I’ve just reached my first OSM milestone by confirming all my contact addresses are in OSM. This took considerably longer than expected. I wanted to add the addresses of all my contacts from around the world to OSM so that those addresses will appear in the next map update for the Magic Earth app.

My first step for this milestone was to cull my contacts list for the first time in 20 years. This step took several hours. My next step was to add the addresses of my contacts to OSM if they did not already exist. This step proved to be a very time consuming and frustrating experience, although there were plenty of learnings too.

The first learning which came quite early on was that when postcodes are introduced to a country, parts of the old address are incorrectly removed by the postal service. In one example, my brother was given a new suburb. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to retain the old address and just add the new post code, rather than using the new address in full.

Needless to say people giving out the wrong addresses like my brother makes life difficult for address search engines. A good address search engine needs to be very clever in accommodating this human behaviour. I found the OSM search engine wasn’t very forgiving, while Google search engine was too forgiving at times by giving me the wrong location.

I decided to edit the addresses of my contacts so that the OSM search engine would find the correct location. I didn’t mind changing the address when it was clear that part of the address was wrong like with my brother.

It was obvious to me that Google tries different permutations of the address to find a result, while OSM expects the address to be perfect. I imagine Google’s first permutation in the UK would be to use the post code and street address as that is all that is needed for a location in the UK. If that permutation failed it would try other permutations with the full address until it got a result.

… See full entry

There are multiple mapping tasks in OpenStreetMap that people still have to do old-style, like we did in 2010. But with current technology and with current funding of OSM research, these can be automated, improving mapping quality over the world.

If you work on OSM-related projects for a company, like in Facebook or Apple, please ask your manager if they can spare your time on projects useful for the community. For example:

1. Imagery alignment! People from the US and Western Europe won’t understand, but in most parts of the world, imagery is offset up to hundreds of meters. Mappers need to shift it to start mapping, otherwise different people would map with different offsets.

   We have plugins for automatically tracing roads, buildings and rivers. Why not create a button for JOSM and iD that looks at GPS traces (rasterized or not) and finds the best offset for an imagery layer?

2. okay I had just that one idea and struggle to come up with more

3. please share your ideas in comments

tl; dr:

Firms like Apple, Facebook and Amazon are paying (their own) mappers for OpenStreetMap (OSM) edits. You are an OSM editor making the same type of work the paid editors are. Shouldn’t you be paid for your edits too? Let’s start sending these firms a collective invoice for our work and use the received funds to benefit the OSM ecosystem. There is an easy way to join if you use JOSM, but users of other map editors can participate as well.

The problem

The OSM project is governed by a license that allows its geo data to be freely used by anybody, including the most wealthy global corporations. Regardless, firms like Apple, Facebook or Amazon are paying for improving the OSM data. They do so mainly by hiring mappers, but also by directly sending money to the OSM foundation, albeit with grants that seem rather small in comparison to market capitalization of these firms. These developments - while good for improving the OSM data, raise also some issues. One concerns fairness: if the firms pay their employees/contractors for map edits, shouldn’t they pay to all who make the same kinds of edits? After all, the edits they provide are not special in any respect - volunteer editors have been supplying such data to the OSM database for years. A more subtle issue is, that emergence of paid map editors dramatically changes character of the project, which for most of its existence has been a purely volunteer affair. Increasingly, volunteer mappers can no longer point to “the Map” and say - we, volunteers did this. Others raised this issue as a problem, but no way out of it has been suggested so far.

The solution

… See full entry

As I’m not yet sure what will be included in the alpha version of the damn project, I’m getting inspired. This time by Tanga Building Footprints Import announced on the imports mailing list.

It looks like the buildings are already imported in the Tanga city, e.g. this one, but I’ve never done the import thing, so I can’t say.

In this diary, I’m going to introduce the example mapping workflow with the prepared data based on Tanga Building Footptrints Import using the damn project. Not everything is yet fully automated, so this diary is more like describing the proof of concept. However, I’m open to the needs of the future.

Create area

There is the dataset of the buildings available on the wiki page. I like that idea of huge GeoJSON file that includes the features with the corresponding geometries. As I’m not the import guy, I’m confused with _key_s in the properties (I mean these underscores of each key.) I need only building:yes tag, so I’ve renamed just those (note that notepad’s “Replace All” would do the same:)

sed -i 's/_building_/building/' buildings.geojson

I’ll create new area to work on. Therefore, I need the geometry of the whole area, where the buildings are. For that, I’ll use the damn-client.py scripts. (The shapely must be installed.)

cd damn-client.py
./convex_hull.py buildings.geojson > ch-buildings.geojson

The command took about a minute on my laptop. The ch-buildings.geojson can be used as the GeoJSON boundary file in the damn project’s manager.

