everyone even for commercial use! So if I integrated Kira data on top of open street maps some commercial companies will use this as it is open source to everyone. Please can you explain if that’s a case considered in my permission or not and how?

Kira:

Hello, again testooools! Your concerns are in their place Actually, we are more than happy to confirm that: You can use your key for open street maps directly any effect follow this action will be (valid and approved by us forever and ever) as I mentioned earlier Open street maps are open source you can use our data on it and no worries about any outsider use. I’m sorry for not clarifying this earlier.

Thank you for contacting us! have a great day

Best Regards. Kira Team.

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For quite sometime,I have edited some road networks around the Rigo District and Abau especially in Kupiano and Moreguina Rubber plantation as well as Babauguina Rubber Plantation. I can recall of a Survey field party that we did in 2015 regarding the setup of GPS for control station coordination using TOPCON HiPER system for aero-triangulation.

Those road were full of dirt and often times we complained of the wild experience along the Magi Highway en-route to Abau District. We were preparing the way for LiDAR(Light Detection and Ranging) work to be undertaken by FUGRO Geospatial for Australia. Visiting these thick vegetated areas some times inhospitable made Surveyor work really tough. Hu ah!! we did it..When I map these features in OSM, it brings back vivid memories of my travel in the “Land of the Unexpected”,Papua New Guinea

Seeing a lot of features especially structures and roads)(esp logging roads) are not mapped an I have appended them form the Maxar imagery. Once these roads networks are mapped ,we can track where illegal logging sites are in Papua New Guinea. Those Mappers who are in PNG using OSM, please do assist as there are a lot of roads built into thick vegetation of the lowlands and they are not identifiable in Goggle Maps but through OSM we can map these linear infrastructures out.

Last January, I’ve just came upon several newbie users in the Philippines who have accumulated over a thousand edits within a few days, adding a thousand POIs, which I discovered by comparing coverage, are more or less copyright violations from Google Maps (with some POIs being at completely odd spots, someting usual with GMaps in some places). I’ve been able to clean up a bunch of their edits, particularly those from a user named JP Baje and another working for a new ride-hail service in the Philippines, and asked the user about their source, but they never replied, and with their activity continuing unabated despite concerns from other fellow mappers back home, I have asked the DWG to have one of them blocked until they have read a message from the DWG addressing concerns. The other one hasn’t been blocked, and has stopped editing, but I’m trying to clean up their edits within my favourite locations while I’m trying to focus with mapping in Canada.

I have no idea why these fly-by-night editors would spring out here with the sole purpose of filling areas of several cities with POIs without providing their source, adding them one by one that make it hard to revert them in one huge sweep and disappearing later when the damage is done, but I think long and strict lockdowns (such as those in the Philippines) are driving this kind of mapping because in such situation, you can’t just go out of home – even within your neighbourhood – without having to present some form of travel authorization from the local government, or you’re a member of a demographic that is likely to get infected with COVID-19 (which in the Philippines, includes those under 14, above 60, or having a serious health condition as of the May 2021 quarantine restrictions) and I assume these users involved are unlikely to have been in those locations, before or during the mass quarantines. Any thoughts?

I saw a new traffic calming traffic island announced on Twitter so i took a small detour and added it. I think i’ll add a Note to review it when new imagery is available.

The neighborhood has a number of other traffic calming measures, speed humps and new lower “Neighborhood” 20mph speed limit. Nice. I didn’t survey or change all the reduced streets, just the ones i drove.

Hi friends, Surveyors and Cartographers,

If you are in Papua New guinea, we still need most parts of Papua New Guinea almost in all 21 provinces where most parts are unmapped.

Please wherever you are, do contribute to OSM(OpenStreetMap) and have your place mapped out. It is free of charge and all you have to do is register an account and contribute your map editing there. You can hone your basic cartographic skills there.

Today I added some building features around Obuta Crescent in Gerehu,NCD,Papua New Guinea

This FLOSS open hardware pizza compass uses Google Maps: http://www.grandideastudio.com/pizza-compass/

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY0OtOy6lcE

Can this be done using Overpass API?

Maybe using osm.wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL#Relative_to_other_elements_.28around.29?

Recently completed mapping of Steep Street Domain in Lawrence, Otago as part of the larger Lawrence walking track map.

Follow up work to be done:

• Double check locations of benches and picnic tables. It’s been mentioned one may have been missed in Fitness Track. Update: Completed June 2021

• Observe the dip near end of fitness track, is there currently a walking track here or is it WIP? Update: Confirmed no walking track here as of June 2021

• Record times to complete each track (walking) from Domain entrance

• When finished send info to Council for signage

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Walking Track Map Project

• ✅ Steep Street Domain
• ✅ Gabriel’s Gully Interpretive Track
• ⃞ Mark fossicking area
• ⃞ Mark Pick & Shovel monument
• ⃞ Otago Dam Track
• ⃞ Munro’s Gully Track
• ⃞ Weatherstons - Gabriels Gully Track (is this still accessible?)