Buildings of the squares

So I’ve area to work on divided to squares. Now, I need the GeoJSON files containing all the buildings of each square. I’ll use the damn-client.py scripts once again:

cd damn-client.py
./prepare_tmp.py https://server.damn-project.org 2351 buildings.geojson

… See full entry

Albany marine base. .. Albany marine base

StreetComplete was designed by Tobias Zwick and launched in 2016 as a handy “low-bar entry” field capturing application for OpenStreetMap. In the following 2-3 years it rapidly rose to have a share of 3.9% of contributors favoured application, since it requires no real prior expertise in OpenStreetMap. The beauty of it is that it exploits the opportunity of a mapper being in situ where some features have been mapped, but lack details about their attributes, and tags on the OpenStreetMap database.

The UX is good, even for the experienced mapper it masterfully detects the absence {not to jump down a rabbit hole, but very like my favourite Pink Floyd Album } of tagging details, and then it supports the insertion of the correct tags with menu systems that are visual rather than everything being list driven. Perfect for being on the move, a car passenger or a leisurely walker. This is not supposed to be a review of the app, but you can probably detect that I am a fan.

With some help from my friend Amanda who downloaded the .pbf, and extracted all the editor traces of StreetComplete here I was able to get hold of a csv of all of the Ireland edits and then use that to make a heatmap, with some help from RustyB. The heatmap shows, what we would expect, greater use of the app in Ireland’s cities and large towns.

… See full entry

Working on an upgrade of OpenSnowMap.org map style, I knew I had to add single trees mapped natural=tree, natural=tree_row and barrier=hedge. I figured out I had omitted them in my rendering when I was about to map some … that were already there.

When testing the new style, it comes out as a nice surprise that in some areas, countryside micro-mapping is really impressive :

Clearly, rendering all those trees gives a far better idea how the landscape look like there.

I expect that this new style will come live within a few weeks.

Paglat a place that is rich in biodiversity and culture. If you will try to search Paglat in google maps, you will be mislead by wrong information about the place location. You will find it’s location inside another Municipality. Apparently Apple Maps was accurate about Paglat’s map and geotag location. Yes interesting indeed about google maps location of Paglat.

Established and created in 2001, under the Muslim Mindanao Authority Act No. 12 otherwise known as the Regional Law creating the Municipality of Paglat on July 9, 2001, which was ratified by its constituents during the September 29, 2001 plebiscite.

The mother municipality of Paglat was General Salipada K. Pendatun (GSKP) or to simplify it Paglat was a Barangay curved from GSKP.

Paglat’s boundaries or adjacent Municipalities are President Quirino province of Sultan Kudarat, Pandag province of Maguinanao, Tulunan province of North Cotabato, General Salipada K. Pendatun province of Maguindanao.

For me personally, the pleasure of mapping is not only in the process itself, i.e. arises during mapping, but a substantial part of it comes from the thought of being able to help other people. Let us all make the world a better and happier place through mapping!

The amount of segments used to represent a curved feature is based on assumptions. For example, an editor may interpret a mapper’s input by merging points that are too close together. Many aspects of the editing process depend on the drawing of curves, and many parameters are assumed by an editor.

A drag is a gesture well suited to mapping curves. Instead of lifting from a trackpad - an event which can throw the mapper’s precision off - the mapper drags along the feature’s centerline. Such a mode provides more consistent levels of mapping detail, a speedup in which a mapper can trace features, and a more natural feel to mapping. However, it requires more assumptions by the editor used.

In order to draw a line, one may drag from a way. The same gesture may move the map using merely a capacitive touch. I wonder what the current state of dragging is in all of the editors. Does a feature lack curves because it is closer to an urban grid or because it is tedious and/or arbitrary to map.

… See full entry

Changset ID # 107053042

Cork County Council in conjunction with TII (Ireland’s authority for major roads) are in the process of building a bypass past Macroom and Ballyvourney in Co. Cork, Ireland.

Recently, I was travelling back from Killarney and noted that the road had been re-aligned. I quickly captured some GPD traces and have now updated OpenStreetMap with the new roundabout and re-aligned N22 (the bypass will assume the N22 name I presume when it opens).

This was a relatively nice edit to undertake. While I only had one trace to work with, it was good enough to get a rough idea of what needed to change. I also had to amend the N22 route relation(s) - there were two; one in each direction. I didn’t have a whole lot of experience editing these types of relations but the josm interface was intuitive.

As always, I wanted to validate my work (especially as I was editing a primary national route in Ireland). ra.osmsurround.org is a great tool for that so I checked both relations for issues (see relations 3147725 and 558006).

I expect more changes in the coming months as work progresses on this road.

Finally, I checked to see if other map providers had picked up on the change. Funnily enough it appears that Google have picked up on it (possibly using data from Google Maps’ users) but in much lower detail. I guess their algorithms detect something is up but don’t know how to deal with it properly yet. 1-0 to OpenStreetMap!

p.s. Driving round the roundabout 3-4 times was quite fun and a great way to get a good trace for it.

Images

… See full entry

Just for the record (because I’m telling everyone), I’m transgender! 🙂 I’m transitioning to live openly and honestly as myself, as a woman now. 🙂 (To my LGBTQ+🏳️‍🌈 friends, I’m simplifying for the cis 😉) My name is Amanda McCann, and for pronouns they/them is fine, but she/her is nice. Auf deutsch, meine Pronomen sind „sie“.

My old email addresses will still work, but amanda@technomancy.org is my personal email address, and amanda.mccann@osmfoundation.org for OSMF Board matters.

On github, I’m amandasaurus on github, Amᵃᵖanda on the OpenStreetMap Wiki, and @Amanda#2524 on Discord, am{ap}anda on IRC

Like always, I am open to good faith questions from OSMers on LGBTQ issues. If there’s a question you’ve always been afraid to ask, you can ask below as a comment, or email me. 🙂

Don’t forget one of the rules of OSM: Have Fun! 🏳️‍⚧️

Are you part of a local chapter, or a local community, putting together an organized project, or developing software? We’d love to hear from you at the OSMF Board meetings. Please get in touch with us or comment on this post.

Over a year ago, the OSMF Board began inviting Local Chapters to present at our monthly Board meetings. It has been consistently great to hear about OSM activities around the world directly from the people involved. Very useful for the Board and those keenly interested in Foundation governance to get as full a picture as possible. Thank you to OpenStreetMap Italia, OpenStreetMap á Íslandi, OpenStreetMap France, FOSSGIS, FLOSSK, OSM Ireland, and OSM UK!

We realized there’s more voices we could hear from, and over the past two months, have opened the door to any OSM community and other projects like software development.

In May, Jochen Topf shared his experiences developing key pieces of the OSM software ecosystem. And this month, Feye Andal shared work across the incredible OSM-PH community. Next month, we have Sarah Hoffman coming to talk about nominatim!

There is so much happening across our amazing community. For the Board and others involved in core governance in OSMF, we want to have this front and center to our efforts. We appreciate the time everyone has spent to share their work with us, and encourage everyone else to signal your interest!

I hope you and your family are safe, healthy, and happy in this challenging time. I have been meaning to write this post since I became the Regional Director for the Asia Pacific Hub early this year. However, I decided to wait until I had something specific and useful to share with you all. Recently, we have made a few important decisions that I am thrilled to share with you through this post.

First, we have decided to name the Regional Hub as ‘Open Mapping Hub- Asia Pacific’.The ‘Open Mapping Hub’ name will also apply to the hubs in three other regions. I believe that this decision is profound and far-reaching. Although HOT is supporting the establishment and operation of the hub, we did not want to narrowly name it something as ‘HOT Asia Pacific Hub’. We want to ensure that the hub creates an accommodating and equitable space for everyone interested in contributing to the OSM movement in the region. We want the hub to be as inclusive as possible.

Those who attended Tyler’s talk at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in December 2020 should not be surprised by this decision. In his talk, Tyler committed to shifting HOT’s focus from HOT to the wider OSM local communities. The name ‘Open Mapping Hub’ intends to encapsulate this very spirit. We are extremely excited to start our journey with this new name, and I would like to thank everyone who participated in the naming discussion.

… See full entry

Last September 2020, the OSM-Philippines community released the Call to Correct Narratives about Geospatial Work [in the Philippines]. We’re provided with an opportunity to share our own narratives and showcase the local community’s initiatives through a documentary-video produced by Amazon Web Services – Philippines.

… See full entry

How-To Add the WMS dataset “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” to JOSM as a layer

After adding the layer, I was able to get the location and a visual representation of the “verkeersborden” (traffic signs) as registered in the “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” dataset, as a layer on my OSM map.

Dataset “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen”

Read information on Verkeersborden Vlaanderen about usage, rights etc.

Adding a WMS dataset as a layer in JOSM

1. Navigate to https://verkeersborden.vlaanderen/opendata.php
2. Capture the links to the WMS datasets:

• De Grafische weergave van de verkeersborden uit de toepassing Verkeersborden.Vlaanderen

• De afgeleide data op basis van de verkeersborden uit de toepassing Verkeersborden.Vlaanderen

In JOSM

1. Open in the menu “Edit” > “Preference”;
2. Select in the left pane “WMS TMS”,
3. Click on the button “Add a new WMS entry by entering the URL”; the “Add Image URL” dialog box opens.
4. Enter under (2) “Enter GetCapabilities URL” the URL, e.g. “https://opendata.apps.mow.vlaanderen.be/opendata-geowebcache/service/wms?REQUEST=getcapabilities”
5. Select the layers
6. Enter under (7) a name for the layer, e.g. “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen”
7. Click on OK

My post Zone 30 speed limits: using OSM next to “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” had already some helpful replies.

When you are tracing every time you go out of your house, it will appear on the Public GPS Traces that there is always a single point coming to your house, revealing your location. The best way to remedy this is to trace every road inside your community to prevent hotspots from becoming to obvious.

Jalan Sutera Pines

In March we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our first pub meeting of local mappers in Nottingham. I’ve written a bit about on-line and in-person meetings held this year, but much more a set of reflections about how the group and its meetings have panned out over the past 10 years.

I hope there are some nuggets of value to others either already running such meetings or contemplating doing so.

Lastly, a big thank you for everyone who has come along over the years, and to Kyle who prompted me to write much of this in the first place.